It took public outrage to get Facebook to back off its decision to allow video of a beheading to appear on its pages; and users still fight to get images of animal torture and pages promoting similar depravities off the site. But according to this article from Queerty.com, over 100 users were barred from access for posting a photo of two men kissing. Not two naked men having sex. Just two men kissing. The author of the article, Matthew Tharrett suggests that it’s all too easy for Facebook users who find homosexuality offensive to label such depictions of garden-variety romance between GLTB partners as “violating community standards.”
While Facebook may not be directly condoning the mistreatment of homosexuals, it certainly seems the company is going to need a better system if it is to remain relevant in, y’know, this century. One minute, these companies want the Internet to be a free-for-all of vitriol, misogyny, and plagiarism on the grounds that it’s all free speech. The next minute, this kind of thing happens, and one has to wonder. And to what lengths are these users going to suss out these images they find so offensive? I know there’s plenty on Facebook that would offend me, but I don’t see it because I’m not friends with people who would post it. Duh.
Of course, if the story isn’t true, I apologize in advance. After all, I got it from the Internet.
It turns out this is Free Speech Week, although I doubt this fact had anything to do with the timing of Facebook’s recent dustup over its decision to allow videos of beheadings on its pages. On Monday, it was reported that executives at Facebook had decided to lift a previously imposed ban on sharing videos that depict actual beheadings committed by terrorists and gangsters. The company almost immediately reversed this decision in response to what appears to have been universal revulsion by users. Of course, our disgust doesn’t mean sharing these videos is not a matter of free speech, but neither is it a First Amendment issue simply because Facebook says it is. Regardless, the story raises some of the cultural and/or legal questions inherent in our relationship to social media, so it’s an interesting topic after we all agree that almost none of us wishes to see, let alone have our kids stumble upon, a video of someone being decapitated.
The first question it seems we grapple with is whether the company that owns a site like Facebook does or does not bear responsibility for the content we users post on its walls. In principle, if the site establishes any rules governing content at all — and they wouldn’t get far in most countries if they didn’t — then the very existence of said rules implies responsibility. Facebook, for instance, does not allow nudity to be posted, and the reason is obvious; there are simply too many ways to run afoul of existing laws pertaining to obscenity or to sexuality and minors. Every teenager posting a naked selfie would be a legal entanglement for the company. Yet, it’s easy to wonder why it matters when minors are a mouseclick away from being exposed to every kind of pornography outside the walled garden of Facebook. While executives at the company are not entirely wrong that protecting kids from exposure to horrific images is a job for parents, our voluntary presence and activity on the site is a bit like entering a shopping mall where the landlords are allowed to turn our interaction into revenue. As such, it isn’t really public space. If I put a bunch of violently offensive posters on the walls in my local shopping center, I could be arrested; but the mall owners could easily be sued if they chose to leave the posters up on the grounds that I was exercising my right of free expression. This argument would never fly in physical space, and it doesn’t appear to work so well in virtual space either.
The attitude of most site owners tends toward a laissez faire approach to content shared or created by users; and this is legitimately understandable given the slippery nature of trying to define protected vs. restricted speech. Still, I suspect the primary motivations are financial rather than ideological. When one is in the business of monetizing traffic, it’s simply easier not to care what drives that traffic. But when thousands or millions of users dog-pile onto some content or activity that is truly depraved, we do have to decide whether we’re okay with allowing the walled gardens of social media to become new Coliseums of grotesque spectacle. From anecdotal observation, it seems most users are not okay with this and that they do want to hold site owners accountable. When Caroline Criado-Perez campaigned in the U.K. for Jane Austen to appear on British bank notes, she received a deluge of death and rape threats via Twitter. The company was ultimately forced to respond to public demand for greater capacity to report and mitigate abuses through the social network.
With regard to the decapitation videos, Facebook tried to play the pubic service card, claiming that people were sharing a particular beheading video “in order to condemn it, but one must ask to what end? So we can put those pro-beheading folks in their place? There is a persistent conceit that the Internet brings us realities from around the world that traditional news media does not deliver and that we are thus able to confront hard truths head-on and address them. Sometimes, this is the case, but often it’s just bullshit. Nothing, for example, will happen as a result of 20,000 or 200,000 people watching a video of a gangster or a terrorist beheading someone except that a majority of viewers will wish they hadn’t seen it, and a small number of viewers will anesthetize their senses to a medieval form of murder. What possible social value would Facebook’s perhaps-too-insulated executives imagine coming from allowing these videos? What is anyone meant to learn that would manifest as some action we might take? Absent a good answer to those questions, one must conclude that the motivation is spectacle itself.
Certainly I believe free speech is the most sacred right to be preserved in a free society, and in order to protect this right, most of us understand that we must defend it absolutely even for expressions we find offensive. It seems, however, that those who presume to lead in the digital age would expand this principle to include all transactions made through these technologies, even when there is technically no speaker and nothing being said. This is perhaps a byproduct of labeling all user-provided substance with the generic content. A rape-threat tweet or a poem are the same thing, measured only by the attention they attract. It is comforting to see that plenty of so-called users have not quite bought this rationale. So, Happy Free Speech Week!
I’m probably about to anger a few friends, but I’ll state at the outset that of all the things I’m concerned about in this world (and there are many), the PRISM program doesn’t even get on my radar. No, I do not think Ed Snowden is a particularly heroic whistleblower, and I am not alone in that belief, but bear with me, and let me first offer a bit of context as to why this story is exactly the kind of digital-age phenomenon that inspired this blog.
The seeds of The Illusion of More were planted amid the brouhaha over the SOPA/PIPA bills while observing the unprecedented role of social media on our political process. Even if I hadn’t supported those bills, I considered the mechanics and the tone of the reaction against them to be a truly dysfunctional combination of hysteria, ignorance, lazy journalism, and corporate manipulation. As a result, I began paying closer attention to my own habits and biases as well as those of my friends, realizing that even we GenXers who finished college before the internet went public seemed to be abandoning many basic rules of reasoning for the sake of sharing news fragments and incendiary headlines. And even if one does click on a shared article, for example, the quality of so much reportage has been degraded by the expansion of media itself to the extent that even traditional news organizations now source one another and work hardest to capture traffic and cover the meta story rather than soberly investigate the crux of the matter. Then, we add political and vested interests and individual biases, and I began to wonder if this tool that is supposed to foster a better informed electorate wasn’t having exactly the opposite effect.
The seminal moment for me happened the day one of my smartest friends shared a viral story about why a particular senator voted against a bill for which he had in fact voted “Aye.” It doesn’t get more basic than Yes v No, and it was while discussing these phenomena with my friend, political operative Cormac Flynn, that I first used the expression “illusion of more” to describe the paradox in which more access seemed to be making people less well-informed.
One of the problems with viral, emotional stories is that they create an instantaneous bandwagon of apparent consensus which, in turn, creates social pressure in an environment like Facebook to either be on or off said bandwagon even before there is time to seek out a voice from among the ever-shrinking population of reflective and experienced professionals. In fact, voices like Thomas Friedman, Michael Moynihan, David Brooks, and Alan Dershowitz do offer sensible recommendations to tone down the hysteria over Prism in favor of a conversation that includes the recognition that counter-terrorism intelligence gathering is not some bogeyman invented by “the government” in order to create an authoritarian state.
It is as though all those Americans running out to buy copies of 1984 forgot that 9/11 ever happened, and I agree with Friedman, who writes, “If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: ‘Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.’ That is what I fear most.” In short, if we maintain a constant witch hunt against even the legitimate actions of our national security forces, we risk bringing about conditions that would foster real, rather than theoretical, threats to civil liberty.
Consider the typically brief interval between Ed Snowden revealing his identity and TV news polls asking Is he a hero or a traitor? This side-show makes great filler and creates synergy between social media and broadcasting, but it is an utterly useless distraction from the very question it pretends to be asking. General consensus had already formed across the political spectrum, long before we ever heard of Mr. Snowden, that all things government are bad and, thus, all so-called whistleblowers are presumed altruistic.
Social media has aggravated this oversimplified bias, and it is one we cling to at our peril, if we consider its larger implications. While oversight is an essential, and believe it or not still extant, component of the American system, a universal and unwavering distrust in “the government” is tantamount to distrust in one another, and this is the cancer that grows into a malignant threat to civil liberty. “The government” still comprises millions of fellow citizens who are as diverse, as well-intentioned, or as flawed as those of us who are not “the government.” But if one automatically judges a story like the Snowden leak through the “government bad” filter, there is no way to come to any conclusion other than the one already assumed. Thus, we cannot rationally determine whether Edward Snowden is really warning us about something sinister.
On the subject of privacy, I’m hardly the only person to mention that through social media and GPS enabled phones, we already volunteer more information about our lives than the NSA could want or possibly find of any practical use. So, watching friends and colleagues use Facebook and Twitter to share their fears about the government listening to our calls and reading our emails is satire that ought to be self-explanatory. Or as humorist Andy Borowitz put it: “Man with 9,000 photos on Facebook angry over government spying.”
In all seriousness, I do wonder if the indignation over Prism is not only overwrought but functionally obsolete since we chose to give up privacy at least a decade ago. Moreover, if you might agree that universal distrust in “government” implies a distrust in one another, then how do we reconcile the dichotomy of social media? Why do I trust that none of my 400+ “Friends” will not use the information I share to cause me harm, and by the same token, why should I assume that my friend at the FBI will misuse someone’s information? To be blunt, if everyone is really worried, why don’t we see a mass abandonment of social media?
Don’t get me wrong. I assume my life is a potentially open book in the digital age, but when considering my personal level of concern vis-a-vis government abuse, the calculus goes something like this: take the information we already share voluntarily, which is considerable; add (if you want) the information we believe to be private; divide that total by the vast but still limited analytic capacity of intelligence services; then factor for the reality that most analysts really are looking for specific needles in the haystack; and the answer is probably such a small increase in actual surveillance of concern that I wonder if we have measurably tipped the scale away from the value of liberty.
Is Prism really a major increase in substantive invasion of privacy, or is the program more like the cops and soldiers we see at the train station, who are indeed seeing all of us but by are by no means interested in all of us? Within the intelligence services, relevant and contextual analysis would have to be dramatically outpaced by the rate of data collection, and it’s a given that most of the data are meaningless, dynamic, and rapidly obsolete.
Thus, if Occam’s Razor is our divining rod, then the government’s statement that the NSA is not listening to our phone calls or reading our emails, is actually the most rational conclusion. The explanation from the Obama administration really is the one that makes the most sense — that what’s being gathered is metadata for the purposes of pattern detection, which is both legally and technologically a very different animal from mining the content of a phone call or an email.
Of course, in the video segment on The Guardian, Ed Snowden describes a system in which all our data are gathered, analyzed (although he doesn’t define how it’s analyzed), and stored in such a way that it can be used at some point in the future against any one of us. This raises two natural fears we might describe as the cockroach and The Crucible.* In Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, a cockroach falls into the machinery at the Ministry of Information and changes the printed name of a wanted man by one letter; and this absurd error sets the plot in motion when the innocent man is summarily abducted, tortured, and murdered by the faceless authority. And, of course, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible dramatizes how the motivation of personal vendetta can maliciously abuse state authority to destroy a fellow citizen. These fears are very real and continue to be borne out every day and in most societies, but does a program like Prism increase the likelihood of either the cockroach or The Crucible, or is it being blown out of proportion and shattering some lingering illusion of privacy to which some of us still cling?
As this story unfolds, and each opportunist makes hay while Snowden’s sun shines, I seriously advocate settling down on the rhetoric that a program like Prism moves America closer to authoritarian rule. It’s true that, in theory, a government agency can spy on everyone (think China), but how effectively this translates into authoritarianism depends on factors other than the intelligence apparatus being employed.
In the U.S. for instance, I tend to have faith in our love of social chaos as a humanistic buffer against authoritarian rule. We Americans have been openly cussing and spitting at one another from Day One, and our lack of a common culture is good for democratic health the same way cross breeding is good for genetic health. To have an authoritarian state requires that a substantial segment of a given population have faith in the authority, and this usually depends upon something cultural like religion, race, or tribe. And while we do have those types who would define what it means to be a “real American,” it’s worth remembering that most of us are still mutts, and this includes those inside the defense and intelligence communities, the halls of Congress, and the White House.
I was no fan of George W. Bush, primarily because I considered him to be incurious about the complexities of the world, and his famous decisiveness is a tragic flaw when it is not tempered by contemplation. Still, during his last press conference, he was asked about some of the programs started under his administration and the promise by Obama to change directions. Bush essentially said, “I wish him luck,” which was both sincere and sardonic. And I remember thinking in that moment that no matter who the president is, he or she will get a security briefing that very few people in the world ever see. And I wondered then if some of Obama’s more idealistic promises of transparency might come back to haunt him once he was privy to more of the complexities of the global security landscape. We can choose to pretend otherwise, but cyberspace is without question a new battlefield just as it is a new social sphere. I think it’s right that we debate matters of security in telecommunications, but we cannot have an effective debate based on the premise that nobody in the entire apparatus of our elected government knows anything every time one guy blows a whistle.
*ADDENDUM: In this story by Gail Collins, we find a perfect example of the cockroach in the story of the wrongful incarceration of Brandon Mayfield.
The Illusion of More is my personal blog from December 2011 to December 2025. As of February 2026, I am no longer posting new blogs or other content, but I hope you enjoy this archive. Please do not attribute any of my writings here to my current or previous employers.
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