Copypasta is invading social medias and people cannot keep up with it

Oweahan, who helped compile and publish the study "Why the US Left is The Biggest Terrorist Threat to the United States," came to Boston to study about the state of the American political system. In a video, he talks about how US government forces now use Facebook in ways that make citizens look like a threat to the government, not a threat to social justice.

He explains to NPR what his analysis means:

[H]e is seeing the American political system as a kind of social democracy where people don't really have to be in a place where they can feel safe coming in. Now you can say, OK, you've gotta do your best to be in, or you're gonna be too close, you're gonna be scared and a lot of people feel like they're not safe. If you don't have that feeling, you're not a real safety, but you don't have a real society in which that's the norm.

Oweahan notes that a big part of US social media use, both online and offline, is "making people look bad to their peers," but it also helps the federal government's "counter-terrorism" efforts, both to combat domestic terrorism and help keep terror suspects in custody. He also discusses ways in which the US government tries to prevent or help people "feel safe," such as having more power over media outlets and the Internet.

But why is the US not a society that people feel safe from or not feel comfortable having so much power over?

Because it still gets to make decisions about how the country should work and what things are important to people. It's an extremely important part of American life that people are still trying to understand all of that is still very much in the balance. It is also a very important part of politics and it's a very important thing when it comes to political decision making and you've got to have a very flexible political system where the state is the central part, not the government.

We can't have a country where people think, here's what we can do, and that's this idea of civil society, and it's really nice, but there are also things that I do think are missing, things that still hold a lot of power.

For example, the US Supreme Court justices say that the "constitutional right" of the people to protest a government policy does not extend to taking it for granted. Yet the Supreme Court in 2010 upheld a law that required police to report police abuses whenever they see violations of the law -- as long as the police report them, too.

For Oweahan, that can mean taking a lot of information that is out there but don't actually take it, which in his view is how we're seeing the US becoming a lot more authoritarian, especially with social media use.

So we're seeing the idea that you don't have to be afraid from the state to try and resist violence. You don't have to live in the sense of fear, but you do have that sense of knowing you're in the right place. It's always a long process. I think there are things that can be accomplished by taking care of people and doing things that's not necessarily what you would have wanted to accomplish if you'd stayed in the situation.

And that's the idea that you're trying to help people get through a difficult time. It's a very conservative interpretation of the American system, of the American social contract. It's a big part of how we're making things work when it comes to politics.

And this is what is really so interesting about the world over which we live, is actually that we're more authoritarian and more totalitarian because of the US media. Because of that.

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