Well, it can certainly be challenging.
Ever since FB started religiously removing anything telling that I tried to contribute to the worldwide effort to stop a genocide, I’ve been wondering what exactly these community standards are that I apparently keep going against.
I read everything I could find and nowhere did I see anything that said ‘anything any group of people disagree with’ but, after the experience of the Corbyn campaign, the Brexit (if only!) debate and the women’s rights campaign, it was pretty obvious that that was the thing. Social media are run by people who find being disagreed with – well, disagreeable. Fair enough, loads of people do, but to find it intolerable?
Do you remember, when it was mainly us, the women’s rights campaigners, who were being shut down for ‘toxicity’, there was a great big argument about whether there was a ‘cancel culture’ or not? Then, after October 7th, people who had been saying ‘well, if you will post toxic opinions…’ were suddenly wailing about their #FreePalestine campaign being ‘against community standards’.
And then someone shot a health-insurance CEO. After a day or two I thought, we can’t make do with round-about jokes, we need to say this, plain and simple. I said:
“You know, I wouldn’t wish an untimely death on anyone but I’m really not interested in the actual motive for that particular newsworthy death. What DOES both interest and delight me is how it has focused attention on what people who’ve experienced insurance-based (ie, profit based) health care think about it all.
“What we in the UK need to bear in mind now is that Wes Streeting et al will not be watching and learning, they will be watching and thinking ‘will it blow over – can we still get away with it…’”
‘It’ being, of course, Streeting’s stated aim of moving the remains of our NHS onto a business footing – an insurance-based model, like the one they have in the United States. Like the one that inspired all those memes, a selection of which I posted along with my thoughts.
According to Facebook, which promptly issued a warning, the whole bally thing went against ‘community standards’ — which is why the collection is now here in a blog post instead.
It set me wondering whether anyone still doubts that cancel-culture exists, which is why I posted this when it came past me…
The nature of freedom
That is the conversation we need to be having. Freedom of speech and freedom of belief are a major part of our very necessary human rights. The vital point to remember is that to build freedom into the system, you need to put limits on powerful organizations in order to allow individual people to speak, learn and believe without fear. Individual people cannot shut down public debate. Powerful political and business organizations can, so they must not be allowed to.
It must be the absolute dream of the powerful to raise a generation who think anything they don’t believe, or that they feel uncomfortable with, amounts to a ‘toxic debate’. It’s notable that in our local assemblies organizing, the rules call for two vital things: the first is freedom of speech – which includes having the decency to listen to people. The second is respect – which means avoiding aggressive or personal, abusive comments. You have to stand by both those rules to avoid a real toxic debate — but people who aren’t used to it just keep assuming the rules must have a list of ‘nasty’ ideas that people aren’t allowed to express. Not so.
That is an idea that needs to be dealt with, before you can call your community free. Ideas might be wrong-headed, or based on wrong information. Where that’s the case, they need to be expressed, and calmly debated, not bullied into silence and sent away to quietly foment. That is precisely what breeds the ‘hate’ people fear.
It has become pretty obvious we’re not going to be able to have that debate on social media. Or the one about the far right, or the one about Israel being an apartheid state, or the one about women’s rights, and how to go about looking after trans people without endangering women and children or, it seems, the one about how we urgently need to stop Starmer’s Labour doing what they are doing to our NHS.
So please start having those conversations in person, and sharing articles like this one by email, when social media won’t let you share them in political and community groups.
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Dear Reader,
Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.
Another great way to support this, and other independent blogs you read, is liking and sharing on social media, signing up for email updates, or by emailing a link to friends.
Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 