How Twitter made the Waukesha tragedy even worse

Rage.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

The verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case had nothing to do with the deadly SUV rampage at the Christmas parade in Waukesha.

That's an easy assessment to render now that Darrell Brooks has been charged with multiple counts of first-degree homicide for Sunday's attack that killed six people and injured more than 60 others. Brooks was free on bond after allegedly trying to run over another woman — she says she's the mother of his child — earlier this month. He appears to be a menace, but politics don't have much to do with that.

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Thanks to Twitter, misinformation and misguided anger spread faster than the facts.

That's not entirely a new phenomenon: After Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Muslims wrongly came under scrutiny until it became clear the terror was home-grown. It's just a human fact that people start looking for explanations when unexpected violence disrupts their lives, and that in the absence of evidence they'll conjure up narratives that later look foolish or worse.

But social media supercharges the process, enabling — even encouraging — masses of people to coalesce around bad ideas and amplify them to potentially thousands of people in mere moments. And in a time like this, when very online Americans are ready to go to (metaphorical) ideological war at the drop of a hat, that cascade of speculation often ends up reinforcing our divisions, creating a self-reinforcing wheel of rage that too often has little to do with reality.

A few mean-spirited people revel in all of this: As of Wednesday morning, Greene was still falsely promoting a Waukesha-Kenosha connection. The rest of us should be a little more cautious with our takes and refrain from posting in the first hours after a disaster unless there is real, verifiable information to share. Otherwise, we should learn to shut up.

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Joel Mathis, The Week US

Joel Mathis is a writer with 30 years of newspaper and online journalism experience. His work also regularly appears in National Geographic and The Kansas City Star. His awards include best online commentary at the Online News Association and (twice) at the City and Regional Magazine Association.