Online, our personal stories are the antidote to Trump

Subconsciously and unwittingly, users have hacked the attention algorithms.

Over the past week, social media users have stepped up to tell their stories in response to the Trump administration's travel ban, which prohibits citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. The honesty has been jarring.

Virality feeds off of shock and emotion. Someone like President Donald Trump has, in the past, used that to his advantage. As media scholar Douglas Rushkoff remarked, Twitter "rewards those who can generate an immediate response." It favours the provocative, the impulsive and the shocking. Sound familiar?

As a presidential candidate and Republican nominee, Trump used Twitter to bypass mainstream media entirely. Left-wing or right-wing, voter or protester, we talked about him incessantly, and he cashed that attention-currency in for the highest office in the United States.

But now, those same triggers are mobilizing the uprising.  

Personal stories

Over the weekend, individuals on Facebook and Twitter shared their personal histories about being immigrants themselves and their early days as refugees in Canada or the United States. Users — friends — shared their fears about whether they would be allowed to travel into the U.S. anymore, a thought that would have seemed unfathomable mere hours earlier.

The timing was particularly poignant, given that Trump's executive order was signed, ironically, on Holocaust Remembrance Day. A reticent user, I found myself sharing my own story: my grandmother, who lived in Manitoba, took in orphans after World War II. They were little boys, with numbers tattooed into their arms, and they said she was like an angel, waiting for them at the train station when they arrived in Winnipeg back in 1946. This year, the social media hashtag #neveragain felt eerily pertinent — more relevant than it has for decades.

People were compelled to share these testimonies, and as story after story filled our feeds, together they became a collective mantra: we will not forget, we will not repeat.

Someone I'd met at a film festival posted about coming to the U.S. from the Soviet Union as persecuted Jewish refugee, a colleague wrote about coming over from Sudan and a friend from grad school — who I'd only known to be from Texas — wrote that her parents had fled Iran. Profile after profile, everyone had one thing in common: they all came from somewhere. And through the collective act of individuals telling their own stories in a communal forum, a timely reminder emerged: we are all immigrants.

In turn, maybe this wave of hyper-honesty will save social media. Highly-targeted misinformation has become one of social media's big money-makers, and biggest drawbacks. In a digital ecosystem steeped in fake news, we've become accustomed to questioning the validity of everything we read. But when the people we've self-selected for our social networks reveal, with disarming honesty, their own stories, pasts and fears, that authenticity cuts through the blur of gotcha headlines, divisive rhetoric and statistics fuelling the debilitating information overload.

For all of its flaws, social media gives us the power to tell our own stories. That was its initial promise, and perhaps it will be the way it redeems itself: by amplifying the voices of regular individuals, and mobilizing people to take some action.

This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.