Social Media and WW2

[Ashley Hill]

If today's social media had existed during World War 2 what implications would it have had? Would Chamberlain have had a copy of an email in his hand,would Hitler have a Facebook account? Would Lord Haw Haw post on You Tube and could careless Tweets cost lives? This does sound funny but seriously ,given the fear and paranoia spread by social media about C-19 think how it could be used during wartime?

 

[GusB]

If it had existed, I think it would be highly censored as the newspapers of the time were. Goebbels would have had a field day trying to spread "fake news" among the population here. Pinterest would be full of make-do-and-mend, YouTube would have tutorials about how to make the ultimate Anderson shelter and...

...Cats. There would still have been millions of cat pics.

 

[Springs Branch]

I remember reading somewhere that when the Luftwaffe Blitz on British towns and cities was underway in the early 1940s, there wasn't always the universal Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On attitude and Blitz Spirit* that our national mythology portrays.

Rather there was a significant part of the population which thought "We can't carry on with this - We should surrender now before they kill everyone and destroy everything - Being governed by the Germans can't be that bad, can it?" This being driven by not wanting to be bombed out rather than any support for Nazi ideologies.

Any deviation from the official stiff upper lip approach to the destruction was totally suppressed by the wartime government and the press / broadcasting media of the day.

Today, of course, it's much harder to keep a lid on alternative & contradictory views which anyone can easily propagate through social media, even if it's a minority opinion. So there might have been more effective "Stop The Bombs" and hashtag-Surrender Now movements.


* - another consequence of the Blitz was apparently a huge increase in low-level crime, as citizens took advantage of the police being distracted and new opportunities to rob their neighbours and plunder their bombed out communities. The Good Old Days were often not as good as the stories make out.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

My opinion is that social media wouldn't be accessible with the internet either being switched off (or, at the very least, heavily censored) by the Emergency Government.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

I think this thread would be better looked at as "social media in World War 3". In that situation, remember undersea fibre optic cables will be a millitary target, so the internet would become physically damaged anyway.

The internet would be such a hotbed for spies/subversion that it would have to be shut down.

Incidently, if you want an idea how every day life would change in the lead up to a nuclear war, this wikipedia article is very interesting if not chilling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_to_war#Post-Cold_War_era

 

[Ashley Hill]

I think this thread would be better looked at as "social media in World War 3". In that situation, remember undersea fibre optic cables will be a millitary target, so the internet would become physically damaged anyway.

A fair point although if WW3 ever happened would such outlets be the accepted method of giving information and consequently receiving miss-information too. WW3 would be a whole different gravy from WW2 (phrase borrowed from the fare evaders program) in that I doubt it would last long. I suppose comparing the "careless talk costs lives" to careless tweets amounts to the same thing.