Freedoms

 

Everybody Wants To Rule The World

I can't stand this indecision,
Married with a lack of vision.
Everybody wants to rule the world.
Say that you'll never, never, never, never, need it.
One headline, why believe it?
Everybody wants to rule the world.

But each individual CAN’T rule the world.

The Constitution of the United States tried to deal with the proposition that a system of individuals can rule those same individuals, but that the system might make mistakes and each individual must be protected for the good of that system. Thus there are checks and balances for the power exercised by the system and protections of the individual from the system. But many of these protections presume that there is a system in the first place.

Among those basic protections are freedom of speech and freedom of assembly to address grievances.  But this presumes that there are public spaces in which to speak and in which to assemble. When these places are private, and there are few, if any, public spaces, those protections can be pointless. Freedom of speech or assembly does not mean that there are no consequences from that speech or assembly, only that speaking and assembly are NOT those consequences. Thus while you can have freedom to speak, there are consequences for shouting fire in a crowded theater. The owners of those spaces may limit the ability to speak and to assemble on their property or else they themselves may be liable for the consequences of that speech or that assembly.

When the speech occurs in a public square, it is protected. When the speech occurs on social media platforms, and all of social media platforms are owned by private corporations, is it public? When assembly takes place by college students on land that is owned by the college, is that public?

Addressing only social media, the reason for banning TikTok is allegedly that TikTok may be  under the control of a foreign power, the Chinese Communist Party. But its competitors, e.g. Meta (operators of Facebook, Threads, Instagram, etc.), Alphabet ( operators of Google, YouTube, etc.) and X/Twitter are all United States corporations ( and are primarily owned by citizens of the United States, although it is decided murky in the case of South African- born Elon Musk and X/Twitter).  Can any of those social media platforms be subject to foreign influence? Absolutely, but the question of ownership/control is not the issue. Foreign interference in elections is a legitimate concern but that foreign influence has been exercised previously in US owned social media platforms, not TikTok.

Can any of these social media platform harm wards of the state ( e.g. children and teenagers)? Absolutely, but this harm is without regard to foreign ownership. Lack of experience, familiarity, and/or understanding of the social media platform does NOT mean that the social media platform is harmful. I don’t use social media, but the arguments against social media, by people as old as me, have long been expressed by the elderly, long before there was social media. Plato complained against ancient Greek teenagers that "What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders; they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions.” Just because you don’t understand something, does not automatically make it evil. It only means that you don’t understand it.

Can the social media platforms protect data privacy? Anyone can purchase confidential data from any of the social media platforms, including the United States owned platforms. Those platforms may try to protect this confidential information by anonymizing or otherwise protecting that data, But as someone who has handled confidential data, there is no lock secure enough to absolutely protect confidential information. If codes are used, codes can be broken, foreign or not. Codes do not even understand foreign or domestic ownership/control. If you want to protect data privacy, then data privacy issues should be addressed, whether that data is foreign or domestically owned/controlled.

As to the rights to assembly/speech by college students on college property, it is the consequences of that assembly/speech that can and should be addressed by the colleges, not the speech or assembly itself. The potential that consequences MIGHT occur is not justification for trampling on those rights. Two wrongs do not make a right. You can’t always get want you want.  You may want to rule the world, but not everyone can rule the world.