By Bamenjo Petronilla, fellow Cohort 7 #AFFCameroon
INTRODUCTION
A trend can be defined as a topic or subject of interest in many posts across a social media website or application within a short period of time. Over the years we have seen how different trends on social media have had an influence and impact on the lives of people especially the youth. These trends influence the mindset and attitude of the youth either positively or negatively leading to real life consequnces.
For a couple of months now, there has emerged a trend called “VAWULENCE”. According to some social media users “vawulence” is an article or a post which is couched in and comedic terms yet promotes insensitive language, arrogance, hate speech and even conflict. Vawulence is all about aggressively talking or responding to others, while using intolerant, abusive and mocking language. Acccording to Urban Dictionary “vawulence simply means violence which was a term that originated to avoid a Facebook ban on the word violence.
BODY
The number of people who enjoy this Vawulence trend is huge and subscribers to this groups refer to themselves as comrades and act as echo chambers to intolerant attitudes.
Given that their Motto reads: “Peace is not an option”, most of these comrades have increased violence on social media to all time high levels. According to Aditya Saurabh (2019) study on effects media of on humans, “The media controls the society and is capable of changing human behaviour, living style and moral thoughts and consequences. Media reflects in two ways i.e. positive as well as negative; as media does not produces the real happening of a world, rather creates a new world”. The study determined that social media was capable of influencing behaviour and attitude of its users especially by acting as an amplifier for negative and increasingly intolerant actions.
Some social media users have attested to the negative impact “vawulence “has had on their lives as highlighted Here
The result of these “vawulence” posts is sowing mistrust, hate and alienation on the target groups as is evidenced Here
“Vawulence” can also be used as a tool for bullying others to settle personal scores or attack people with different ideologies as can be seen Here
There is a widespread belief that any recipient of bullying deserves it and they receive little sympathy from other users who view the issues as entertainment and either watch from the sidelines or join in the bullying
Bullying in the name of “vawulence is normalized since the cyber space offers a shield and people feel free to attck others without consequences as is evidenced below link.
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Social media Influencers have realized that” vawulence” is popular and they use it as a strategy to amass numerous fans by posting feeds that would polarize people and encourage insults, cursing and provocative language that will elicit responses in kind. There is a trend to meet “vawulence with “vawulence thereby escalating the situation as seen below. Click here
From the above screen shots we can see the hurtful things said to Smart Achu Fominyen who is a gay blogger and how other commenters enjoy the hurtful comments lobbied at him.
There has been a pushback to counter the negative effects of “vawulence” and some users have begun to create awareness on the true effects of “vawulence” and urging people to stop promoting and supporting “vawulence” content as is evidenced here.
CONCLUSION
Some social media users follow the trend of “vawulence” blindly and ignorantly without thoughts of the repercussions of their actions on their recipients. They tend to ignore that real life people are hurt by their words which creates mistrust, hate, alienation as well as negatively impacting the mental health of the bullied individuals.
There has been some efforts made to discourage users from engaging in “vawulence” but a lot still remains to be done to create awareness and protect people from this form of bullying.
RECOMMENDATIONS
- Social media users should be encouraged to use peaceful approaches when addressing issues or calling out others on social media to avoid alienating people or creating tension between opposing factions or people with different ideologies.
- A social media campign to counter the “vawulence” trend should be initiated for example a #NoVawulence campaign could be popularized to sensitize and create awareness on the negative impacts of Vawulence.
- Social media companies should integrate protective measures to protect users from bullies and initiate a form of blacklist for people reported to have participated in cyberbullying under ‘vawuilence”.
