Categories
asides

How Facebook Went Easy On Alex Jones And Other Right-Wing Figures

From “Mark Changed The Rules”: How Facebook Went Easy On Alex Jones And Other Right-Wing Figures:

“Ideology is not, and should not be, a protected class,” a [Facebook] content policy employee who left weeks after the election wrote. “White supremacy is an ideology; so is anarchism. Neither view is immutable, nor should either be beyond scrutiny. The idea that our content ranking decisions should be balanced on a scale from right to left is impracticable … and frankly can be dangerous, as one side of that scale actively challenges core democratic institutions and fails to recognize the results of a free and fair election.”

Categories
politics

Removing a Video from Facebook is Not Censorship

A friend messaged me recently to discuss Plandemic, the 26-minute video that went viral last week due to its conspiracy mongering. My friend didn’t want to discuss the video, per se — he said he knows the idea that “the coronavirus was planned by billionaires to enforce worldwide vaccinations” is nuts — but he was concerned about major social-media companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo preventing people from watching it. 

In a free country, he argued, all ideas — even (and especially) bad ones — should be out in the open for debate and discussion. 

He didn’t get any argument from me, but he did get it (not directly) from the social-media companies. Travis Andrews spoke to them for The Washington Post and learned the companies took the video down because it violated their terms of service. While the legal language is different for each company, the gist is the same: the companies reserve the right to remove a video if it spreads harmful and misleading health information to the public. 

Of course, they weren’t quick enough. Before Facebook could remove the video, it was viewed over 1.8 million times and shared over 150,000 times.

This was not the first viral video to be taken down for violating “community guidelines” around harmful and misleading health information. This NBC News report, for example, focuses on videos by doctors who “downplayed the risk of coronavirus and asserted that stay-at-home measures were unnecessary. They also promoted a conspiracy theory that doctors were falsely attributing unrelated deaths to COVID-19, the disease associated with the coronavirus.” These videos have been watched more than 9 million times. As Matt Taibbi reported, the videos provoked the American Academy of Emergency Physicians and American College of Emergency Physicians to issue a joint statement condemning the videos.

Taibbi’s article, The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here, explores the issue of coronavirus censorship in detail, connecting several dots, including WMDs in Iraq, Russiagate, and Tom Brady’s Deflategate, to make this point:

[T]he functional impact…is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.

In general, I agree with my friend and with Matt Taibbi. The first donation I ever made as an adult was to the American Civil Liberties Union, and I’ve long told my students that when it comes to the First Amendment, I’m an extremist. 

At the same time, I have no problem with these private companies taking down misleading and harmful videos. Among other things, the First Amendment recognizes the right of Americans to be free from governmental interference of speech, but it doesn’t compel corporations or individuals to follow the same rules. Removing these videos from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. does not violate the rights of these citizens. It may reduce the impact of their ideas, but it does not stop them from having or expressing them.

With today’s technology (and access to the computers in public libraries), every individual in the United States is able to record their thoughts, develop their arguments, or post their memes to the Internet, where every node is (by design) equally accessible.

While blocking access to the major social-media networks limits the potential audience, it doesn’t cause any more harm than when someone had a great idea in pre-Industrial Europe and could only post a pamphlet on the door of his local church: Martin Luther’s 95 theses went viral, and he didn’t even have a blue checkmark to help him out.

So yes, while I adamantly support the right of all Americans (all people, really) to express their opinions without fear of retribution from their government(s), I also support the right of private companies to determine their own terms of service (in accordance with their government’s laws). 

The danger is not YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter preventing someone from sharing ideas on their social networks, nor is it the political and social condemnation that comes from airing one’s minority opinions in public (such is life); instead, the danger is a government that silences its critics.

On that front, things don’t look so rosy

According to Reporters Sans Borders (RSF), the United States ranks 45th in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, mainly due to “Trump-era hostility.” One item RSF highlights is the placement of an American journalist on the U.S. government’s “kill list.” Another is the U.S. government’s prosecution of whistleblowers. A third condemns the U.S. government’s seizure of a journalist’s phone and email records going back several years. 

If YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter prevent an individual from using their services, that’s their right, but when the U.S. government is the one doing the censoring, then that’s the loss of our right, and we ought to do something about it.

Categories
featured life politics

A New Facebook Page

Like many Americans, I’ve been thinking about my relationship to Facebook. A few months ago, I wrote that the Facebook party might be over. Since that time, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone…only to reinstall it two months later because I was still going to the website several times a day anyways, and the app just makes it a hell of a lot easier to share things.

Plus, as I wrote in that previous post:

 Facebook is a great tool for knowing — at least on a superficial level — what’s going on in the lives of the people I know, people I once knew, and people I want to know better.

So I’ve decided to keep my Facebook account. But I do want to change the way I use it.

Since President Trump’s inauguration, and in the years leading up to it, we’ve all witnessed (and been part of) the way politics has taken over our democracy. I’m not just talking about the partisan bickering. That’s been a part of our democracy since Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans.

I’m talking about the way politics has ingratiated itself into virtually every conversation and every interaction. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I try not to start conversations about politics, but I rarely prevent myself from participating in them.

I believe the personal is political. To attempt to separate personal matters from political matters is to commit the crime of privilege. Only the most privileged people in our country have the luxury to ignore the downstream effects of the decisions made in Washington D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. Only the most privileged can pretend that “not talking about something” is the same thing as “being civil.” 

But there has to be a space where people can come together to empathize with each other’s stories, a space where there is no “us” and “them” but just “me” and “you,” where I can talk to you about a funny thing my daughter said and neither of us feels the urge to mention the way, less than a month ago, our government “roused…hundreds of migrant children…in the middle of the night [and] loaded [them] onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.

There has to be a space where you can share a picture of your grandmother on her 100th birthday and neither of us feels the need to mention the way our society fails to provide adequate care to millions of elders due to the for-profit nature of our healthcare system. 

A space where you and I can meet, smile, and care about one another without asking ourselves how our words and actions will effect the results of the next election. 

I’ve decided to try to create that space on my personal Facebook page. 

With that being said, I hope you want to engage with me outside of the bubble of that peaceful, partisan-free space. I also hope that you have found my more politically-minded blog posts to be interesting and thought provoking, or that they’ve challenged you or inspired you to think differently about a topic or opened your mind to a perspective you hadn’t considered. 

If so, I hope you’ll follow my new Facebook page for Fluid Imagination. If not, I hope you’ll remain my friend. 

Categories
life politics

The Personal is Political

Several of my friends on Facebook (all of whom lean conservative, interestingly enough) recently complained about Facebook not being fun anymore because their feeds are full of nothing but politics, politics, politics. As one of them suggested, everyone should “unfollow people who are draining every ounce of your Facebook Fun because they only post political crap you’re tired of hearing about!”

It’s not just my (conservative leaning) friends. You can find plenty of articles on the topic around the web. For example:

Generally speaking, those who make this argument seem to feel that Facebook should be like a friendly reunion where people who don’t see each other very often can share what they’re doing in their lives, gush over photos of each other’s kids, and exchange some good humored ribbing. It’s “a way of hanging out with everyone you ever met, and political ranting makes the whole thing…awkward.”

As you might imagine, I don’t agree with this argument.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve unfollowed friends on Facebook because of their political rants, but it wasn’t because of their political leanings (I greatly appreciate having right-leaning friends who help me stay out of an entirely liberal bubble), nor was it because the ratio between their political posts and their “personal” posts was too high. Instead, it was because these particular friends demonstrated very little ability to act civil with those who disagreed with them.

Provided you can remain civil, and remember that the people you’re talking to are real live people and they have stresses and interests that are different from your own, then I find that there really isn’t a better place for online conversations than Facebook.

Facebook allows you to connect with virtually everyone you’ve ever met, which means you can have conversations with people from college, people from high school, people from that trip you took once, and people from your extended family, all at once. People who maybe don’t ever see each other in person, who may not even know one another, and who live in variety of places around the country or around the world can actually engage in a substantive conversation about a timely topic, should they choose to.

The software itself is perfect for this. You can have threaded conversations with direct replies to people, so you can engage a particular topic from multiple angles, and people can choose to focus on a single, a small subset, or all of the angles. You can include links to supporting articles, including fact-checking services such as Snopes.com. You can tag other friends to invite them into a particular section of the conversation, either to support what you’re saying or to provide an insight that you couldn’t provide on your own. And you can get notifications everytime someone adds a comment to the discussion, ensuring that you don’t miss out on anything important (or funny).

Honestly, Facebook is perfect for these kinds of in-depth conversations.

But that’s not what I want to talk about…not exactly.

There’s a slogan that came out of second-wave Feminism in the 1960s. You’ve probably seen it on a button: “The personal is political.” It comes from the title of an essay by Carol Hanisch published in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation. The essay wasn’t originally given that title because it was written more as an internal memo to members of the women’s liberation movement, but after it got picked up and published, the editors gave it that title.

In the memo, Hanisch argued that the women’s liberation movement had to continue to engage with “apolitical” women through what detractors derisively called therapy” or “personal” groups but what supporters such as Hanisch would go on to call “consciousness-raising groups.” She argued that through their derision of these group sessions, some of the more activist supporters of the movement were pushing away women who desperately needed their support and whose support, in all honesty, the movement desperately needed.

She painted a portrait of what these group sessions were actually like:

We have not done much trying to solve immediate personal problems of women in the group. We’ve mostly picked topics by two methods: In a small group it is possible for us to take turns bringing questions to the meeting (like, Which do/did you prefer, a girl or a boy baby or no children, and why? What happens to your relationship if your man makes more money than you? Less than you?). Then we go around the room answering the questions from our personal experiences. Everybody talks that way. At the end of the meeting we try to sum up and generalize from what’s been said and make connections.

She went on to argue that through these sessions, she was “forced to take off the rose colored glasses and face the awful truth about how grim my life really is as a woman.” The sessions gave her “a gut understanding of everything, as opposed to the esoteric, intellectual understandings and noblesse oblige feelings [she] had in ‘other people’s’ struggles.”

Women didn’t attend the meetings “to solve any personal problem. One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems [emphasis added]. There are no personal solutions at this time,” she continues. “There is only collective action for a collective solution.”

What does this have to do with not being political on Facebook?

If I show you a picture of my daughter scaling a rock wall at our local climbing gym, you can sit back for a moment, smile, click “Like,” and move on. But what have you and I just done?

First, we ignored all of the injustice in the world. We said to ourselves, “We are comfortable right now, so let’s just smile at each other for a moment, and then move on.” It’s the mental, emotional, and spiritual equivalent of running into each other at a coffee shop, smiling at each other, and moving on.

But I don’t want to just smile at you as we pass each other by at a coffee shop. If I’m friends with you on Facebook, it’s not just because I met you once. It’s because in some real and authentic way, I want to consider you my friend. There’s a real chance that we actually are friends, like in real life, and if we’re not, then there’s a real chance that at some point, if only for a few minutes, in real life, we actually were, and if we weren’t, however I know you, if you’re my friend on Facebook, it’s because at some point in my life, I thought about you and was actually willing to call you, in all honesty, my “friend.”

I don’t want to run into one of my friends at a coffee shop and simply nod and smile. I want to stop and talk for a little while.

And I get it, not everyone wants to talk politics, and most of the time, not everyone wants to talk about the world’s injustices. But the people I want to call my friends are willing, at least some of the time, to really get into it.

I went back to the town where I grew up last weekend to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with the Irish side of my family….or so I thought. To my complete surprise, my brother invited his best friend (a second-generation Italian) and his best friend’s family to the party as well. I couldn’t have been happier. There hasn’t been a minute in my life when I haven’t known this guy, and in my childhood, I saw very little difference between him and my brothers: like them, he was always there, and he usually treated me with love.

But this is a guy I don’t see as often as my brothers, so when he came walking in the door, it was like being surprised by a long-lost brother who I hadn’t spoken with in forever.

Let me set the stage for a moment. This man is a physical education teacher (and I stress the word teacher) in a Catholic preparatory school for high-school age boys. He’s a dedicated Ironman whose idea of a dream vacation is to bike the route of the Tour de France. He’s a regular churchgoer whose coworkers are ministers, and he feels that Christian charity is not a thing you give money to but a thing you actually do in your daily life, a way to be.

He also voted for Donald Trump.

Within moments of his arrival, he approached me in the corner of the kitchen and without missing a beat, engaged me in a substantive conversation that ranged from God to transgenderism to television shows to the art of teaching to the meaning of friendship to the power of plays. We spent most of the night together, joined by our wives at points, my brothers and cousins at others, our daughters at still others. It was great.

At no point did we shy from discussing politics. I’m not talking about partisan politics. Neither of us are firmly committed to either the Republican or Democratic party. True, when forced to vote for them, we often (if not always) vote for opposite parties, but when we do, we do so with clear enough eyes that we understand why other people would have justifiable concerns about our chosen candidates. I don’t think either of us would give a full-throated defense of either party.

When I say we didn’t shy from discussing politics, what I mean is that we didn’t shy from disagreeing with each other based on a disagreement in principles. We understand the strength of our relationship, and so we’re able to challenge each other without the other having to take offense. We know that each of us are dedicated to growing as human beings, and if we disagree with each other and challenge each other, it’s only because we care for one another and want the other one to continue to grow.

If I show you a picture of my daughter scaling a rock wall at our local climbing gym, and I follow it five minutes later with a link to an article on white male privilege or to the specific details of a law being proposed in Congress or to an analysis of our President’s ties with a foreign power, it’s because I want to do more that just show you pictures of my kid. It’s because I also want to challenge you as a human being, and to provide a signal to you that I would like to be challenged as well. The hope is that, through our conversations, we can each grow into something better than we currently are, which often comes from exposing ourselves to new and sometimes contrarian ideas.

The best thing we each could do with a “political post” on Facebook would not be to click “Like” and simply move on, which would be like running into each other at a coffee shop and just throwing pamphlets in each other’s faces.

The best thing to do would be to — at some point — read the article the other person shared, or if we don’t have the attention span for that, to at least look at the headline and then ask a question about it. Through that interaction, we start to earn (or renew our committment to) the word “friend.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I can’t be friends with anyone who doesn’t read every article I share or leave a comment on every post I write.

What I am saying is that if you think Facebook is more for personal stuff than political stuff, then you need to understand that the personal is political. By closing your eyes to anything you might disagree with, you’re committing a political act, one that commits you to remaining the same forever and forever, while also committing you to accept (and thus tacitly defend) the status quo, injustices and all.

If I’m friends with you on Facebook, it’s because I either am or want to be your friend in real life. That doesn’t mean always giving you a shoulder to cry on (though of course I would if you needed me to), but it does mean always giving you my willingness to get into it with you, even if sometimes I have to be the one who starts it.

What’s more personal than being willing to engage with one another from places of differing principle? And since I can’t see you everyday, and so few of us actually write emails (let alone letters) anymore, and since texting definitely isn’t a good tool for in-depth discussions, why wouldn’t the serindepity of running into each on Facebook be the perfect place to connect?

Some might suggest it would be more appropriate to take those conversations to someplace more private (Facebook Messenger?), but there’s a commitment to a private conversation that we’re not always willing to have. It’d be like if we ran into each other in a coffee shop and I said, “Hey, why don’t we go sit in the front seat of my car and catch up?” That would have the chance of becoming weird, right? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for us to keep our conversation in the public/private space of the coffee shop, where if someone we both know happens to stumble in, we can increase participation in the conversation, and where we can also remain safely in the public eye, forcing us both to be on our best behavior?

I honestly can’t think of a better tool for allowing the personal to become political. And that’s why I’ll keep talking to my friends on Facebook the way I talk to all of my friends: with a love for conversation and committment to helping each other grow.

There’s nothing more personal, and nothing more political, than that.