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The clash of civilizations on Facebook
by Akli Hadid
2008-02-17 09:20:46 |
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One of the most interesting features on Facebook, the internet’s most popular social networking website, is the ability to join social groups. Though Facebook administrators try to censor abusive comments, it sometimes has the features of the clash of civilizations.
Almost 1 million people joined the group “I bet I can find 1 million people who dislike Bush”. Many join that group because they see Bush as the symbol of the Western world trying to attack the rest of the world. In that group, one Facebook user posted a message saying: “Hello, I am a Muslim. We don’t have a problem with Judaism or the Jewish. We have a problem with Israel.” Clearly, Bush is seen as the symbol of an alliance between the US, the world’s hegemonic power, and Israel, symbol of a war against Muslims.
The clash of civilizations categorizes the world into Africans, Latin Americans, Westerners, Islamic people, Sinic people, Hindu people, Orthodox people, Buddhist people and Japanese people. The Western world is clashing against the Islamic world, and several categories of people are building alliances against several others.
On Facebook, the word fuck in groups often designates a repulsive feeling for something. Groups such as “Fuck it”, “Fuck Facebook” or “Fuck you bitch, you had one sip of vodka” are popular groups among its users. The civilizations described by Huntington are also targeted by the word “Fuck”. Groups such as “Fuck Islam”, “Fuck Christianity”, “Fuck off Japan”, “Fuck Japan”, “Fuck China” or “America Fuck You” among other groups aiming at speaking ill of parts of the world.
As a reply, people created groups such as “I fuck idiots who blame Russia/China/US for all the problems of their nations”, “Fuck whoever made the group fuck Islam” or “If you don’t like America, then get the fuck out”. There seems to be clear rivalries between groups which involve hatred of a certain category of people.
Israel being the most targeted country by hate groups, Facebook can make it clear why the State of Israel has a defensive policy, since its existence is constantly threatened, several websites have confirmed that, and now Facebook has that confirmed. The United States comes second, which explains measures taken, and their interventions around the world in rogue states which also threaten its security. One group particularly underlines Israel’s existence threat since it claims “Israel get the fuck out of the Middle East”.
It was once claimed that the clash of civilizations was the result of organized groups, not of popular culture. But Facebook, a website where influential organizations do not gather people for certain causes, has proved that the clash of civilizations is also a reality.
However, it should be underlined that only a minority of people are the incarnation of the clash of civilizations, since a lot of people and groups also express their wish for peace on earth and friendly coexistence between different kinds of people. Indeed, Facebook is a website where people from all countries in the world have registered, and the most popular group is “Six degrees of separation, the experiment”. That group aims to prove that there are only six degrees that separate all the people in the world from knowing each other, which clearly means that people would like to get rid of prejudice against each other, prove that people from world can coexist, and that in fact nations and borders are just an illusion, since it does not disable people from knowing each other.
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