When WhatsApp Administrators Become A Cult of Despots — By Dominic Kidzu

Now that's a really sad place to be, for the members of the watsaap community and for the very idea for which the group was created ab initio. These groups are defined by their nature, nomenclature, membership and scope. That is why some are professional, political, communal, issue/ project based etc. Once one is listed as a member, it is believed that by the foundational requirements appertaining to such a group, such a person has been adjudged to qualify to be a member. 

With the growth of the social media, WhatsApp groups have tended to create virtual human communities and some have been robust enough to cause change to happen both in Ideology, mentality and indeed in real physical terms. That being the case, a watsaap group that  is community based should therefore mimmick a village, a clan or a local government area or tribe. There are no prototypes, (read) stereotypes in a village. Everyone according to their gene, or family trait, or education, or training or experience acquired through travelling, apprenticeship or faith. 

No WhatsApp Administrator,  can coerce members to behave in a particular way that they find "appropriate and correct." By all means standards of behaviour, including the "dos" and " don'ts " are alright, but that's where it stops. Watsaap Administrators cannot take on the additional and preposterous responsibility of content interpretation. And should not constitute themselves into a board of moral judges. Once this happens, excessive control sets in and the freedom of self expression, which is such a cornerstone of social media is eroded. 

The constitutions of all liberal democracies contain a hefty chapter that espouses and ensures the fundamental freedom of speech ( not fundamental freedom of good or reasonable speech). For who really is to interpret what is reasonable speech, chat or otherwise? Every human community contains an admixture of the reasonable, the not so reasonable and the down right stupid. But the Almighty created them all, according to His wisdom. To expect anyless in a watsaap community is to attempt to create utopia. 

Al Pacino as Tonio Montana, in Scarface, a classic drug film in the 80s told the US immigration officials the story of life in communist Cuba. ".... you know the communists, how do you like them, They tell you what to think, what to say, what to do. You want me to stay there and do nothing? To follow them bah, bah bah like a sheep?"

You do not create a watsaap group to control what people say, advice, yes, from  time to time. But to sit there, on mount Olympus, with cane in hand waiting for people to step out of turn so that you can suspend them, or remove them represents the complete antithesis of what social media as a phenomenon aims to achieve, ie, to give full and free expression to people's feelings, ideas and speech. 

By all means quality control is useful, excercised through  polite and courteous advice not by ordering,  and warning, and suspending. The watsaap Admin, must be humble in the discharge of their privileged duties, always remembering that, as Shakespeare succinctly puts it in Julius Caesar " the abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power ". 

There is no doubt that some people are by their very nature pugnacious, bellicose and belligerent. But people will be who they are, either in the real society or in watsaap groups. Through their posts we can easily classify them in our minds place them in our minds, where we believe they belong. But that is where it ends. Some watsaap groups have a lot of quarrelsome members reflecting the provenance of their type. I belong to about 30 groups in all, through no fault of mine. I have come to respect mostly the ones that have allowed me the freedom to be reasonable and not so reasonable. Just the same way that the reasonable and the not so reasonable all have a right to fetch water from the village brook.