Terrorist's Facebook friend, speaking out

DRINKING FROM THE STREAM: A friend of Breivik's on Facebook, Camilla Ragfors, writes in the Guardian of her online experience with the perpetrator of the attacks in Norway. "One day I had a friend request on Facebook from Anders Breivik. There wasn't anything odd about that: when I was a member of SD I was magnetically attractive to everyone who called himself a nationalist: both those for whom it was a game, and the real extremists. Those were, in fact, the people who drove me away from the party. A machine of hate propaganda pumped through my feed on Facebook. There were YouTube clips of massacre victims, demands that all the "fucking niggers" should get out of the country, and far more horrible things. I reacted by backing away. But for many other people who are weak, or feel bad for some reason, this stream was something to drink from." Read the rest.

It's such a shame, to put it in the mildest of terms, to see the internet become a medium for the kind of mindless hate exhibited in the activities described in her article. Although I understand and suppose that all mediums of this significance will ultimately be used for deplorable purposes, it cannot be denied that this one is vulnerable to such use to a considerably greater degree. The reason for this, it can be asserted with little doubt, lies in the fact that it is so ludicrously accessible; we live, as I have often told people, as part of the generation of accessibility. We live our lives with more information available to us than ever before, and we have more platforms upon which we are able to express our views on that information, as well as spread the information which supports our cause. In this age, in spite of the growing capacity for good to be organised through digital means, such ease is extended to the bad in kind. We live in a time of speed, but also a time of extremes, and we mustn't forget it.