Speak Up, Speak Out

A report by Robin Dunbar, Magdalen College, Oxford and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

Introduction
Speaking up against hatred and discrimination
27 January 2012 will mark Holocaust Memorial Day. This annual commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi Concentration Camp, provides a time of reflection to remember the victims and honour the survivors of the Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution, as well as in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The theme for this years Holocaust Memorial Day, is Speak Up, Speak Out. We are asking people to consider what they see and hear around them, and to use their voices and their influence to speak up against hatred and discrimination. This will be the focus for activities across the UK from simple candle lightings to community programmes which last throughout January. The report written in conjunction with Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Magdalen College, Oxford and based on a consumer survey, reveals a new insight into the changing nature of social communities and how we communicate within them. The partial anonymity that social media provides its user allows them to hide from the consequences and impact of their speech the research shows that many will now comment online in a way in which they never would in a face-to-face situation. This has far-reaching consequences for how abusive language exists in our societies today. On the one hand it makes it very easy for those who wish to hurt others to do so; however the self-moderating nature of the Internet also means that we now have a means to voice our dissatisfaction with intolerance. Since HMD 2011, a number of events, home and abroad, have shown us just how powerful expressing your opinion through social media can be. On Tuesday 9 August 2011, residents of the Clapham Junction area gathered together initiating a cleanup operation after the riots which took place there the night before and across the UK. The hashtag #riotcleanup began to trend on the social networking site Twitter. The Arab Spring, a series of revolutions which swept through North Africa and the Middle East throughout 2011, saw mass protests coordinated through social media. Three leaders which had led states for over 30 years were deposed and many other changes have been brought about throughout the region. In the era that we live the possibilities for communication are endless. However, we often forget to look around us and remember we are part of a wider community. The theme of Speak Up, Speak Out gives us the opportunity to pause, and reflect on how we treat others. If we do not speak up for those who need us will there be anyone to speak up when we need them? The increasing growth of social media have created opportunities which we should seize and make the most of, as we are very lucky not to be facing persecution such as that of Nazi Germany or Pol Pots Cambodia. However, we should not allow discrimination to go unchecked. If people believe that they are safe from retribution because those they harass do not know their true identity, the rest of the new community has a duty to speak up and out against the abuse they witness. We know that words can hurt and saying that name-calling can lead to genocide might seem like an exaggeration. But long before the Holocaust, Jews were dehumanised through language; in Rwanda, Tutsis were called cockroaches and this intolerance of difference was allowed to grow. However, we know words have the power to heal as well. On HMD 2012, we are asking you to use your voice to speak out against racism, prejudice and discrimination and to speak up for fairness, justice and equality.

James Hurst Acting Director

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust www.hmd.org.uk

Executive Summary
The rapid increase in the availability and use of social media has widened our social horizons and changed the communities we are a part of. Social media have brought many positives: bringing together new communities, making it easier for our voices to be heard and allowing us to speak up for things we are passionate about. This report shows that social media are increasingly seen by people as a way to prompt positive change, but also to challenge those who choose to abuse the new freedoms which exist. The freedom of expression and removal of established restraints that social media bring also presents inevitable risks and challenges.

The Changing Face of Social Communities

In the kinds of small scale traditional societies that we all lived in until recently, social networks were densely interconnected: we knew everyone in the community and they knew us. In such cases, the community itself acted as its own policeman: those who broke the communitys codes of behaviour by acting in unacceptable ways would be admonished by the community. Everyone had a stake in the community and felt they had the right to intervene. And, importantly, those who infringed against societys mores would take note of that admonishment precisely because it came from someone with whom they had a relationship, someone with whom they shared a sense of obligation and reciprocity. The past century, in particular, has witnessed dramatic changes in our social world, thanks mainly to economic mobility: we are no longer lifelong members of small communities, but rather transient members of a series of large, often rather anonymous neighbourhoods whose other members we often do not know. As a result, our personal social networks the people we know and love for their own sakes have become fragmented and geographically dispersed, with small subsets of friends that we have collected as we have moved from one town to another during the course of work and life. Most of us have ended up with several small sub-networks of friends in the various places where we have worked and lived, most of whom do not know each other. Fragmented networks of this kind lack the kind of social coherence and sense of community that makes it possible for communities to be self-policing in the way they once were. This type of societal disconnection makes us less likely to speak up for those in trouble or distress, as we feel we have no responsibility for others. Instead, we mind our own business and leave others to mind theirs.

Empowering Communication through Social Media

The social media created by the online world have opened up new opportunities for social exchange, making it possible both to keep contact with old friends who now live too far away to see in person, and to meet new friends in online environments like chat rooms and social networking sites. In a poll of 2000 UK adults carried out on behalf of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, 29% of respondents claimed that they had made new friendships through meeting someone online though this was more likely to be true of 18-24 year olds (34%) than 55+ year olds (14%). At the same time, social media also enable us to influence the behaviour of complete strangers. The speed with which views can potentially spread through populations was well illustrated by the role of social media in precipitating and coordinating both the 2011 riots and the Arabian Spring, and demonstrates just how powerful social media can be as a forum for speaking out. No less than 39% of the respondents to our survey said they had used social media to speak up about something they objected to or felt passionate about.

The Internet Age: Removing Restraints

The psychological anonymity of the internet has its downside, however. One of its most important downsides is that it removes the brake that would normally give us pause to think before saying something in face-to-face situations. Although social media make it easier to engage with a cause in the safety of our own home, where the consequences are less immediate and severe, the relative anonymity that social media provide can allow us to express ourselves in insensitive ways that we wouldnt normally engage in ways that could even lead to sustained criticism over a period of time. Our survey suggests that we are less restrained in what we are prepared to say online. Over a quarter (26%) of respondents in the survey admitted that they had said something online (e.g. on Facebook or Twitter) that they would never have said face-to-face. A further quarter said that they regretted putting something on a social media site. Of these, 44% regretted having done so because what they said had been inappropriate, while 27% regretted it because they thought it had upset someone. Importantly, it seems that age and experience play a significant role in modulating our social style. For example, 31% of 18-24 year olds had later regretted having put something on a social media site, whereas only 12% of those aged 55 and over had done so. This might reflect relative usage (younger people spend more time online), but it is also likely to reflect a learning effect due to experience of the social world as much as anything else. The older we get, the more we are likely to think before we speak. Part of the problem is that all too often we dont check what we have written on an email or social networking site before pressing the send button. Of our respondents, only a third said they always re-read what they had written before sending. Over 20% said they rarely or never bothered to check it. Younger people were less likely to have checked what they had written before hitting the send button: 36% of 55+ year olds always checked what they wrote, but only 29% of 18-24 year olds did so. There was an even more striking gender difference: irrespective of age, women were much more likely than men to check what they had written before sending (39% said they always did so, versus 27% of men), perhaps reflecting womens greater social skills and sensitivity. Seemingly, we are more prone to making these kinds of mistakes online because, in these digital environments, we dont receive the immediate feedback that we get during face-to-face interactions. Somehow, standing in front of someone just makes us that little bit more hesitant about blurting out something hurtful.

Serious Consequences
This lack of face-to-face engagement can create an environment in which bullying and discrimination prosper. Our survey revealed that over a third (36%) of respondents had witnessed or been the victim of online bullying. Encouragingly, 41% of these respondents said they had intervened directly in such cases, and another 34% said they had notified someone about it. However, a quarter of these respondents said they had done nothing about it. Sometimes this is through fear of reprisals (and a lack of support from the rest of the community); sometimes we just feel it is none of our business because we dont know the individuals involved. More disturbing, however, was the fact that 13% of these respondents admitted they had actively encouraged cyber-bullying. There was a striking, but perhaps understandable, age effect in this: 18-24 year olds were more likely to have seen or been involved in online bullying (47%) and the 55+ age group least likely (just 16%). Similarly, those in the 55+ age group were far less likely to have done nothing about it than 18-24 year olds (8% vs 31%).

Speaking up on Social Media

We have a responsibility to use our voices for the common good and social media make it much easier for our voices to be heard and for us to stand up for what we believe. Our survey found that 39% of respondents said they had used social media to speak up about something they felt passionate about. Of these, 20% said a change was in fact implemented as a result of their speaking out and 24% said other people also started tweeting, blogging and/or commenting about the issue. Although 27% of these respondents confessed that speaking up on social media hadnt made a difference, many also said they were not deterred by this from continuing to speak up in the future. When respondents were asked what they felt the most effective method of communication to speak up about an issue was, face-to-face interaction topped the list (51%), with social media as a firm second favourite (18%). Petitions (10%) and protest (10%) were seen as much less effective. This indicates just how influential social media could become as a forum to voice opinions and campaigning to make a difference. Despite this, the research also revealed some evidence that people found social media dissatisfying as a way of managing everyday social life with friends. Over half (55%) of respondents felt that social media had taken over from face-to-face interactions in everyday life: it has become a commonplace of life that we would rather send an email or a tweet than pop into the office next door to see someone in person. Half (51%) also indicated that they would prefer to see someone face-to-face in times of need rather than contact them online, while another third (32%) said they would prefer to use the phone; just 16% said they preferred to use email or a social networking site for these purposes. Not surprisingly, perhaps, 55+ year olds were more likely than 18-24 year olds to prefer face-to-face contact with friends in times of need (64% vs 50%). Whether that reflects older peoples greater lack of familiarity with social media or their greater social experience remains unclear.

Social Consideration
Our survey illustrates the passion of youth: 43% of 18-24 year olds said they had used social media to speak out about something they felt passionate about, but only 29% of 55+ year olds did so. However, this impetuousness of youth also has its downside: 18-24 year olds were more likely than other age groups to say something without thinking it through carefully first (31%). This, perhaps, serves to remind us that the social skills we need to negotiate our way through the complex social world in which we all live do not come naturally, but take time and experience to learn. With age may also come a better capacity to discriminate between the qualities of different friends. In the sample, respondents declared that they had around 13 real friends about the typical number we would find in the population at large. This narrow focus to our social lives is well illustrated by Facebooks own data: it shows that most exchanges take place between a core group of between 10 (for boys) and 16 (for girls) friends, even if the individual has more than 500 friends on their page. The tendency to discriminate more carefully between true and casual friends is reflected in our survey data by an age effect on the number of real friends that respondents listed. Our 18-24 year olds listed an average of 15 real friends, whereas 55+ year olds listed just 10; more than 10% of 18-24 year olds claimed they had more than 30 best friends, whereas only 3% of 55+ year olds did so. This seems to reflect the tendency for younger people to overestimate the quality of a friendship, and to make less fine grained discriminations between different types of friendships.

The problem is that even though we can and do sign up many hundreds of friends on our social networking sites, when we post something on these sites we still think we are talking to just a handful of people we seem to forget that everyone else can see it. It is as though we believe we are in a normal conversation, which in real face-to-face life will typically have an upper limit of around four people. We will say things (and think it perfectly OK to do so) in these private contexts that we wouldnt dream of saying in public. This is why people will insist on blurting out their most private details when on their mobiles in a crowded railway carriage: they think they are having a private one-to-one conversation and forget that they are surrounded by a carriage full of people. We are still not used to the openness of the digital world.

Conclusion
The rapid increase in the availability and use of social media has brought with it many positives and, as our report has revealed, undoubtedly one of these is the ability to stand up for things we are passionate about. Indeed, many of those we surveyed had not only used social media to speak up for what they believed in, but this then led to positive change. However, it is important to remember that it is through experience in face-to-face interactions that we learn many of the social skills needed to navigate our way through our complex social world. These skills do not necessarily come automatically. As our research shows, people are using social media without giving the same thought to what they say as they would in face-to-face interactions. The result can be a careless or inappropriate tweet or at worst, cyber bullying. As we move increasingly to communication via social media, we need to put in place new checks and balances to ensure the proper and courteous use of social media. Just as importantly, we all need to be alert to, and willing to challenge, those who choose to abuse the new freedoms which the likes of Facebook and Twitter bring.

Prepared by: Robin Dunbar Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology Magdalen College, Oxford Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy, and co-Director of the British Academys Centenary Research Project. His principal research interests focus on the evolution of sociality in mammals (with particular reference to ungulates, primates and humans). He is best known for the social brain hypothesis, the gossip theory of language evolution and Dunbars Number (the limit on the number of relationships that we can manage). His popular science books include Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, The Human Story and How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbars Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks.