Recently, a few residents of Promontory Park City upset with contributions by its founder to organizations critical of Israel’s government sent me an article listing them in a rightwing publication, apparently shocked anyone could doubt Israel these days.
F. Francis Najafi, an Iranian-American, supports a progressive publication, Jewish Currents, which frequently criticizes Israel; a couple of think tanks opposed to war in the Middle East; and more controversially, the National Iranian American Council, which some have seen as too close with Iran’s regime though the group has not been sanctioned and insists it only works on behalf of the Iranian people, not any governments.
Nonetheless, to these critics in Promontory, this all is akin to mailing dollars straight to Hamas, though every organization on the list has legitimate standing in our country.
The article was breathless but ultimately silly. An investigation into nothing, built for a social media storm in which progressive causes are cast as if criminal in rightwing circles. Of course, the left casts conservatives in the same light — in one ex-president’s case, accurately.
This is Promontory, among the most exclusive communities here or anywhere. The fabulously wealthy founder has exercised his First Amendment privilege to contribute to causes he cares about. And a few fabulously wealthy residents able to contribute to their own causes are furious.
And not only that. When someone posted the story about the founder’s contributions on the Promontory Facebook group, the group’s administrators took it down, saying it didn’t conform with the standards of the site.
But they can’t do that, can they? Isn’t this a rank violation of the First Amendment?
Well, no. The Facebook group’s administrators also have a First Amendment right to speak — or not speak — which extends to taking posts down. They are more like a news organization this way than a utility such as a sewer system or Facebook the network, a pipeline for everyone.
The fellow who reported this was beside himself when I explained. What kind of editor was I anyway?
This is America.
Free speech in a tangle
As I wrote this, I was reading up for an “Emerging Issues” discussion Monday evening at the Summit County Library branch at Kimball Junction. The title: “The Power and Perils of Free Speech.”
The material brings up some of the toughest questions, ones the Supreme Court will have to resolve.
How much misinformation and disinformation and plain lies and utter bull crap permitted by the social media entities, those utilities, can government limit?
Where do protests that cripple college campuses fit in the First Amendment landscape with the occupations and intimidation on many campuses right now?
How about banning Chinese-owned Tik Tok in the United States?
Should the infamous Section 230 law protecting platforms from legal responsibility for the worst of what is contributed on them be allowed to sunset and drift away? Has the law and others like it become the very poison they were enacted to avoid?
Should the social networks at this point be treated as genuine news media, subject to liability for destructive lies, intrusions into private lives, criminality? Haven’t they each built their own soapbox, stage and auditorium for public speech?
Do social media companies have too much power to shape our politics? If so, what should be done about that?
Slippery slopes everywhere.
The reading material includes trend lines showing a big divide on this between registered Republicans and Democrats, with a growing number of the unaffiliated like me who run along a broad middle ground, sometimes siding more with conservative viewpoints and sometimes more liberal.
And there are a couple of pieces about social media disinformation campaigns, which peak just ahead of elections around the world. One warns of how widespread, realistic and unrecognizable these lies have become.
This is America.
Distrust news media, too
There’s also broad suspicion, largely by party loyalty, about “the news media,” as if the whole fractured mess of entities employing some form of journalism were one massif, FOX the same as CNN, The Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone, NPR and NewsMax.
I’m probably at least as cynical as the survey takers in this: One axiom of my biz is that people don’t find the media biased so much as they’re upset it’s not biased their way. A little Will Roger-ish there, but I think this is closer to a deeper truth.
Americans are also suspicious of the owners, financial interests, corporate influences, pretty much every large funding source of news media entities. Of course, the only thing worse than the American press are all the others run by the state. China, Russia, Iran, et al.
Fine, the really cynical me thinks, you can’t go wrong exercising smart skepticism and reading widely. But then you swallow the stupidest stuff on your Facebook feed, heedless of facts you could check quickly yourself.
I noticed that none of the reading material for this discussion comes from “some guy named Dave on Facebook,” as one email correspondent coined it. All the pieces are from the realm of journalism, ranging from national newspapers and The Economist to LawShelf, a specialist site, and the Pew Center, a think tank.
This corresponds with the single best advice I know you won’t take about news consumption: Drop the social media. Even with all the good stuff, it’s bad for you, far more meth than enlightenment.
Even the addled critics in Promontory, frustrated by their extinguished flame war on Facebook, went to news outlets. None of the outraged critics so far has taken up a more responsible course with their speech, mistaking their own angry opinions for news, angrier still that we declined to pursue a story but offered space on the opinion page, as long as they could keep their facts straight.
They’ve either cooled down, found something else more outrageous on their feeds, or that fact thing was too high of a bar.
This also is America: Consumed with expression and attention. Not really all that interested in what is true.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.