Words Matter: The Power of Speech in Changing Minds

Words are powerful, and, when used well, they can incite people to both good and evil. They give those in positions of power, well, power – and lots of it. And, thanks to the Bill of Rights, specifically the very first item on it, people can say almost anything with presumably no consequences. This means when someone with influence says something publicly, it can have a huge impact on society.

While everyone has the right to say whatever he or she wants, those with influence over audiences have the responsibility to exercise their free speech with vigilance. While speech can be, and is, used benevolently, it is also used nefariously. Examples of either are unneeded here; the evidence for both is plentiful and ever growing.

The media are not the only ones with this responsibility. Anybody who has influence over any number of people is aware of the impact of their words. Words matter, and saying certain things can have unforeseen consequences. The expression “Be careful what you wish for” wasn’t created in a vacuum.

A gut-wrenching story illustrates the importance of this responsibility on a very personal level. In Massachusetts, a woman was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for sending text messages to convince her boyfriend to commit suicide. She continually told her boyfriend to get back into his truck while it was filling up with carbon-monoxide. While she is protected under the First Amendment to an extent, the consequences of her words are too real to be ignored. She ignored her responsibility to exercise this right with caution and is being punished for her “reckless conduct.”

The recent shooting of Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise offers a lesson as well. A distraught Bernie Sanders supporter, angry over the recent election of Donald Trump, found it necessary to travel to Virginia from Illinois and open fire on a group of Republican lawmakers. The shooter may have been tackling other mental illness issues at the time, but is it possible all the toxic, and sometimes violent, rhetoric against President Trump pushed this man to do what he did? Would he have not done what he did if he weren’t influenced by media outlets he followed constantly attacking Trump, making the president seem more evil than Satan himself? We will never know with certainty since the shooter is now dead, but the rhetoric can’t be written off.

And here’s why we can’t just look the other way (so to speak!) — because to say it had no influence in the commission of the crime is to deny that speech can also bring good.  National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg well-articulated the relationship between free speech and action.

I have always thought it absurd to claim that expression cannot lead people to do bad things, precisely because it is so obvious that expression can lead people to do good things. According to legend, Abraham Lincoln told Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.’ Should we mock Lincoln for saying something ridiculous?

As Irving Kristol once put it, ‘If you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book. You have to believe, in other words, that art is morally trivial and that education is morally irrelevant.’

If words don’t matter, then democracy is a joke, because democracy depends entirely on making arguments — not for killing, but for voting. Only a fool would argue that words can move people to vote but not to kill.

Goldberg also points out that the First Amendment was built on an effort to stop leaders from murdering in the name of religion.

Ironically, free speech was born in an attempt to stop killing. It has its roots in freedom of conscience. Before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the common practice was that the rulers’ religion determined their subjects’ faith too. Religious dissent was not only heresy but a kind of treason. After Westphalia, exhaustion with religion-motivated bloodshed created space for toleration. As the historian C. V. Wedgwood put it, the West had begun to understand ‘the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword.’

This didn’t mean that Protestants instantly stopped hating Catholics or vice versa. Nor did it mean that the more ecumenical hatred of Jews vanished. What it did mean is that it was no longer acceptable to kill people simply for what they believed — or said.

But words still mattered. Art still moved people. And the law is not the full and final measure of morality.

All in all, freedom of speech is a considerably large power given to the residents of this country. And, in the words of one well-known superhero’s uncle, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Fake News May Distract, But It Doesn’t Rig Elections

Fake news is not a technical glitch.” This sentence is the headline of a recent article about the hysteria that has enveloped the nation over the “unexpected” presidential outcome. It also is a simple explanation that clears up much of the confusion being disseminated since the Nov. 8 vote.

Ironically, there has been a lot of misinformation about what “fake news” is. Is it false stories made up whole cloth? Yes. Is it misreporting about events that have happened? No, but that’s become a much-discussed point about the journalism profession since the issue arose. Is it media opinion? No.

Blaming members of the media for expressing their opinion rather than just stating the facts of a news story has been a complaint for decades, if not centuries. Not reporting all the facts is poor journalism, but a lie of omission is not the issue at hand.

Fake news is “creative writing,” to be kind. It’s the act of crafting imaginary facts about people whose opponents would be willing to believe are true. It’s pernicious, but it isn’t merely bad journalism. It is not based in fact at all.

Yet, people are willing to believe what they are told is news because Americans trust the format.  “Crankish conspiratorial thinking has been a theme in America for a long time,” notes professional software engineer and blogger Ariel Rabkin.

But there has been an outcry at the platforms that have unwittingly served as dispensers of fake news. The messenger has been condemned as much as the fake news itself.

Blaming the messenger — the online platforms where this fake news appears — is not the answer, however. Getting angry at Google or Facebook for “throwing” the election by permitting fake news on their sites is a pretty big waste of breath.

Consider the complaints. Facebook repeatedly tweaks its algorithm to impact how news trends, for which it recently faced a fair backlash, but that does not equate to Facebook making up false stories that show up on the site. And it would hurt Facebook’s business model to try to decide what’s real and what’s not.

As Rabkin explains:

Facebook didn’t invent rumor-mongering. It doubtless has made the problem more visible, since what used to be merely asserted drunkenly in saloons or spoken on talk radio is now in publicly visible text online. But visibility is not the same as impact and we should not assume without evidence that technology has made false rumors more dangerous to society. (The election of Donald Trump is not evidence that falsehood has any new potency. Partisans have been repeating lies about their opposition since the birth of democracy.) …

Google and Facebook have a deep ethos of neutrality, and to the extent that they are credible, it is precisely because they do not make blatant editorial decisions that embed their preconceptions and beliefs about which sources to trust. If Google or Facebook were to anoint some limited set of news sources as “authoritative” and some others as “fake,” they would immediately be faced with quite an ugly controversy about who is who, and this is controversy they avoid for both business and philosophical reasons.

Getting to the top of Facebook or Google search returns is a contest, and contestants know how to play the game.

This is the era of digital marketing, where getting seen is as important as what is said. Many players are vying for the top spot, and are willing to pay for it. An entire industry has made its fortune teaching other businesses how to rank up the Google pages. They game and test and look at data to learn how to outbid their competition to get to that spot.

This is how these platforms make their money, and they aren’t going to jeopardize the funding stream. So while Facebook and Google may constantly be rewriting and reframing their algorithms to try to second-guess what people are looking for to be able to deliver that to them, there are many, many guardians at the gate willing to point out what these platforms are doing wrong.

To wit: Being the editors of quality news is not the job description for Facebook and Google engineers.

If users are seeking carefully curated news, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are both available online, and there is no particular reason why Google ought to compete directly against them.

Americans do want reliable information on which to form opinions, it’s in their best interest to have all the competing arguments coming at them, good and bad. This involves becoming educated, not just by what’s on the screen, but what is in books, what occurs in real-life experiences and involves real-life witnesses.

Anybody can put anything on the Internet, for better or worse. It’s our responsibility as members of society to be able to develop and express well-considered, well-formed, and well-sourced positions.

And for all its faults, America was not “hacked” into electing Donald Trump. Some Americans may have believed fake news and used it to form their opinions, but that is not what “hacking” is. No evidence points to machines having been tampered with, despite Trump’s pre-victory claims that it could happen. The Wisconsin and Pennsylvania recounts requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein only reinforce the validity of the vote.

So let’s be vigilant thinkers and put a little effort into determining the quality of information on which we form our opinions. We’ve no one to blame but ourselves if we fault the machines for doing a poor job of thinking for us.

Read Rabkin’s entire article on TechPolicyDaily.com.