Fluid ImaginationFrom There’s a Word for Why We Wear Masks, and Liberals Should Say It:
In “On Liberty,” [John Stuart Mill] wrote that liberty (or freedom) means “doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures, as long as what we do does not harm them even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse or wrong.”
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.
I could tell you a lot of cool things about my school, but yesterday, the sheriff’s department escorted one of our students out of our school in handcuffs; and earlier this year, one of our former students (who had dropped out) was shot in the head while sitting in a parked car at two in the morning; and one of the people in the car when the gun went off was also a former student, and he went to prison soon after because, by being in the car that night, he violated his parole; and earlier last year, two other former students were accused (though not convicted) of stealing from their employers, with each incident independent from the other.
No matter how cool our school might be, the truth is that we attract some difficult kids, and while we try to provide them with every opportunity to take control of their education and, in the process, gain control of their lives, too many of them find the freedom too difficult to handle.
One of my students told me yesterday that they feel like they’re living in a role-playing game because even for the simplest of decisions, they sometimes roll a die to decide what they should do. When the student told me this, they were thinking of episodes in their life where they actually, physically rolled a six-sided die, but they were not connecting this anecdote to their immediate reality, wherein they were seated on the floor, consulting a new-age ripoff of Tarot cards for insight into their current predicament. They honestly didn’t see a connection between their inability to make simple decisions and their desire to seek out answers to life’s problems in a deck of commercially produced and professionally marketed cards.
Earlier in the class, for reasons I don’t need to go into, I found myself having to explain to this same student the market forces that lead to SPAM phone calls and emails, a conversation that resulted in the student returning a SPAM phone call they had received earlier in the day to demand an answer from the telemarketer as to how her company acquired the student’s phone number. The conversation did not go well; my student was being earnest and the telemarketer refused to budge from her script, leading me to have to provide explicit instructions as to how and why my student should simply hang up the phone, regardless of whether the telemarketer was done speaking on the other end.
All of which is to say that most of the students who come to my school have difficulty with the simplest things. It’s not that they are dumb — in fact, most of the kids I work with are incredibly bright — it’s that some simple but important things about living in society do not click into place for them like they do for you and me. They just don’t get it, and unfortunately, some of them never will.
We designed our school for one mission: to provide every student, regardless of their abilities, with the opportunity to be interested and engaged in their own education (including their social-emotional education). But so many of our students come to us without being interested or engaged in anything beyond their own drama, or what’s worse, their own trauma, which makes them unable to stay out of their own way.
Our tactic to overcome this is both simple and incredibly hard: We try to make them feel safe. At bottom, that means safe not just from something, but also to become something. The kids who come to us have rarely heard an encouraging word; they’ve been told they are worthless, and in some cases, they’ve been abandoned by their dearest family members, literally left alone in the world with no one to protect or care for them.
It’s no wonder they have trouble making decisions. They have zero self-confidence, and so they don’t trust themselves. Every decision they’ve ever made has led them to where they are now: kicked out of almost every school they’ve ever attended — some residential, some not, some institutional, some not — told that they don’t belong, told to get out, told that they’re a freak of some kind. Their parents, if they’re around, are rarely worth much, and what they are worth is often compounded with negative interest in their kids, which can often mean verbal, physical, or sometimes even sexual abuse, resulting in the child experiencing incredible pain and suffering at the hands of the people society tells them are supposed to love them more than anyone.
Why would they trust themselves? Why would they trust anyone?
And then we come along, offering these students with incredibly acute social-emotional needs a true progressive model of education — one that is student-centered and student-driven, where they’re asked not to do as they’re told but, instead, to do as they think they ought to.
What do we expect will happen? That they’ll all start singing kumbaya, and butterflies will descend from the heavens, and within days, they’ll each be as happy and as engaged as the students on a college brochure?
No. What we expect to happen is what happened today. One student will be escorted from the building in handcuffs. Another will have such an emotional crisis that they will collapse to the ground shaking and in tears. Another will scream so loud on the drive to school that their driver will have an actual panic attack in the car and be unable to feel her hands and feet. Another will refuse to comply with even the simplest of requests, choosing instead to physically wrestle with their teacher. Still others will actively avoid your best advice and refuse to work on the projects they need to exhibit publicly in just over two weeks.
Trying to give kids conscious and moral control over their freedom is a struggle. It’s a real struggle.
Thankfully, I’ve had enough days that were the complete opposite of yesterday to know that, with most kids, the struggle is worth it.
And so while I should expect days like today, I should also be ready to celebrate success whenever I can find it. Like the fact that yesterday two of my students donated their time to complete the duties of a staff member who had to leave early due to a family emergency. Or the fact that the day before, one of my students consulted with a professional in the student’s field of interest to verify the quality of their homework, and the student did so with only the most minimal of supports. Or the fact that, earlier in the week, another of my students, despite being incredibly tired and out of sorts and despite having a history of verbal diarrhea, found enough self-control to be respectful with their peers, their teachers, and the public for longer than I thought possible.
All of them did those things not because they were told to, but because, as free thinkers, it was what they thought they ought to do.
Some days are a struggle. But the struggle really is worth it.