The Positive Power of Social Media

Newsflash: Facebook removed its Third Intifada page due to the enormous pressure put on it. (Check out the link.)

I have always maintained that technology, the Internet and social media like Facebook are tools. They are not inherently positive or negative. Their value--good or bad--is in how they are used. Recently, there have been some amazing examples of how social media like Facebook and Twitter have helped alert the world to governments' brutality and repression, as well as helping to find people displaced by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. But Facebook, in the name of "free speech" and "information for all" also allowed a page that was designed to promote hatred and incite deadly violence. By using the same social media, the word was spread and the same technology was used to give feedback to Facebook that there ARE limits to "free speech" and that racial violence is just not tolerable in human and humane society. The speed and breadth of this technology effected a positive change that may not have happened in a regular print media, nor would the withdrawal have been so widely known.

Let's hear it for the positive use of tools!