Pondering Platforming

 A controversy broke out on social media this weekend: Taylor Lorenz interviewed the (or one of the) truly horrible people behind the far right Libs of Tiktok account.  It raised questions of whether one should platform the truly awful.  I have been thinking of platforming such for awhile  now, so I am using this as an opportunity to think through my stance (which is not at all based on a strong standing of the legalities of all of this).

Let's start with the basics that people get so very confused about:

1. No one is entitled to a platform, everyone is entitled to free speech.
2. To be clear, when we talk about free speech, we need to be clear that the 1st amendment in the US (and probably the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada) only restricts governments from restricting people's right to engage in free speech.  Clubs and, yes, businesses can restrict the speech of their members/employees in ways that the state cannot. 
3. Free speech does have some restrictions--the classic is you can't yell fire as a prank in a crowded theater as that is dangerous.  Inciting violence is also not so free, although your mileage may vary on what counts as incitement.  Is "Free Palestine" incitement? I don't think so. 
   

Now, that whole platform is not the same thing as free speech thing. One is not obligated to give time/space/bandwidth/whatever to anyone (in ye olde days, US tv stations had to give equal time, and when it went away, that gave room for Fox and its ilk).  Universities, for example, don't have to provide stages and fora and audiences to far right speakers or even not so far right speakers.  Or far left ones. 

In an op-ed, I argued that the Conservative Party of Canada should not provide a prominent speaking position to a far-right retired general as that would politicize the Canadian armed forces.*  Of course, the supposedly cancelled retired general then used his perch at the National Post, a right wing newspaper, to argue that I was trying to deny him free speech.  Nope, I didn't say he couldn't rant in public, I was just arguing it was a bad idea for the CPC to amplify him.  He is entitled to say what he wants, he is not entitled to having his speech amplified.  There is a distinction here, and he is smart enough to get it, even if wants to play coy about how a dual citizen might dare to question him.

So, the question is rarely whether to deny someone free expression (although when it comes to jury tampering or inciting violence, gag orders on the Trump family seem to be not only fair but wise), but rather who to platform and under what conditions.  Obviously, the starting point is the intention of the potential actor that might be platforming someone.  The example of the CPC: they wanted to attack the government and found a handy tool that might make it look like they presenting mainstream military views that contradict the government.  Yeah, tis bad faith bullshit, but they had that intent so they didn't care what the downstream effects will be on the military.

The example of this weekend is a lot different: it is not just giving space for a hater to speak at length, but providing a critical interview where the interviewer pushes back and gets the hater to be revealed as shallow, incoherent, virulently racist and xenophobic.  To be honest, I haven't watched the entire thing because, well, yuck.  I am online enough (understatement) to know what Libs of Tiktok have been doing--inciting violence against Black Americans first and now LGBTQ+ folks. That the account deliberately names individuals so that its followers can then threaten those people.  Truly, truly awful.  But folks who are not so online may not be aware of this, so a WashPo reporter doing an extended interview with the source of all this hate is a good way to expose what's going on.  People can disagree about whether we need to hear from the source directly, but this is not platforming in the sense of giving someone a megaphone and letting them spread their views.  Recently, the governor of Oklahoma gave this far right white nationalist a position on the state's library advisory council.  That is giving someone a platform.  And then a non-binary kid gets killed, and the governor then acts all shocked.  

Anyhow, sometimes these decisions are tricky because we want to expose awful people, but we don't want to provide awful people with greater audiences.  Folks might argue that we need the marketplace of ideas to sort this out, but like most markets and most invocations of the market metaphor, it really doesn't work like the metaphor. Ideas do not win or lose based on the quality of their debaters or the quality of the ideas themselves.  They win or lose based on what people do and who has the power.  That a far right white supremacist owns and controls twitter is a real problem that cannot be sorted out by everyone sharing their competing ideas online.  Musk is platforming far right racist and xenophobic stuff, and he is blocking stuff that is critical.  Suspending Navalny's wife a day or two after his death is a real tell.  

Ultimately, journalists and organizations have to be prudent about who they give platforms and who they do not.  Again, no one is entitled to the front page or the editorial page or the university's biggest stage. Every decision to give someone a platform is just that a decision, which should be based on the benefits and the costs.  Academic freedom suggests giving space to a wide range of views, but there is no need to bring back that which has been thoroughly discredited--like flat earthers or those who buy into eugenic stuff or bell curves and IQ tests or antivaxxers.

And, yes, we live in a time where Democracy is under threat. Which is a bigger danger: giving anti-democratic forces the megaphone or denying them platforms and then having those forces try to make those institutions feel bad for being hypocritical?  The bad faith actors want to use our values against ourselves.  It can be tricky about how to respond but respond we must.  

So, that's my incoherent rambling on this topic.  You are required to read it, to respond, or to share it via social media.

* I realize that folks can argue whether Maisonneuve is right wing or far right, but my coding rule these days if one uses "woke" disparagingly and essentially slurs those who are not cis straight folks, they are far right. If right wing folks want to say that is not fair, that those are mainstream views of the right, well, they are telling on themselves about where they are. 

Democratic Backsliding and the US: A West Coast Roundtable

 Yesterday, I was part of a roundtable held by Simon Fraser University, which is located in Vancouver, on the erosion of democracy with a focus on the US.  I was joined by Jean Lachapelle of the University of of Gothenburg and Dietlind Stolle of McGill.  Dietlind and I started at McGill at the same time so it was nice to hang with her.  I live tweeted the event, but I wanted to summarize what they said and what I said here.

Jean is part of the V-Dem project, which measures democracy around the world.  He showed a variety of trends, including how the US's score has been in decline after rising in the 1960s and 1970's.  He focused on the role of parties and polarization.  That backsliding happens when major parties act to undermine democracy.  He was generalizing from a variety of places, like Hungary, but it very much spoke to the US case.  Indeed, in the various figures, the US tended to be closer to Hungary, Brazil, and the like than to democracies to whom we would prefer to be compared.  And then when he focused on parties, the GOP ended up being quite close to Hungary's Fidesz, to India's Hindu Nationalist Party [BJP], and the like.  The Dems moved a smidge, but in most figures stayed on the pluralist, democratic end of the spectrum.  Which meant that the US story is one of asymmetric polarization--that the GOP went nuts and the Dems have not.

Dietlind is a specialist on attitudes, so she discussed survey results of where Americans stand on the issues of democratic backsliding, particularly executive aggrandizement.  She showed that Republicans are generally more supportive of executive aggrandizement than Democrats. She discussed how the generally higher support by Republicans also stands out comparatively and is in part due to elite mobilization (aka Trump). She also showed that Dems support democratic backsliding as well, but only when an important policy is at stake (e.g. abortion, or lockdown). 

What did I say?  Well, here are my slides:

I started by noting that the backsliding of most democracies has not been caused by their armed forces.  There have not been coups in most of the cases that we are discussing: US, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, India, etc.  Turkey is the exception to be discussed below.
I, of course, discussed that the events on Jan 6 were not a coup--that individuals from the US military participated but not elements of the military itself.

I then discussed the bad: that if we like our militaries, we can't hope for them to save us.  That militaries can't stop the backsliding since the backsliding is due to the stuff happening within and between parties.  Nicely connects with Jean's arguments.  Asking the military to help is actually bad.  I did note that coup attempts can make things worse, as the Turkish example illustrates.

I then discussed the erosion of the norms of civil-military relations, which referred to the appointments of retired generals as SecDefs, Trump referring to his generals, and Trump politicizing the military by having partisan speeches with military folks as the backdrop.  I pointed out that the real troubling thing regarding the military and Jan 6th is it has helped to remind us how white supremacist organizations are infiltrating the armed forces and the role of vets in far right terrorist organizations.  Plus how everyone wants to dress up like Special Operations folks.

I then had to conclude with a Star Wars reference

But that was not the end, as we had a good q&a.  Since I basically argued that my topic, civ-mil, was not so relevant, I made myself obsolete.  But did that stop me from talking?  Hells no.  When we were asked about where US asymmetric polarization came from, I discussed how it was a GOP-led thing from Gingrich to McConnell with a soupcon of bottom up (sort of) tea party along the way.  I did rant a bit about the asymmetry and the temptation by the media to run their false equivalence machines.  That the Dems want to expand the franchise and the GOP wants to limit it, and the latter is obviously the anti-democratic move.  As I have said before, #voterfraudfraud is an abomination. 

 

 

 

 

Fighting #VoterFraudFraud

As I am that the International Studies Association meeting, inspiration strikes in all kinds of strange ways.  In discussing Trump and Sessions and the potential end of American democracy, I realized that there is stuff that can be done to fight #voterfraudfraud--the effort to suppress likely Democratic voters (minorities, students, etc).

Of course, the best course of action are legal strategies to get these laws tossed out.  But that takes much time and often happens too late, so that likely Dem voters are discouraged.  What we need to do is support efforts to get people the ID's needed to register to vote--which can be driver's licenses, fishing or hunting permits, gun permits, passport, etc.

The first step, besides fundraising and organization, is to identify what ID's are needed in each state and figure out for each state:

• which ID is the easiest to get (requires the least paperwork, requires no or easy visit to get, etc)
• which ID is the cheapest to get
• which ID does not need to get renewed or does not have to be renewed frequently.

The second step is to help potentially disenfranchised voters whichever ID makes the most sense in terms of cost, difficulty and length of renewal.  If it means getting heaps of people gun permits rather than passports or driver's licenses or whatever, then do it.

The third step is to make voting more pleasant in an environment where it is more difficult.  The GOP have realized that early voting is a problem for them, so they have eliminated some of it, especially those days when African-Americans tend to vote (Sundays).  This creates huge lines on election days, so resistance organizations should try to provide water/food/umbrellas/folding chairs, and whatever else to make it easier to stand on line for hours.  Perhaps music and entertainment or whatever. 


Get out the Vote Efforts happen just before elections, when it is too late to get people the ID they need to register, to vote.  We need to make an effort now to get people the ID's they need so that they can register and then get to vote, and then we need to make voting less painful despite the best efforts of the GOP to make it inconvenient.  Sure, if we can, get laws passed to extend early voting, make it possible or easier to mail in one's vote and all that.  But if we can't make election days holidays and if we can't legislate our way through this in states dominated by GOP, then make it easier to vote.