Argue, refute, debate

Editorial

Last week, a court in France ordered the social media platform Twitter to identify people who had anonymously posted racist and antisemitic comments. Twitter, apparently, has not determined yet whether to abide by the court’s order. This is one of many legal and philosophical challenges society faces in a wired world.

Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are based in the United States, which has very liberal laws on free expression, and these companies face conundrums when things that are posted on their platform contravene the laws of other countries. It might be one thing for France, a democracy and an ally and friend of the United States, to ask for names of users. What if it were Cuba or Iran asking?

Much has been written and said about the power of the Internet to connect disparate individuals and groups, as well as to encourage individuals, emboldened by anonymity, to express things they likely would suppress in a “real time” environment. This topic resonates with the Jewish community because, for reasons that we need not rehash here, the sorts of people who engage in uncivil dialogue seem disproportionately inclined to bring the conversation around, at some point, to Jewish people and topics. A cursory review of readers’ comments at the bottom of news articles even in “legitimate” online media outlets demonstrates how quickly a reasonable discussion can devolve into an antisemitic tirade.

While it was once possible to deadbolt a printing press or shackle the doors of a newspaper, new technology makes this sort of forceful censorship impossible. Certainly, we can bring alleged offenders before the courts or a network of tribunals, but what, ultimately, is served? One response would be to say that, as a society, we have these laws and limitations in order to express our revulsion at ideas that are intended to harm or persecute others. But we should have a more proactive approach to these issues. As individuals, we should be standing up and confronting these ideas – and, in fact, we are: online. While the Internet has made it possible for millions of people to express their intolerance and bigotry, it has also proved a heartening venue for refuting those very ideas. True, the dialogue is not always of the highest calibre. But the Internet is the agora of our time and it is where ideas are expressed, condoned or rejected.

Few would argue against trying to track down, using the Internet and every other means, people who may legitimately be preparing to harm individuals or groups. Counterterrorism has benefited immensely from the ability to uncover plots and track individuals based on online activity. When life or limb is at risk, the justification for policing the Internet makes sense. But how far should we go to identify and prosecute people who express offensive ideas, but do not demonstrate likelihood of violence?

The nature of the Internet makes the policing of expression on it effectively futile. It is possible to permit most everything (as in America) and to silence everything or almost everything (as in China and North Korea); it is extremely difficult to do anything in between.

In a democracy, the government, ultimately, is just us. While we can certainly understand the argument that governments have a role in making sure that individuals and groups are not targeted for intolerance, it remains a better approach to take a “citizenship” strategy on this issue. Individuals, not the collective, are the ones who should be standing up to intolerance.

When a French Twitterer besmirches the Jewish people, the logical response is not for the government, in the form of the judiciary, to jump on the micro-blogging venue and force it to identify the offender. For comparatively run-of-the-mill prejudice and bigotry, the answer is to Tweet the heck back. Indeed, when a Vancouver Island woman last week engaged in an argument with some young Jewish Twitterers, she made the observation that, if the Jews of the 1930s were like the Jews she found disagreeable on Twitter, she can understand why Germans perpetrated the Holocaust. The recipients of this message did not call the police or seek out a human rights tribunal. They did what should be done: they shone a bright light on her despicable ideas and highlighted her despicable ideas in the online community where she operates.

In the end, even for those who advocate censorship, it ceases to be an issue of what we should do and becomes instead an issue of what we can do. In an era of technological wonder, the only feasible response to ideas and statements we find reprehensible – the response that the Jewish Independent has always favored to such notions – is the most Jewish response of all: argue, refute, debate.

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