Social media and politics

If the creosote burning controversy was a battleground then the warriors were the protesting Kamloopsians, ACC’s president Kim Sigurdson, MLAs Terry Lake and Kevin Krueger and facebook.

If facebook was a country then it would be the fourth largest based on population, says a short statistics video about the Social Media Revolution.

Facebook has become both a tool to be informed and also a weapon.

Bryce Eberle, admin of the facebook group “Opposed to Creosote Burning in Kamloops,” said that gathering people to rally against the creosote burning facility could largely be attributed to networking on facebook.

“Facebook had a lot to do with it because it was a free media,” Eberle said. “It’s by the people and for the people and they can look up [information]; that’s the beauty of it, the information is there only if they want it, it’s not forced on them.”

“The true media behind this is the Internet, and then you can get the truth from both sides and interpret it the way you want,” Eberle said.

Eberle explained that it was a group of him and his friends who looked at the creosote burning situation and figured something wasn’t quite right there. As they looked into it they realized through networking a lot of people felt the same and thus the facebook group began soon gaining over 1,900 members.

“Social media is a way of touching people and bringing more energy to a cause,” Lake said, agreeing that facebook played a role in how protesting Kamloopsians were rallied together. “Social media will rally people in a way that hasn’t been seen before.”

However Lake said that this comes at a cost. It is too easy for people to find all this information that incorrectly informs them or is bias one way or another as what happened with the creosote burning facility. It took too long for the public consultation and by that time the opposition was set in their outlooks.

“Social media is a powerful source but we have to train ourselves to be critical thinkers,” Lake said.

Facebook can be informing and also deadly as Bill McQuarrie, Interior Science and Innovation Council executive director, realized when a women wrote on facebook that the B.C. Liberal government was planning to help move the plant elsewhere under his account, reported the Kamloops Daily news in the article “Facebook Fiasco.”

Anyone could potentially sign up to a social media site under a politician’s name, look up their information on Wikipedia, input it into their profile, upload a profile picture from google image search and potentially tarnish their good name.

Politics and social media mix together like oil and water: you can shake them up in the same bottle and it may appear they’re getting along but as they settle, they each have their own agenda.