The political use of Social Media by neoliberal regimes, to control children, adolescent and youth. The role and the impact of Critical Pedagogy.

In this work, the use of social media (sometimes called here: SM) by neoliberal governments is examined. Focus is given in their serving as tools to control and record children’s, adolescents’, as well as youth’s behavior and views. Researchers up to know have studied the possible critical use of social media as alternative or enhancing ways of learning. Their bad impacts have also being scrutinized, concerning the area of learning or finding out true knowledge. But there seems to be a shortage of studies on how social media are used to manipulate youth politically. Social media can easily serve the objectives of neoliberal education and governance, since they subject the “self” to an ideal, dull notion of “connectivity”. The individual looses the limits that separate them from the mass and seems to be together with everyone and to learn any accessible information. This is typically a first step towards handling him/her. Alienation also appears, since the sentiments of human loss, death, and separation are extremely blunt. This leads to political reactions and movements also being affected, since they are electronically channelized. Also the distinction between true news and false news becomes difficult and isolation prevails (thus movements on the street are reduced) in superficially totally-non-isolated-world. Even the reflection of “self” (typically in photos-“selfies”) prevails over the treatment of the “other” as equal and very important. Happiness is a distorted sense and all the aforementioned are methods for a regime to keep politically silent and inactive its citizens. Even language becomes homogeneous (some sort of English) and cultural differences are not given prominence (“I show you my way of life but we all do this by the same means”). Critical Pedagogy (sometimes referred to here as: CP) has a prominent political role to play in both formal and informal education and schooling, in order to frustrate these impacts. CP stresses the need for active human communication (not an artificial one), explores Social media as tools of imposing totalitarianism and focuses on the young man’s or woman’s need to be critical towards SM. It advocates differences and through teacher’s empowerment helps the student to overpass both the limitations and restraints imposed by SM, as well as the effort to deceive him/her. The theoretical context for this action of CP and methodologies to apply it will be presented in the current work