Internet Censors and Real Speech

The cover art from Sharon Van Etten’s
Remind Me Tomorrow

I had no idea, until this week, that Sharon Van Etten’s folk-pop electronic album Remind Me Tomorrow might be off-color. Specifically, the cover art. I’ve linked to my review of the album several times on several platforms without incident. But this week, I had a link yanked from Instagram by the parent company, Meta, on the grounds of “child nudity.”

As you can see, the cover image is a childhood snapshot of Van Etten and her brother. That’s Van Etten half-folded into a laundry basket, partially unclothed. Small children often hate clothes, and have to be conditioned to wear them in time to start school. Because of this, most people recognize a categorical difference between innocent small-kid nakedness, and smut. I suspect any impartial judge would consider this the former.

This isn’t my first collision between Meta and nudity. I’ve repeatedly needed to appeal them blocking links because my essays included Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, a panel from the Sistene Chapel ceiling. It depicts Adam, not yet alive, lolling naked in Eden, including his visible genitals. Nearly every blog essay I’ve written that included this image, I’ve had to appeal against lewdness regulations.

Any reasonable person would agree that social media needs basic standards of appropriate behavior. Without a clear, defined threshold, one or a few bad-faith actors could deluge the algorithm with garbage and destroy the common space. Consider the decline of public spaces like Times Square in the 1970s: if nobody defends common spaces, they become dumping grounds for the collective id.

But those standards are necessarily arbitrary. What constitutes offensive behavior? We get different answers if we ask people of different ages, regions, and backgrounds. My grandmother and I have different expectations; likewise, Inglewood, California, and Doddsville, Mississippi, have wildly divergent community standards. But because Facetube and InstaTwit don’t have geographic boundaries, they flatten distinctions of place, race, age, and economic standing.

TikTok perhaps embodies this best. Cutsie-poo euphemisms like “unalived,” “pew-pew,” and “grape” gained currency on TikTok, and have made it vitally difficult to discuss tender topics. YouTube restricts and demonetizes videos for even mentioning crime, death, and the Holocaust. Words like “fascism” and “murder” are the kiss of death. In an American society filthy with violence, the requirement to speak with baby talk circumspection means that we can’t communicate.

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, from the Sistene Chapel ceiling

Watching the contortions content creators have to perform whenever called upon to address the latest school shooting or overseas drone strike, would be hilarious, if it weren't heartbreaking. Americans have to contend with legislative inertia, lobbyist cash, and morally absolute thinking when these catastrophes occur. But then the media behemoths that carry the message have the ability, reminiscent of William Randolph Hearst, to kill stories by burying them.

I’m not the first to complain about this. I’ve read other critics who recommend just ignoring the restrictions, and writing forthrightly. Which sounds great, in theory. If censorious corporations punish writers for mentioning death and crime too directly, the response is to refuse to comply. Like any mass labor action, large numbers and persistence should amend the injustice.

In theory.

Practically speaking, media can throttle the message. In the heyday of labor struggles, the Ludlow Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain, unions could circumvent media bottlenecks by printing their own newspapers and writing their own folk songs. But most internet content creators lack the necessary skills to program their own social media platforms. Even if they could, they certainly can't afford valuable server space.

Thus, a few companies have immediate power to choke even slightly controversial messages, power that creators cannot resist. Which elicits the next question: if journalists, commentators, and bloggers cover a story, but Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk stifle the distribution, has the coverage actually happened? Who knows what crises currently fester unresolved because we can’t talk about them?

This isn’t a call to permit everything. Zuckerberg and Musk can’t permit smut on their platforms, or even link to it, because it coarsens and undercuts their business model. But current standards are so censoriously narrow that they kill important stories on the vine. If we can’t describe controversial issues using dictionary terms, our media renders us virtually mute.

Given how platforms screen even slightly dangerous topics and strangle stories in their beds, I’m curious whether anyone will even see this essay. I know I lack enough reach to start a movement. But if we can start speaking straightforwardly, without relying on juvenile euphemisms, that represents a step forward from where we stand right now.

Are Students Still Citizens?

High school cheerleader Brandi Levy was a freshman in May 2017, and therefore probably fifteen years old, when, wracked with frustration, she composed a vulgarity-laced Snapchat about student life. In response, her school district ejected her from the cheer squad. The resulting lawsuit has dragged on for nearly four years (Levy is now in college), and hits the Supreme Court this month. Her case will have First Amendment ramifications for years.

The same day I learned about Brandi Levy’s case, footage emerged from the school where I formerly taught, the University of Nebraska at Kearney, of a solo protestor. The individual was waving a succession of placards, including one reading “COVID Killed George Floyd,” and selling lapel buttons with antivax slogans off a folding table. Though some students tried shaming him into desisting, the school claimed powerlessness, calling it a free speech issue.

Discovering these two stories together, I descended into a doom-spiral of deliberation about free speech. I’ve previously called myself a “free speech absolutist,” though like most absolutists, I’m not that absolute. Some speech acts are clearly unacceptable, like inciting violence or proscribed obscenity, and the Supreme Court agrees with me. But students’ speech rights have always been lawfully circumscribed, and that creates moral paradoxes.

Legal scholars observing Brandi Levy’s case have agreed: the Tinker precedent asserts that any speech which doesn’t disrupt school functions is lawful and protected. Equally important, school authority has traditionally been construed to end at the campus perimeter. Yet the school raises an important counterpoint: if they can’t police speech taking place online, how can they combat cyberbullying? And where is the campus perimeter in this age of remote learning?

I remember school officials claiming complete powerlessness when bullies pursued, harangued, and even physically struck me off-campus. Didn’t happen here, they said, so it’s not our jurisdiction. But behavior originating on-campus carries into off-campus life, a tendency amplified by digital media reach. Since kids are legally compelled into school, surely schools have some responsibility when campus toxicity spills into the community.

Yet I reflexively flinch from giving schools sweeping authority over students’ non-scholastic behavior. People—bosses, pastors, bureaucrats—given unrestricted authority over others’ choices frequently, even consistently, abuse that power. Especially in today’s economy, where parents’ working hours have become painfully lengthy, the desire to hand in loco parentis authority to schools, which are often short-staffed and underfunded, courts moral disaster.

@UNKearney with all of the things happening in the world right now, ignorance on our campus should not be tolerated especially on a University Campus that has less than 20% of the population that are POC pic.twitter.com/q9UHgj8ZZP

— jeni.chez (@jeni_chez) April 13, 2021

The inability to concisely resolve this contradiction gets amplified by the numbskull at UNK. Universities, as bastions of knowledge and research, should surely have authority to prevent anyone peddling bullshit—literally peddling, since the protester was evidently selling his slogan buttons for money. Most college students are at least 18, and therefore nominal adults, so they have lawful adult liberties, but universities have a mission to teach something like reality.

If schools have authority to police students’ online behavior when they spout vulgarities about their extracurriculars, surely they have authority to silence people preaching balloon juice. But if free speech protects a frustrated teenager off-campus, surely it protects a nonviolent protester who isn’t disrupting campus activities. Even if what he says is flat damn wrong. (Retrogressive views like this are widespread on my former campus: UNK isn’t exactly UC-Berkeley.)

This contradiction highlights the problem with rules-based school governance. The Supreme Court will dispense a ruling in Levy’s case that either expands or contracts school authority, and their ruling will apply nationwide. But changing technology, and COVID, prove that the boundary between “school” and “life” isn’t circumscribed by physical campus. We’ve applauded people getting fired for participating in the January 6th insurrection, so adult lives aren’t insulated either.

The delineation between school and life, and between free speech and action, is decided not by rules, handed down by black-robed justices, but by deliberation, evidence, and language. Boundaries of acceptable speech are fundamentally moral decisions, and whatever ruling SCOTUS makes will enshrine their morality for at least two generations. A federal case, while sometimes necessary (Brown v. Board), also forecloses debate when circumstances change.

Which, beyond a doubt, they will, in ways we cannot predict. And sooner than later.

Maybe schools need some guidance. The University of Nebraska system, lacking clear guidelines, has a history of wildly inconsistent positions. Yet whatever position SCOTUS favors will have knock-on effects. Increased authority will put schools in competition with parents; circumscribed authority will make it difficult to eject bullies and professional liars. That’s the problem with moral precepts, I guess. Reality doesn’t conform itself to our rules.

Alex Jones and the New Techno-Government

Alex Jones

Facebook and Google have given me massive ethical twitches recently. As Earth’s two among biggest websites, they draw massive amounts of business into their webs every day. It’s virtually impossible to communicate with a mass English-speaking audience without going through these two companies. But as privately held companies, they have the ability to enforce personal, often arbitrary “community standards” on content produced by ordinary citizens. They have become the ultimate privitization of the public sphere.

This most readily manifests in “adult” content. YouTube (a Google subsidiary) and Facebook both assiduously screen images of boobs, sexual content, vulgar or violent memes, and anything else that might curl Aunt Mabel’s hair. I have no problem with that, theoretically. Except I do, because both Google and Facebook are so vast, and functionally screen so much undifferentiated content ordinary people receive, that making these concepts disappear from their sites makes them basically disappear forever.

So I’m conflicted about Facebook and YouTube’s decision Monday to scrub notorious troll Alex Jones. This moon-faced whack-a-mole, notorious for preaching everything from “Pizzagate” to Sandy Hook “crisis actors” to saying Democrats plan to launch a “Second Civil War,” finally pushed even Facebook and Google’s studiously neutral content critics too far. They’ve decided to starve him of oxygen. Part of me wants to shout: “Thank God! Maybe we can get serious, grown-up discussion going again!”

Except…

Between them, Google (which owns YouTube) and Facebook (which owns Instagram) control over half of planet Earth’s Internet advertising revenue. They aren’t just content gatekeepers; they profit handsomely from deciding what you and I see. Though neither company has official state standing, both have power and reach autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping must drool over. Making somebody disappear from these sites has consequences so far-reaching, the word “censorship” isn’t out of line.

How do we process entities like this, which have greater reach than William Randolph Hearst or Rupert Murdoch ever dreamed of? Google and Facebook have state-like power, but no state-like democratic oversight. Most shareholders have no idea what contributes to “community standards” on these sites. Even many people enforcing standards make snap decisions. Try this experiment: report a friend’s perfectly innocuous statement for violations. Betcha it’ll disappear, because monitors can’t actually read every reported violation.

Mark Zuckerberg

This isn’t even an issue of whether certain speech is acceptable. Like most First Amendment absolutists, I draw the line at incitements to violence. Saying something like “Person X is stupid and shouldn’t breed” is offensive, and deserves scolding. Saying “Get your rifles, Person X is gonna die” crosses a line between speech and action. And when somebody with a platform reaching millions of listeners, simply saying anything requires a diligent conscience and constant scrutiny.

Yet as we saw in 2016, during the first great “fake news” wave, propagandists can produce meaningless, fact-free gibberish that nevertheless motivates a base already primed for anger. We’ve seen what angry people do: they carry guns into pizza joints to verify conspiracy theories. They shoot a roomful of journalists. They hector parents of a murdered child so badly they have to go into hiding. This isn’t free speech fallout, it’s the consequences of actions.

Google, Facebook, and their subsidiaries thus find themselves in a precarious situation: they are private companies with the reach and influence once exclusive to governments. In order to survive, in order to do business and remain viable, they must exercise the discretion of the state. Their so-called community standards, like “no boobies where children can see them,” now have semi-governmental weight behind them. Companies no longer just live by community standards, they now set them.

This is simultaneously comforting and horrifying. It means companies now step up and take responsibility for ways people use their products, even when they use their products recklessly. Corporations have too often sworn off culpability for their products: think gun and cigarette manufacturers. If Facebook and Google can own their products’ behavior, and enforce some bottom minimum for accountability, then maybe so can Philip Morris or Smith & Wesson. I mean, probably not, but maybe. Someday.

Yet when governments silence unacceptable speech, we understand who they answer to. When states say flag burning and incitement aren’t protected speech acts, we (hopefully) realize the government answers to its people. (Pipe down, North Korea.) Corporations don’t. Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg are accountable to, I assume, somebody, but who? And what ensures they use their unelected, state-like authority reasonably? These questions should scare even we who are happy to see Alex Jones silenced.