Sympathy for the Devil

This New York Times story about the parents of Noah Pozner, who was murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre, is horrific.

In the five years since Noah Pozner was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., death threats and online harassment have forced his parents, Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, to relocate seven times. They now live in a high-security community hundreds of miles from where their 6-year-old is buried.

“I would love to go see my son’s grave and I don’t get to do that, but we made the right decision,” Ms. De La Rosa said in a recent interview. Each time they have moved, online fabulists stalking the family have published their whereabouts.

Inevitably, Donald Trump believes that the man responsible for this horror, the snake-oil salesman and human stain Alex Jones, is “amazing“. His channels do big numbers for YouTube and Facebook.

Jones and other demons hide behind the right to free speech, which is enshrined in US law. In our social media age US law is global: the likes of Facebook and Twitter are US companies who take a US approach to the content they publish.

Whether by accident or design, that means they’ve become platforms for some of the worst people on the planet. I think it’s by design, because Facebook and Twitter do make editorial choices. Facebook won’t let you upload a photo of a woman breastfeeding. Twitter won’t let you use the name Elon Musk in your Twitter handle.

That’s beyond the pale. Holocaust denial, targeted attacking of women and minorities, inciting racial hatred, rape and death threats… that’s all fine, it seems. On Twitter, right-wing armies relentlessly attack people without consequence; the people they assault are the ones who often end up banned.

The supposed right to online free speech is starting to resemble the US right to bear arms: something that’s been perverted and used to cause untold misery. What scares me is that we’ve only scratched the surface of its malign power.


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