There is a danger in public space with covered faces.
Currently, unfortunately, social networks often have a greater impact on citizens’ lives than simply walking down the street. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t have the most powerful people in this world, of which Elon Musk and Donald Trump are the best example, wanting to control them, communicate through them and finance their use. Social networks are read more than newspapers, they are spaces where opinions are formed and distorted, they are the stage for lively discussions. Elections are won and lost through information and disinformation campaigns on social media. The young vote, often radicalized and polarized, is won more on tik-tok than in debates. Simplified and reductive messages are found there and put the quality of democracies at risk, as we all know.
On social media, there is a legion of commentators, especially on X and Facebook, quick to react to any news or comment. These networks today have a greater weight in people’s lives and opinions than conversations that, in the past, took place in the media, on the street, in squares or in cafes. Today, it is no longer appropriate to talk about the “coffee talk” that contaminates the public debate. I would say that it is more accurate to mention how network chatter contaminates coffee chatter.
I find it useful to imagine a day in our lives in a reality (perhaps not so parallel) in which people on the street behaved the way they behave in the comment boxes or in the posts they make on social media.
We must remember that most of the most violent people are cowards who hide in anonymity. You don’t know their names, you don’t see their faces.
A normal day would be one in which we go out on the street and pass a majority of hooded people, with masks on their faces, with their eyes covered. We would get on the bus and around half of the passengers would have white masks (like those used in a racist demonstration on the streets of Lisbon). I can imagine that these people, when they come across us, would treat us in various ways, and I extracted all of them from a list I made of the “top 20” of comments:
1. To the left-wing politicians, they would shout in our faces (that is, in capital letters) that we are sons of bitches (I’ll use the asterisks) communists, a bunch of s***, a bunch of idiots.
2. Those who have been in governments or city councils could eventually get punched in the face. They would say that we needed to go to work (even though we were heading to our workplaces at the time) and they would have a few more shouts in their ears (always in capital letters) saying that they had done nothing but shit and that they should disappear or be eliminated.
3. Right-wing politicians would hear, in equal shouts, that they are all pieces of shit and a few should be buried in Salazar’s grave.
4. We would go out on the street and they would stand in front of us and in front of others showing us images, some bordering on pornographic, with the faces of public figures or other citizens. These images would often be produced with the help of artificial intelligence, but they would spend the day reaching out to us and trying to make us see them at every corner.
5. Women, especially those who hold public positions, would be called c***s when walking down the street, their clothes would be commented on loudly in front of everyone.
6. Every immigrant who was on the street and came across one of these beings would hear that he was a criminal and that he had to return to his homeland. He would be accused, to his face, of what is happening in the house where he lives or on the street he frequents, even if nothing happened in that house or on that street.
7. These beings, in every encounter with us, would try to get us to sit down with them to tell us a few lies about what is happening in the world.
8. Whenever we were sitting in the cafe reading the newspaper, they would rip off what we were reading and put it in the trash, with a hysterical scream warning us that we were contaminating ourselves with “junk newspaper” and that they wanted to save us.
9. Journalists who did not replicate what these people said or who went to the media to denounce them would be insulted in the street, possibly pushed or attacked.
Let’s imagine what these people would be like. They would have masks on their faces, hoods covering them. We would constantly see, every three or four minutes, these strange entities on the street. They would try to enter our homes to pass on their messages, attack us or convince us, depending on the appetites of that day. They would be hanging from our balconies trying to influence our home lives. They would enter our workspaces to try to distort what we are doing. They would tear up our papers and our writings. They would physically attack many of us.
This could seem like a complete dystopia. The problem is that, even though we feel safe on the streets, these behaviors have already gone beyond the limits of the screen and are manifested in comments made to female deputies in Parliament, in insults to same-sex couples who dare to kiss in the street, in what some immigrants have already had to hear or in the physical attack on actor Adérito Lopes. Although we still don’t see these covered faces when we leave the house, this is what happens in the public space of social networks, the one that impacts democracy more than the street.
All of this comes with a view to security, urbanity and civility. Would we tolerate these people, of whom there are many, being on the streets with these behaviors? So why do we tolerate these behaviors on the streets of the internet? Would we live safely surrounded by thousands of covered faces, distorted voices that attack us? Perhaps the time has come to discuss this seriously and propose rules for the civilized use of social networks. It is a public space that has become deregulated, where crimes are committed daily, just like the streets I painted here would be.
Knowing that this is the favorite space of the far right around the world, one can see the hypocrisy of their concern with a handful of covered faces of women who want them to be hidden and even more punished for being women. I would only believe in Chega and its good intentions regarding security if they had the courage to propose a ban on hidden faces on social media, which they feed with bots and fake accounts, with cowardly anonymities, spreading lies, violence, hatred and aggression every day. They don’t want to protect women or anyone else. They want to continue being cowards, with their faces covered, deceiving and lying. These are the hidden faces that put us at risk as a society and population.
And now, come the usual comments to this article. Here we are for your unregulated insults, hooded cowards!