Social media has now become the greatest force for doing the right thing and the wrong thing in the world. Jihadism in its modern form owes an enormous debt to those men and women who in Silicon Valley developed their social media platforms. The Arab Spring utilised the tools of the smartphone and social media to spread their message across the whole of the Arab world. And helped undo the Western-blessed oppressive regimes that had ruled for much of the previous 45 years.
Technology always creates opportunity. A hundred years ago if British engineers had not developed the railway half a century earlier then how could the German High Command have got Lenin into Revolutionary Russia to start the Communist Revolution?
How could the First World War have been such a death machine for the millions and millions of soldiers who were consumed by explosives and military technology that had been developing hand in hand with the motor car, the sewing machine, the electric elevator, the radio.
The technology of mass murder reached a new height with the Holocaust with millions of people murdered through the
developments of the German chemical industry being utilised in the death camps sited in Poland.
But murder and mayhem have a new ally in social media. For it presents the chance to recruit and radiate out the damage that a few people can make in the world.
We must not be blind to the role that crime and murder and mayhem play in the social media world
The informal anarchy of the social media structure, and its instant take on the world, have played into the hands of a desperate group of people who want more recruits, more exposure and more power to terrify and destroy. And that can take a man who straps on bombs and blows up himself and others in Manchester and be all over the world not long after he does it. And paraded as a success by people who hide and reside within social media itself.