Howdy y’all!
I’ve been thinking a lot about free speech this week. Probably because it has been in the news. First, in case you missed it, the Nobel Peace Prize went to two journalists – Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia – who have stood their ground against authoritarian governments which would limit the freedom of the press, everywhere. I’m less familiar with Muratov’s work, though I know of Ressa because Time Magazine included her as a Person of the Year in 2018. She’s been very brave in standing up to the Duarte regime and championing freedom of the press. This award is well deserved, and I am glad the Nobel committee saw fit to recognize the important work done by journalists around the world in preserving everyone’s right to free expression.
Meanwhile, in the UK, there has been a concerted effort to have a university lecturer sacked because she holds “gender critical” views; that is, she does not believe that sex is mutable and holds the position that sex is of material importance to women’s rights. This has fanned the flames of a culture war raging in the UK over the need to balance the rights of women with the rights of trans people and what constitutes hate speech, something I have written about before and will no doubt revisit again in the future.
But this week, we turn our attention firmly towards California. Silicon Valley, to be specific. Facebook dominated the headlines after having what must be the worst week in the company’s history. I think it is worth exploring some of the themes we’ve seen arise in that – chiefly, what role do we want social media companies to play in policing speech online? The truth is, we’ve not really defined what social media is nor have we defined its role in private and even public life. Going forward, we are going to have to decide as a society what social media is and how it should be treated. Are social media platforms such as Facebook a modern day agora – and therefore ought to be treated as a public utility, open to all – or are they private platforms with no obligation to allow unfiltered speech? I attempt to explore that theme below.
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Now onto the main event.
On Facebook…
Facebook has not had a good week. On Sunday night, whistleblower Frances Haugen went on CBS’ 60 Minutes to reveal just how damaging the social media company has become to everyone from kids to their grandparents in places as far apart as Washington and Xinjiang. Then on Monday, the site went down for a historically-long six hours, which just happened to coincide with Haugen testifying in front of Congress. Draw your own conclusions. The internet sure did.
I don’t want to rehash every accusation Haugen leveled at Facebook or its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. You can read that elsewhere or watch the clip above. Besides, I feel like Haugen didn’t really tell us anything new. We know that Facebook is responsible for the spread of misinformation and fake news. We know that it exacerbates social divisions and turns disagreements between individuals into full-blown feuds. We know that it poisons not only public discourse but personal relationships.
We know this because we’ve seen this data before, but also because we’ve all been on Facebook for long enough to see it happen to someone else or have it happen to us. We know it because we are sentient beings of the 21st century. In other words, while it is nice to have the proof Haugen provided, there is a bit of a “no shit, Sherlock” to her revelations.
One thing she did mention, though, felt worth exploring. Haugen told the world of how Facebook was developing an Instagram to be used by children despite evidence showing the platform made young girls insecure about their bodies. Facebook needs to do this, though, because its mother platform is increasingly seen as the product of a bygone era, an antiquated space full of parents and pensioners. As Helen Lewis wrote in the Atlantic, Facebook is less hip and more hip replacement:
According to the company’s own research, young people think Facebook is uncool. In a statement that will chill the heart of anyone who remembers cassette tapes and the original version of Baywatch, one 11-year-old boy told the company’s researchers: “Facebook is for old people—old as in 40.”
Ouch. I will try not to take that personally. It’s true, though, isn’t it? This has been the trajectory of Facebook for at least a decade. A 2009 article from Adweek reported that the fastest growing demographic of Facebook users was women over 55.
This tracks with my own recollection. We have seen social media companies come in and out of vogue before. I distinctly remember when Facebook first opened up to people who were not in college. There was certainly a sense of “there goes the neighborhood” among my friends and I. You know what? We were right. The neighborhood quickly went to hell.
I am something of a Facebook early adopter, joining the site in March 2005. I was a freshman in college, and everyone around me was so excited that our university had finally been added to this social network. I signed up mostly out of curiosity and being swept up in the zeitgeist; everyone around me was on Facebook, so I might as well be, too. One of my first thoughts was “this will never last.”
Hindsight is 20/20. But in 2005, thinking that people would quickly tire of Facebook was not as ludicrous as it sounds. I had seen websites come and go before. MySpace, an early competitor of Facebook that now few people under the age of 25 will have any experience with, did just that. I had no reason to believe Facebook would be any different.
My freshman year of high school, there was some drama created over online bullying on a website that allowed students to create polls for their schools. Some were as innocuous as “what’s the best lunch period?” but others toed the line (“who is more popular?”) and others were downright vicious; “is Kristen a slut?” is one that I distinctly remember. The administration had to eventually get involved.
This was 2001, a full three years before Facebook would launch at Harvard in a similar spirit; it’s easy to forget Zuck developed it as a way to rank hot students. While that polling site quickly faded into the annals of Internet history (I can’t even remember the name of it), 2001 was the year I officially developed an online presence, for better or for worse.
In the summer between my freshman and sophomore year I joined a website called Teen Open Diary. An early blogging platform, “TOD” as it was affectionately known by users allowed us to customize our own web presence. I spent hours upon hours learning HTML code to build out my diary homepage. I connected with people from across the country and around the world, some of whom I am still in contact with to this day. (Hi Asher! Hi Em! Hi Lexxi!)
I deleted my TOD when the administration at my high school got wind of it. Two girls I disliked and who disliked me learned that I had written about my dislike of them (including an offhand comment about how I would like to change their grades on a test for the class I work-studied) and went to the principal. There was a lot of personal information, not just about me but about other people in my life, contained in the pages of that diary. At the behest of a teacher who I’d written about (kindly, I should add), I deleted my diary.
xoxo,
Gossip Gay
Anyway. TOD itself would go the way of the dinosaurs some years later, unable to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, and especially MySpace – which always felt like its most direct descendant.
What does all of this have to do with Haugen’s testimony or the global reckoning with Facebook’s might? Well, it provides a glimmer of hope. As Helen Lewis relays in her piece, it is folks over the age of 65 most likely to share fake news on Facebook, and Gen Z – which doesn’t remember a world before social media – is much savvier than even us Millennials. They have a more acute understanding of the seedy underbelly of social media and the perils of posting, something Lewis says older kids often advise younger kids on.
This is heartening, because it means that in some ways the problems we currently face may someday just… go away. Facebook is not immortal, much as it seems so right now. Nor are its most ardent users.
It is easy to forget just how new all this technology is. I’m only 35, but I’m not a digital native; I can clearly remember the moment our family got our first computer. The truth is, I am – and chances are you are – a digital pioneer. My generation, and the one or two immediately before us, had to learn how to navigate the “information superhighway” (remember that term?) We came to this brave new world where there were no rules, which meant that we had to write them.
The problem is, we didn’t. We didn’t write any rules. There is very little formal etiquette surrounding the use of social media, as demonstrated by a viral story in this week’s New York Times Magazine. If you haven’t read #BadArtFriend yet, I won’t spoil anything. But the whole saga (and boy, is it that) started because a woman was upset her acquaintance didn’t like her Facebook post. I despair.
The Internet of the early 21st century is often compared to the Wild West of the late 19th century, a lawless place of endless freedom and limited consequences. The fact that anyone can say anything is part of what made those early days of social media so heady. It is certainly what drew me to TOD in 2001. But, as my classmate Kristen found out early on, it can be a nasty place that demonizes individuals to the point they are crying in the principal’s office.
Our failure to codify acceptable behavior and governing rules for the use of social media – not just as individuals on an interpersonal level, but as a society – is what has brought us here. One person’s acceptable use is another person’s grave insult. 20 years after I joined what I consider my first (albeit crude) social network, we still haven’t decided as a culture how these new tools should be used.
A big part of this is because we can’t decide on what, exactly, social media is. Should platforms like Facebook and Twitter function as modern day agoras, free speech zones where anything goes? If so, should they be considered a public space or utility, open to all regardless of how zany or offensive their beliefs?
Or – should social media companies be regulated like publishers and broadcast networks? Should there be constraints on what they can and cannot allow on their platforms? Should they be able to police their own content, or perhaps they should be regulated by the government?
To me, it is impossible to imagine that the federal government would or even could regulate social media in a constructive and fair way – as much as I might wish they would. And I stress might, because I am genuinely conflicted here.
On the one hand, I am something of a free speech purist. The idea of the government regulating what is said frightens me, in no small part because I have seen what a slippery slope that can be. I don’t want the US to develop UK-style hate-speech laws which get the cops called on a grandma who says something homophobic or see a woman sacked for asserting a belief that physiological sex is real and immutable – both things that have happened and that I have written about.
I’m not even sure how you would regulate social media, which transcends borders. Never mind that the US government all but gave up trying to regulate speech and the news decades ago. Since the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s, the airwaves have become a cesspool of hate and misinformation. The irony that Fox News turns 25 in the same week we are debating the role of Facebook in spreading hate and misinformation should not be lost.
This is not just an issue with social media. The scourge of “fake news” is the direct result of folks lacking critical thinking skills. The ability to discern between a credible source and an uncredible source is sorely lacking in many of our compatriots. While the problem is definitely with Facebook, it is also with us. And while Facebook has every reason not to fix the problem, we have every reason to fix it as quickly as possible.
As Haugen pointed out, Facebook has a huge profit motive to keep you outraged, as outraged people use its site more. So, it has every financial reason to keep you reading fake news. This problem isn’t exactly new – if you look at a lot of 19th century newspapers, particularly from the latter half of the century, you find that news reports were often exaggerated and sometimes even fabricated by unscrupulous editors looking to sell papers. As long as there is a profit motive in journalism, there will continue to be an impetus to sensationalize.
Part of the problem here is that we have never taught media literacy in American public schools, at least not that I am aware of. Maybe in the past it wasn’t such a big deal. Walter Cronkite spoon-fed you the news, and 20th century newspapers were much more reliable than their Gilded Age counterparts. But the lack of media literacy now is costing us dearly.
Folks don’t seem to understand how social media or the internet works. If a link looks credible, they take it at its word. And in some ways, you can’t blame them. Fake news websites look every bit as legitimate – sharp, well-designed, hyperlinked – as anything else.
Another problem I have noticed, and I think I am in a unique position to be aware of this, is that folks have a difficult time separating opinion from factual reporting. I’m an opinion writer, which means I am trying to convince you to think like me in virtually ever article I write. My pieces fall under the opinion section at The Independent, Newsweek, and others. Yet I get e-mails and comments from people all the time who saw them shared on social media and criticize me for being “biased,” as though they do not realize that is the whole point of my writing.
Fox News is in large part responsible for this. So is MSNBC, though to a lesser degree. Both of these networks have for years been buoyed by their opinion broadcasts – Tucker Carlson, Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity, Joy Reid – with little to make viewers aware that these anchors are, in fact, editorializing as opposed to simply reporting the facts. CNN is now getting in on this action to, letting Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo chime in with their opinions.
I am not going to begrudge anyone their right to speak their mind. I make a living speaking mine. But there is a reason I quit doing reported pieces (the last one I did was in February 2020), and that’s because I think blurring the lines between opinion and straight journalism has cost us too much as a society. Too many people simply do not have the skillset to differentiate between the two.
I do not think this is as much a problem with Millennials, and certainly not with Gen Z. The younger generations do seem better equipped at spotting fake news online than their parents and grandparents. They have a better understanding of the toxicity of social media and just how unreliable a place it is for information. The kids, it turns out, are alright. The problem is their parents.
Luckily for us, Facebook has been falling out of fashion with younger people since it opened itself up to everyone in 2006. The moment it ceased to limit its users to college, it lost its edge. It went from the secret online hideout of America’s youth to grandma’s house.
While grandma’s house might be familiar and even occasionally a comforting place to be, it is also the place where family arguments happen over a Sunday roast. With its landlines, boxy televisions, and antique rocking chairs has the musty decrepitude of obsolescence. Bad news for grandma, good news for democracy.
I have only begun to touch the tip of the iceberg of problems Facebook and social media more generally present to life in the 21st century. How do you address Facebook’s use in espionage (spying on Uyghurs for example)? I don’t know. But I would caution against overcorrecting, because government controls on what can and cannot be said have historically been bad for most people – certainly bad for the working-class, and especially bad for leftists.
Besides, the problem with Facebook could sort itself out through the natural order of things. It is impossible to imagine the world without it now, but it is not impossible to imagine the world without it in 20 years. It is also not impossible to imagine a world in which Facebook survives, but its users become savvier as the older generations die out and are replaced with Gen Z and whoever comes after them – folks for whom this new technology is not new at all.
On growing older…
As mentioned above, I’m 35. Not old. But not exactly young, either.
Reading about how kids these days don’t use Facebook got me thinking about aging. Perhaps because I am unmarried and have no children, I find myself uncomfortable ceding the ground of “the next generation” to Gen Z. It inspires a grotesque fear in me, an unshakable reminder of my own mortality and the things I have not accomplished. But it’s also… kind of nice.
My life at 35 is infinitely better than my life at 25 was. I’m 100 pounds heavier, but that doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. I care much less about what others think about me. When did that happen? Hard to say. Around the time I stopped drinking, I reckon. Or quit my nine-to-five office job. Not coincidentally, those things happened within months of one another.
Last night, I submitted my application to grad school. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I keep thinking of what it is going to feel like walking onto a college campus as a student for the first time in more than a decade. I keep seeing that meme with Steve Buscemi in a high school and hearing “I Wish I Could Go Back to College” from Avenue Q in my head:
If I were to go back to college
Think what a loser I’d be
I’d walk through the quad and think “oh my God”
These kids are so much younger than me
It doesn’t help that I am living at home with my grandparents who, keep in mind, are like another set of parents to me and whom I lived with in high school while I’m applying for college and preparing to move out. The other night I was laying in bed reading gossip about Britney Spears and watching Friends. It could have been 2003 again. Children born in 2003, by the way? Yeah, they can vote now.
Realizing that you are growing older and that you are no longer the youngest in the room is not a phenomenon unique to Millennials. Every generation goes through this transition, and every individual lucky enough to age finds themselves occasionally wistful with nostalgia or longing for their glory days. It’s why my grandfather, aged 80, likes to drive back in the mountains to where his childhood cabin stood. It’s why the Judds asked their grandpa to tell them ‘bout the good ole days. It is why we’re on our second version of The Wonder Years.
Millennials are, however, the first generation to do it so publicly and so frequently. You can’t click on Buzzfeed without seeing a listicle of ‘90s nostalgia, and now those lists are starting to focus on the ‘00s. The horror.
And then there is Facebook, which never misses an opportunity to show me what I was doing ten, twelve, fifteen years ago. Each time I see a Facebook memory it feels like it is taunting me, reminding me of the person I was and that I have not become the person I thought I would. “You still haven’t moved to England? What a loser.”
That doesn’t mean that I dislike the person I am – as I said, I like myself a lot more at 35 than I did at 25 – but it does mean constantly being reminded that you are no longer in the bloom of youth. That you didn’t live up to the high expectations of your idealistic younger self. That you are, by many measures, a failure.
I don’t feel like a failure. Au contraire, I am more optimistic about my future than I have been since at least 2010. But let’s be frank here: things have not turned out as planned for me or for my generation.
I often feel as though older family members, especially, do not understand. My grandfather, especially, seems to struggle to understand this. He will, on occasion, mention that maybe I should look for a job in Knoxville or go back to working at “the bank.” He talks about when I finally go to an office or out to work, not realizing that all that time I spend in the basement isn’t just spent playing solitaire. I have a paying job. It just doesn’t look like what a job looked like to his generation. But it feels like he, and many other older relatives, look at me and think “at 35 I was married with three kids and a full-time job, what’s his problem?”
That stings in a way I think a lot of Millennials can relate to. As a generation, we are putting off marriage and children until later in life, we aren’t buying houses like our parents did, and we have less stability in our work life. Because of these things, our parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles often think of us as stunted. They don’t see us as adults because they do not understand that the world around us has changed, and that what it means to be 35 in 2021 is not what it meant to be 35 in 1991.
I found less judgment on this front living in Chicago than I do living back in Appalachia, probably because many people in the city are single well into their 30s. Kacey Musgraves was not far off the mark when she sang “if you don’t have two kids by 21 you’re probably gonna die alone.” In these small towns, it can feel that way.
The milestones older generations celebrated are not milestones I have encountered. I have no husband. No kids. No house. It sometimes feels like I’m stuck in this weird position where I know I’m technically and legally an adult, but I don’t feel like an adult.
Yet I am also incredibly aware I am not a young person anymore. I don’t use TikTok. I never understood SnapChat. I only vaguely understand what a VSCO girl and e-boy are. Don’t even ask me about Billie Eilish. I think she’s weird, but apparently, she is crazy talented. I don’t get her. But then, I’m really not her target audience.
Part of growing older means being comfortable in your ignorance. I don’t really care to “get” Billie Eilish. I’m comfortable applauding her for doing her own thing and doing it very successfully and then listening to Adele. Gen Z can keep their VSCO clothes. I will always have Abercrombie. (Is VSCO a brand or a lifestyle? Unclear.)
There is a sadness in this too, though. Usually, when you grow older, you have more financial security, a family, nice things. My generation has student loan debt and the gig economy.
It’ll be interesting to see how Millennials, myself included, redefine middle-age as we come upon it. I say it that way because my grandmother is always adamant that I am not middle-aged, although I have always thought of 35 as middle-aged and feel fairly comfortable wearing that label. Whatever I am, there is no denying I am not “the youth” anymore.
What I’ve been up to…
I wrote about the 25th anniversary of Fox News for The Independent. This was an interesting piece to work on, as it involved digging deep into the annals of Internet news to find contemporary reports about Fox in its infancy. We often think about Fox News being a product of the Tea Party-cum-Trump era, but in reality it has been spewing right-wing vitriol and lies from the very beginning. The hate Tucker Carlson gives? It’s a feature, not a bug.
I wrote a piece commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire for Mental Floss. This was a lot of fun to write. I always enjoy putting that history degree to use. Plus, I love Chicago. I miss Chicago. A lot.
I had my first week as a contributing editor at 100 Days in Appalachia. It was mostly Zoom meetings and onboarding this week, but my first edition of the newsletter will go out on Tuesday so be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already!
What I’ve been reading…
I mentioned this earlier, but I read “Bad Art Friend” in the New York Times Magazine. I don’t even know what to say about it. If you have an hour – it’s 10,000+ words – you might want to read it though. Just when you think you’ve pegged the villain, you change your mind.
There was an article at The Cut by the first woman to rush Sigma Phi Epsilon at Yale. Their “Sig Ep” chapter disaffiliated to allow her to pledge, as I believe Yale banned sex-segregated clubs and societies. I have mixed feelings on this. I think if you want to do away with exclusive organizations which perpetuate privilege and elite social closure you should go whole-hog and abolish them, not just integrate a few women into them. But I also think the problem there isn’t fraternities and sororities, it is the Ivy League. This doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate reasons to want to abolish fraternities and sororities, but I’m not sure this is one of them. Unless they worked for nationals, I’ve never known anyone who got a job because of their Greek affiliation. I have known a lot of people who should not have their jobs but got them because they went to Harvard or Yale.
Carly Pearce is one of the most exciting acts in country music right now, so it was very nice to read this essay on her latest album and why she’s so damn good at what she does. If you haven’t listened to Carly, please do. (I’ll put one of her songs below.) There are a lot of great female acts in country music right now, but they are not getting the airplay their male counterparts get. This is not new – I’ve wrote about this last year – but please, if you like country, turn off the radio and listen to some of the fantastic women making the most relevant music of our age.
This story about a hamster that is better at the stock market than Warren Buffet will make you question capitalism. Unless you’re like me and already realized capitalism is a failed system. Then it will just make you wanly chuckle.
What I’ve been listening to…
Carly Pearce’s “What He Didn’t Do” is fantastic. Give it a listen
Obsession of the week…
Generic brands that outperform name brands. I love a bargain, so when I found the Vivian Tries YouTube Channel, I immediately became obsessed. The premise is simple: this woman called Vivian tries different products from the Dollar Tree, Walmart, and so on to see if they stack up to name brand versions. Oftentimes, they do. Here’s an example
A picture of the puppy…