NOTE: We highlight CSUSB faculty who are mentioned in the news. Faculty, if you are interviewed and quoted by news media, or if your work has been cited, and you have an online link to the article or video, please let us know. Contact us at news@csusb.edu.
The use of social media was the topic two Cal State San Bernardino faculty members were asked to discuss by news media.
Ahlam Muhtaseb, a professor of communication studies and an expert in social media, was interviewed by Al-Jazeerah Arabic on the role of Twitter possibly replacing traditional media during the Donald Trump’s presidency and whether the Trump administration could cut the middle man and abandon the long held tradition of daily White House briefings by using Twitter.
The interview, in Arabic, was posted online on Jan. 6, 2017, and may be viewed on Al-Jazeerah Arabic’s YouTube page.
News media, following the horrific beating of a mentally disabled white man in Chicago by four black assailants broadcast on social media, continue to interview Brian Levin, criminal justice professor and director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism housed in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, for his perspective.
Wisconsin Public Radio featured Levin in a national conversation about race, hate crimes, and politics that has erupted out of the incident.
The four were arrested after a Facebook live video showed them beating a white student who police say had “mental health issues” while shouting expletives about President-elect Donald Trump and white people. Levin discussed the impact of the incident on social media, as well as hate crimes in general, including how they are recorded.
The interview was posted online Jan 6, 2016, and can be heard at “Four charged with hate crime over livestreamed beating in Chicago.”
The Associated Press, in an article about incident, wrote that it has highlighted anti-white hate crimes at a time of increased racial strife in the United States. But federal statistics and experts say anti-white incidents remain a smaller percentage of overall hate crimes. Anti-black hate crimes are still the largest number of cases.
Levin was is one of the experts interviewed for the article. He described the situation as “a logjam of motivations” for conflict, saying it’s like nothing he’s ever seen. “We are seeing the coarseness that exists in society generally, those embers, have crossed the fire lines to all parts of the racial, ethnic and ideological spectrum.”
The wire service article was published Jan. 6, 2017, and picked up by various news media nationwide. The Albuquerque Journal’s post of the article may be read at “Small percentage of hate crimes aimed at whites.”