Journalism

Featured Freedom of Speech Globalization Human Rights Internet Journalism Society and Culture Technology

Social Media, Protest, and the Freedom of Speech

This article is the fourth of five pieces from our summer series for 2020. The theme this summer is “Challenging Narratives.” In the coming days and weeks, The Generation will publish more articles where our writers challenge various notions to provide new and different perspectives on the debates and events shaping your world.

State violence, racial protest, and debates on the freedom of speech are not novel phenomena, but with the advent of social media and its global proliferation, 2020 especially has witnessed a fundamental change in how citizens criticize their government and conduct political protest. In
order for citizens to actualize their fundamental rights in the 21st century, one must navigate the complex relationship between free speech, democratic institutions, and the broadcasting power of social networks. From the Arab Spring a decade ago to the Belarusian election and George Floyd protests of this summer, social media platforms have democratized the ability to rapidly spread information about injustice to millions. Yet as these platforms become increasingly inseparable from our lives, online spaces have become battlegrounds between governments and protesters, and between information and misinformation. Now, the private companies who created these virtual domains must take on a balancing act that was previously reserved for states: protecting the freedom of speech while maintaining public safety. The complication with this role shift is that as international corporations, they must balance many countries’ cultural norms regarding the freedom of speech. To what extent will individual domestic laws be able to influence private, global platforms? In addition, social media companies have the task of remaining politically neutral while protecting election security. They are responsible for codifying checks on their own industry which inherently profits off of scandalous, viral information. The U.S. has seen the influence of online conspiracy theories increase from the 2016 election until now, demonstrating that what goes on in online chat rooms can have effects in the physical world. Conspiracy theories, inflammatory accusations by state leaders, hate speech, and calls for revolutions all violate some sort of public order in physical space, so how will social media platforms design cyber policies that will actualize people’s right to speech while protecting public order? Overall, because social platforms have become whistles for injustice and democratic tools for political organizing, social media companies must develop social media policy that helps users to actualize these freedoms online while fighting against misinformation and hatred that could pose as threats to our democracies.

Social media has catalyzed social and political movements since the Arab Spring in 2011. A viral video filmed by a common bystander ignited this powerful and paradigm altering movement. Mohamed Bouazizi was a 26-year-old fruit vendor who lit himself on fire in front of a government building after refusing to pay a police bribe. He had been unable to find work as a lawyer due to his involvement in the opposition Progressive Democratic Party, and he publicly committed suicide in protest of police harassment and President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime. Bouazizi’s death and his funeral were both filmed and sparked mass protests across Tunisia; President Ben Ali fled the country after a 23 year long reign four days after Bouazizi’s funeral. Like dominos, protests erupted across Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, all objecting to autocratic regimes. Social media created the ability for common citizens, especially young people, to collect and share evidence of state brutality. This technology has served as a system for fact checking government propaganda and has allowed opposition movements of repressive regimes to quickly galvanize and organize people in real life. While the results of the Arab Spring did not result in the “political reform and social justice” that was hoped for (Tunisia was the only nation that gained substantial changes in the form of a new constitution), technology was intrinsic to sparking these revolutionary movements and defining a new, 21st century method of actualizing one’s right to speak and assemble.

More recent examples of how social media has empowered everyday people and helped corroborate state brutality can be found in Lebanon and Belarus. In Lebanon, the government’s handling of the harrowing August 4th explosion in Beirut’s port, in addition to existing outrage over the governmental fiscal policy decisions during the nation’s grim economic recession, has ignited protest around the country. Videos of the explosion were disseminated widely across global news, and soon after, videos of excessive uses of force such as the use of tear gas on peaceful protesters began circulating on social media. According to Human Rights Watch, researchers “observed security forces fire a tear gas canister directly at a protester’s head, in violation of international standards, severely injuring him.” A video of the aftermath of that event where the man is being treated for his injuries was posted on Twitter and currently has 119,000 views. In Belarus, protests have broken out after attacks on members of the opposition party and the corruption of the sitting president. Aisha Jung, Amnesty International’s Senior Campaigner on Belarus, said:

“The people who have gathered to denounce the elimination of opposition presidential candidates from the election list have every right to take to the streets…Protesters claim that the sole reason Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s political opponents have been purged from the campaign is so that he can seek a sixth consecutive term as President, effectively unopposed.”

Peaceful protestors are now camped out in front of the Minsk parliament building in what is known as Independence Square. Anyone in the world with access to Twitter can be witness to these powerful moments; they can see the overwhelming crowd from a bird’s eye view and hear the ringing echo of thousands of voices bounce off the buildings. Yet, one can also find graphic videos of unnecessary and excessive force on peaceful Belarusian protesters in the media. These videos and images serve as evidence of state violence, dispel propaganda, and have captured the world’s attention.

One final example of social media’s role in galvanizing protests includes the recent demonstrations for racial justice across the United States which may be the largest social movement in U.S. history. Everyday people of all races and backgrounds, in addition to celebrities, sports teams, and corporations, have been contributing their support for the Black Lives Matter Global Network. The protests were ignited by the George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police on May 25th. 17-year-old Darnella Frazier captured the shocking image of the killing, which showed one officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck as he begged for his life while three other police officers looked distantly on. In America, protests over police brutality and racism have been catalyzed in the past by similar videos taken by bystanders. The Rodney King Riots of 1992 erupted after four Los Angeles policemen were acquitted for a brutal beating of Rodney King, a violent act caught on camera that made national and global news. Since then, technology has become heavily integrated into our lives and vastly accessible to many, so now more than ever the everyday citizen has the ability to record chaotic and events that could later be used to inform others or corroborate eyewitness accounts.

In an analysis of these events, one can view social media and technology as a widely accessible, democratic outlet where nearly anyone can exercise their human right to the freedom of expression. The people can share their voices, experiences, and opinions in ways that can check political regimes. But social media platforms are also private companies that, especially after the 2016 U.S. election, are reviewing their policies and investigating how they will balance the. universal right to free speech and the need to maintain public safety as well as stopping the spread of maliciously false information that could lead to real life disasters and threaten civic
institutions.

In 2016, a bizarre example of how fake social media accounts and conspiracy theories could develop real consequences arose. Crazed rumors about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s connection to a child sex trafficking ring hidden in a Washington D.C. pizza parlor spread on social media. Bot accounts, which are accounts that “automatically create tweets without direct human oversight”, helped to share and promote information on what became known as “Pizzagate” along with radical online “personalities” like conservative radio host Alex Jones. Edgar Welch, a believer of such theories, showed up to the supposed center of this satanic ring, Comet Ping Pong Pizza, with a “Colt AR-15 assault rifle, a .38-caliber Colt revolver and a folding knife, [and] fired his gun two or three times.” No one was injured, but this strange incident serves as an example of how fake media accounts created for the purposes of smearing a political figure online can have real and violent consequences. More recently, a group founded on similar beliefs to “Pizzagate” called QAnon has amassed followers on mainstream platforms. The Washington Post defines QAnon’s beliefs as

“… a concoction of allegations against Democratic politicians, celebrities and supposed members of a ‘deep state’ government bureaucracy, against whom Trump is seen as waging a valiant battle. Purported pedophilia rings are central to the conspiracy theory, along with Satanism and secret judicial proceedings’. QAnon believers await the ‘Great Awakening,’ or the moment the general public realizes the conspiracy exists, and the ‘Storm,’ when thousands of wrongdoers face justice.”

Despite being labeled a domestic terror threat by the FBI, Facebook only began removing QAnon platforms in August of 2020; this included 790 groups and 440 pages. Conspiracy theorists with fringe opinions spread false information to promote their own interests, interests defined by a system where the more followers one has, the more money one stands to make from advertising deals. For example, Alex Jones was “permanently suspended” from Twitter in 2018 on the grounds that his tweets violated Twitter’s community guidelines against abusive behavior which states “you may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.” Recently in 2020, Alex Jones and his “InfoWars” app were banned from the Google Play store after spreading false information about the coronavirus; Jones also “lost an appeal in a defamation case about his claims related to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting” and racked up nearly $150,000 total in legal fees before the trial. Yet, cases where platforms that are actually taken down are the exception, and usually after significant harm has done. The spread of maliciously false information has terrible consequences in reality, especially during a pandemic that requires a collective effort and understanding which is constantly undermined by this misinformation complex.

The benefit of social media is that a single person has the potential to reach millions of people at once, but that also serves as a complication in the balancing act between protecting one’s right to self-expression and ensuring public safety. In America, hateful or inflammatory speech is usually thought of as “lawful but awful” and protected as long as it is not meant to incite imminent violence. But social media platforms span across many nations, all with differing regulations regarding one’s speech. An NPR podcast about free speech and social media discussed how hate speech is not protected in Europe and the EU has developed a solution of writing their guidelines into the terms of service that is signed by users of their regions; they warn platforms of passing restrictive laws against them if these rules are not factored in, while the Trump administration is also threatening legislative action if platforms do not conform to their own standards. This creates a tension unique to an international platform that has to balance the various cultural norms regarding free speech laws.

Another debate influencing free speech online is the one of the major components of Trump’s platform known as “Fake News” which is the idea that traditional media coverage and social media algorithms discriminate against conservative viewpoints. Despite this pervasive allegation from the Right, there has been no evidence to substantiate this claim. In one study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the National University of Singapore debunked this assertion of online conservative bias in their work “The Ideological Landscape of Twitter: Comparing the Production versus Consumption of Information on the Platform” where they found that “while partisan opinion leaders are certainly polarized, centrist or non-political voices are much more likely to produce the most visible information on the platform”. Online platforms are methods where both politicians and citizens of many countries can actualize their freedom of expression, but the struggle between governments and these private companies over algorithms and guidelines will only continue as these platforms age and grow.

Finally, other corporations are also weighing in on the issue as Coca Cola, Target and other major companies have recently limited or stopped advertising on Facebook in order to push Facebook to codify new rules regarding hate speech. This debate over the role of the platform in protecting the public order has not only been reactivated by false information about the COVID- 19 pandemic, but about the validity of the U.S. 2020 presidential election as well. Twitter has tacked two disclaimers on President Trump’s tweets this past year about voter fraud and the validity of US elections as well as a tweet “implying [that] protesters in Minneapolis could be shot.” A key factor in this debate over expression on online platforms involves the profile of the speaker. Should public figures with the ability to reach so many, compounded by the legitimacy of their position, have different standards of what they can say on social media than the average person?

Social media has equipped the everyday person with the ability to document injustice and corroborate their experience with evidence. It has catalyzed protests against racial injustice and state brutality in the United States, facilitating one of the largest social movements the world has seen. It has been utilized to ignite revolutions and check autocratic regimes. But social media platforms must practice a balancing act. They must protect the public against false information spread with malicious intent – like defamatory rumors about a political figure spread by an opposition party or hostile government – while also confronting structural incentives that encourage peddlers of misinformation to make millions by circulating hateful conspiracy theories. But who has the right to determine what is a lawful expression of one’s opinion and what are lies intended to incite violence? We know that social media has the power to stir revolutions and instigate social movements. Which movements should be allowed to grow at the risk of violating public order? We also know that social media has the power to make fringe opinions or conspiracies appear to be mainstream understandings. How will companies protect free expression and public safety? Should widely followed accounts of public figures be held to different standards of the acceptability of what they share? Ultimately, this election year will help define this gray area as private social media platforms write new cyber policies to govern virtual communities that have become inseparable from how we exercise our right to expression and protest in our physical ones.

October 27, 2020 0 comment

Source

Featured Globalization Human Rights Internet Journalism Security Security and Conflict Society and Culture

Multinational Corporations and the EU’s New Data Laws

written by Eden Ballard

United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12

“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”

This sentiment is echoed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) Article 17, Right to Privacy. On April 8th 1988 the UN adopted general comment number 16 to article 17 which states that:

The gathering and holding of personal information on computers, data banks and other devices, whether by public authorities or private individuals or bodies, must be regulated by law. Effective measures have to be taken by States to ensure that information concerning a person’s private life does not reach the hands of persons who are not authorized by law to receive, process and use it, and is never used for purposes incompatible with the Covenant. In order to have the most effective protection of his private life, every individual should have the right to ascertain in an intelligible form, Whether, and if so, What personal data is stored in automatic data ﬁles, and for What purposes. Every individual should also be able to, ascertain which public authorizes or private individuals or bodies control or may control their ﬁles. If such ﬁles contain incorrect personal data or have been collected or processed contrary to the provisions of the law, every individual should have the right to request rectification or elimination.

Nearly 31 years old, this statement has gone largely ignored as the internet exploded and user engagement far outpaced any thought to user privacy. This changed on May 25th, 2018 when the European Union took a major step in protecting the privacy rights of individual users by adopting the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The website created for the GDPR boasts that it is “the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years.” This regulation impacts how the the privacy of more than 500 million EU citizens will be protected from exploitation by online service providers. With the approval of the General Data Protection Regulation, the European Union has shown that it holds individual privacy to be of the utmost importance.

The GDPR applies to the conduct of all companies that provide services for EU residents, even if it is only for one EU resident. It aims to safeguard against individual users’ data being used in ways they do not knowingly consent to and mandates that consent can be withdrawn as easily as it is granted. This ability to withdrawal consent protects what they call “The Right to Be Forgotten.” One of the main ways that this is protected is by prohibiting from using “long illegible terms and conditions full of legalese.” Apple’s “Terms and Conditions” updated as of September 17, 2018 was a lengthy 7,006 words. The contract ambiguously ends: “Children under the age of majority should review this Agreement with their parent or guardian to ensure that the child and parent or legal guardian understand it.” However, the parents or legal guardians themselves are likely not reviewing nor understanding it; it’s unfair to expect that average users feel comfortable or have the spare time to try to understand the needlessly verbose contracts drawn up by lawyers working for multimillion dollar firms. Now behemoth companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, each serving a network of users across the globe, are being asked to rise to the occasion… and they will.

The amount of revenue generated from the more than 400 million internet users in the EU is more than enough to incentivize companies to adhere to the GDPR. If they fail to change their policies or decide to pull out of the European market, the business face the loss of millions of dollars through fines or from decreased profits respectively For violations of the GDPR’s stipulations on consent, among other legal issues, fines are the greater of twenty million euro or 4% of the entity’s gross global revenue. That said, Google and Facebook were quick to make sure that they updated their user policy to adhere to the GDPR.

Google will be making data they collect viewable under “My Activity” and users will be able to delete specific activity or data from entire time frames that they would rather not have associated with their account. Data privacy information has been made more easily accessible and users are provided with clearer explanations of Google’s data practices through a series of video tutorials outlining a user’s options for managing, exporting, and deleting data.

Both Facebook and Google will have special protection features for their users who are under 18 years old. Facebook’s include requiring parent or guardian permission for the use of target ads and restricted sharing.

On April 17th, 2018 Facebook’s Newsroom published an outline of changes being made to accommodate the GDPR. In addition to allowing the data to be more easily deleted, Facebook will ask users to agree to their updated terms of service and data policy, whether they want to see ads targeted to the information they have filled out on their profile, and if they want to turn off Facebook’s face recognition features. This last option will also be available to users in Canada.

All of this comes shortly after Facebook’s now infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal in which data mined on Facebook was collected and used to strategically place ads pertaining to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Users were inadvertently handing over their data to a third party by playing games and taking quizzes that were seemingly innocuous.

This particular application of mined data, and many other similar instances, highlights that as our dependence on technology and virtual programs has increased over the years, we have slowly but steadily bought into a system without taking the time to critique it. Collectively, people have become complacent about what contracts they absentmindedly agree to mean in the context of their everyday lives. Although we understand that anything shared on the internet will never truly disappear, we fail to ponder what happens when we hand over our addresses, credit card information, age, and other personal statistics to sites like Amazon, Twitter, banking sites, and dating services.

Unfortunately, even with the publicized steps corporations are taking to meet the expectations of the GDPR, business is business and companies continue to look for ways to maximize profits and minimize accountability. In response to the GDPR, Facebook now handles their user responsibility out of their offices in California instead of their international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. This allows them to circumvent the GDPR and that user rights are now subject to the much lighter U.S. data protection regulations. On top of that, Facebook is still able to advantage of comparable tax breaks by booking their revenue through their Irish office. Alex Hern of The Guardian summed up the issue on April 18th, 2018: “Facebook has moved more than 1.5 billion users out of reach of European privacy law, despite a promise from Mark Zuckerberg to apply the “spirit” of the legislation globally.”

The GDPR is a step in the right direction for privacy rights but the fact remains that the very companies that so many people depend on in their day to day lives continue to abuse their global dominion. As illustrated by Facebook’s move to California, regulations lack strength unless they are implemented globally. The data privacy values outlined by the Article 17 of the ICCPR should be regarded equally around the world. Until there are universal norms, corporations will exploit legal irregularities to serve themselves, not their trusting customers. Looking to the EU as an example, one can only hope that soon the international community will begin to ask, and rightly so, about individuals’ right to privacy on the world wide web.

March 11, 2019 0 comment

Source

Featured Journalism

A Budding Bipartisan Consensus on the Liberal World Order

written by Zach Emanuel

On June 26th, Democratic Representative Joe Crowley of New York was defeated in a primary challenge from the left by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a twenty-eight-year-old former organizer for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run and member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory shocked many as Crowley, the powerful chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, had been named as a potential replacement for Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and led in several polls in the weeks leading up to election day. Yet despite the upset, Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said Ocasio-Cortez “represents the future of our party;” and based on her support amongst younger voters, he would seem to be correct.
In addition to running on a progressive platform similar to that of Senator Sanders in 2016, Ocasio-Cortez’s policy positions are indicative of a larger trend within the Democratic Party. Over the last eighteen months, Democrats have begun pivoting to the left of their Obama-Era stances as a result of President Donald Trump’s actions in an effort to oppose him as strongly as possible.
Take immigration for instance. President Barack Obama famously deported more people than any of his predecessors and called for tough and secure borders, while simultaneously supporting a path to citizenship and implementing the DACA program, which protected minors who were brought to the U.S illegally from deportation. All of which were at the time moderate. Obama called them, “common sense” solutions. Yet Trump’s rhetoric and actions on immigration, regardless of how disrespectful and inhumane they may be, have caused Ocasio-Cortez to call for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, and a number of other high-profile Democrats are now doing the same. The policy represents a strong shift to the left from Obama’s positions. Thanks to Trump, Democrats who used to back Obama’s “common sense” immigration reform and strong border security measures would be hard pressed to utter any sort of support for them now.
The same is happening in healthcare. Before Trump, Democrats supported working to improve the flaws within the Affordable Care Act. Regardless of what many in the Republican Party may say, President Obama’s signature legislative achievement was both a moderate plan and a compromise solution to one of the nation’s toughest and most divisive issues. However Trump’s efforts to strip Americans of their health insurance and wreck the Obamacare market through repeal of the individual mandate have led rising Democratic stars such as Ocasio-Cortez to instead call for a more radical Medicare for All plan. Again, due to Trump, attempting to fix the flaws in Obamacare is seen as outdated while support for a Single Payer system has now become a litmus test for Democratic presidential hopefuls in 2020.
Across many issues, the pattern remains. Democrats under Obama supported moderate policies and positions. Along comes Trump, and Democrats move to the left to oppose him as strongly as possible. Ocasio-Cortez and her campaign platform embody this trend, and now it “represents the future of [the] party.”
Yet when it comes to foreign policy and support for the U.S-led liberal, international order, the pattern stops. On domestic policy, Ocasio-Cortez’s platform is filled with aggressive stances opposing Trump, and yet there is no mention of his tariffs jeopardizing the global network of free trade, no position on Russian election interference constituting a threat to American democracy and democracy worldwide, and no reference to Trump’s rhetoric and actions against NATO threatening the Western-democratic alliance. What explains the dichotomy?
Given the lack of criticism Trump has received from Ocasio-Cortez for his actions, it has become clear that the far left is willing to go along with the President in renouncing America’s role as the world’s leading economic, democratic, and military power. For instance, Ocasio-Cortez’s lack of opposition to Trump’s tariffs and potential instigation of a global trade war can be explained because, like Trump, progressives have their own issues with free trade. President Obama championed trade deals through pursuit of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the U.S-Korea Free Trade Agreement. In contrast, Bernie Sanders said in 2015 that agreements like these “have been a disaster for the American worker,” because “corporations that shut down here move abroad.” Later in a Democratic primary debate, Sanders even touted his “being on the picket line in opposition to NAFTA” in the 1990s. And Sanders is not alone. A number of left-leaning economists such as J.W Mason and Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Policy and Economic Research, have also spoken out strongly against the benefits of free trade. Therefore, Ocasio-Cortez’s lack of criticism towards- and agreement with- the President’s trade policy is actually in line with her fellow progressives. What’s notable is that just as Trump’s victory represented the triumph of protectionism within the GOP, Ocasio-Cortez’s has done the same for Democrats.
Second, similar to her silence on trade, there is not a word in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, criticizing Russia’s efforts to sway the result of the 2016 Presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. Likewise, I have yet to hear her denounce President Trump’s denials of what unquestionably constitutes a foreign threat to the strength of American democracy, or comment on how the President’s partisan attacks against the Justice Department, FBI, and the media over investigating those threats are eroding public faith in American institutions. Moreover, Bernie Sanders– for all his vocal support and outspoken appeals for progressive policies–has not really spoken strongly either about the dangers Russian meddling poses to democracy worldwide. Why is that?
I suspect it stems from the fact that many on the far left have long seen American democracy and its institutions as intensely flawed, and therefore don’t view them with much essential value. If the American political system was not valuable to progressives to begin with, then attacks by foreign adversaries against it are not perceived of as being particularly threatening. Similarly, if the U.S can’t reasonably claim to represent democratic ideals, then it has no moral right to tout democracy around the world. Though conservatives always questioned whether or not President Obama “loved America,” he never failed to speak glowingly about the country and its political system, saying “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” and “in no other country is my story even possible.” Certainly those statements illustrate a belief in a system worth protecting from foreign threats. Yet as Peter Beinart noted in The Atlantic on July 4th, it is hard to imagine Ocasio-Cortez, or any progressive of her caliber for that matter, saying something similar. Thus, unlike Trump’s immigration policy, his passivity regarding defense of democracy and actions in assistance of its demise have failed to provoke Ocasio-Cortez and others on the far left to speak out.
When President Woodrow Wilson announced America’s entrance into World War I with the intention of making “the world safe for democracy,” he became the first U.S. President to articulate a belief in defending the American system of government both at home and abroad. Trump’s victory however symbolized the end of a Republican Party that cared about Wilson’s conviction of protecting American ideals and institutions in the face of foreign threats. Apparently this view now constitutes “the future” of the Democratic Party as well.
Third, Ocasio-Cortez’s platform lacked criticism of Trump’s dismissal and undermining of American multilateral military alliances such as NATO. Additionally, she has not discussed in any of her post-Election Day interviews the effect those actions have had on weakening and eroding the U.S.-led liberal order that every post-War President, including Barack Obama, has strongly supported. On the campaign trail Trump consistently complained about NATO, lamenting the fact that our European allies weren’t paying their fair share towards their defense and that the distribution of costs was “unfair, economically, to us.” Just this past week in advance of the NATO summit in Brussels, the President levied criticism at German Chancellor Angela Merkel, claiming Germany free rides off U.S security guarantees and threatening to pull back the 35,000 U.S troops deployed to Germany. Such actions are indicative of Trump’s belief that America is getting a raw deal when it comes to NATO and that the U.S would be better off avoiding the international entanglements and obligations that come with the alliance.
When it comes to scaling back U.S military commitments abroad, progressives like Ocasio-Cortez often agree with Trump. Bernie Sanders has long sought to cut American defense spending and once criticized President Obama’s plan to combat ISIS for not encouraging Middle Eastern states to “step up their military efforts and take more responsibility for the security and stability of their regions,” a statement with echoes of Trump’s rhetoric towards Europe. To quote Reihan Salam, the executive editor at the National Review, Ocasio-Cortez is actually “keeping with the fact that many on the hard left have their own objections to the status quo in U.S foreign policy.” Whether it be military interventions or alliances, progressives aren’t shy about their belief that the U.S should take a less activist role. So just as Trump has cowed the GOP into reversing and renouncing its history of support for multilateral agreements and mutual defense, if Ocasio-Cortez’s politics truly constitute the future, then the Democratic Party will soon do the same.
In 1947 when Republican Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Arthur Vandenberg declared that partisan politics should stop “at the water’s edge,” he solidified a bipartisan consensus behind Democratic President Harry Truman’s proposals to drag the U.S from its isolationist past towards an internationalist future. However President Trump’s takeover and transformation of the GOP into an inward-looking party hostile to globalization has threatened the strength of this internationalist consensus. Moreover, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the likely soon-to-be Democratic-Socialist Congresswoman from New York, who openly and proudly opposes Trump on domestic issues, has yet to criticize the President and GOP for this radical shift. If the Republicans are the party of Trump and Ocasio-Cortez is the Democrats’ future, then there may yet be a bipartisan consensus on foreign affairs. It just isn’t the one Truman and Vandenberg had in mind.
The belief that the U.S should abdicate its world leadership arises for different reasons on the Trumpian Right and the Progressive Left. While Trump believes America is better off when it doesn’t concern itself with the interests of the rest of the world, progressives believe the world is better off when America doesn’t. Both positions however are intensely flawed. There is widespread agreement amongst economists on the benefits of free trade for all parties involved. American democracy, imperfect as it may be, is a stronger force for good in the world than Russian or Chinese autocracy. And without military alliances to defend Western liberalism from Moscow and Beijing, there is no way to guarantee its survival. Hopefully one of America’s two parties will recognize this reality before it’s too late.

July 22, 2018 0 comment

Featured Freedom of Speech Globalization Immigration Interview Journalism Populism UCLA and the World United States

An interview with Fareed Zakaria

written by Andrea Zachrich

Dr. Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s show GPS, a columnist for the Washington Post, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, and a New York Times bestselling author of three books. Born in India, he immigrated to the United States to attend university and went on to receive his Bachelor’s of Arts from Yale and a PhD degree in Philosophy of Government from Harvard. Dr. Zakaria was invited to UCLA to give the annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture in Journalism and International Relations. He was kind enough to sit down with members of The Generation before he gave the lecture and answer our questions about immigration, democracy, and journalism with patience, insight, and humor.

Immigration:

The Generation’s first question for Dr. Zakaria concerned the relationship between immigration and populism that he has explained in one of his past articles for the Washington Post, and why this issue is so potent at this particular moment. Zakaria noted a visible rise of “right wing populism” in countries that are both lagging behind economically and those that are succeeding. Yet regardless of their economic prospects, “the one common trait you see is immigration.” What’s to blame for the backlash? Zakaria says its the forces of globalized capitalism.

“Globalized capitalism is a very dynamic but destructive force. We always think about the upside, the new products, the new companies, but we forget about the downside, the destruction of companies and communities. Now that’s what gives [globalized capitalism] its power, its dynamism, its productivity. But there’s a real downside…. And in that, when you go through a particularly accelerated phase of it, which I think we’ve been going through ever since the end of the Cold War, I think it’s easy to accept the globalization of goods, of services, of capital, these are all abstractions. But the globalization of people, that’s very hard.”

In addition, Zakaria observes, paradoxically, that places without many immigrants have the strongest reaction to immigration.

“Where is it that you find this rhetoric about [Donald Trump’s proposed border] wall has played the best? Its in rural Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. These are not places that have vast numbers of immigrants. The places that have immigrants- New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the Bay Area – they’re fine, because it’s much easier to fear the unknown, the image, the stories, the scare tactics.”

The combination of the globalization of people and the fear of the unknown person are the causes of this current rise in populism worldwide. Furthermore, Zakaria finds political leadership to be at fault for the populism rearing its head today as opposed to in the past.

“At the end of the day, political leadership matters. You have had one party, and within one party, one person, who systematically drummed up this fear. And of course he had something to play with, there was a great deal to play with in terms of the underlying anxiety. But that’s what leadership does for better or for worse. It takes that raw material and then it can fashion it as it wishes. And it’s always easier to scare people. It’s always much easier to scare people than to give them hope.”

Dr. Zakaria is, of course, referring to President Donald Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric. Throughout his candidacy and presidency, Trump has spewed rhetoric almost daily about building a wall on the Mexican-American border and implementing a ban on Muslim travel to the U.S. According to Zakaria these campaign promises exacerbated fears of immigration and helped lead to the rise populism in the United States.

We also asked Dr. Zakaria about struggles of assimilation in Europe and the United States for new immigrants. He discussed the differences between the two regions, and how he believes it to be much easier for immigrants to assimilate into American society, calling it an “assimilation machine”, and noting that “as an immigrant I can tell you the great challenge for American immigrants, for me with my kids, is to make them retain some small element of the old culture. That is the biggest challenge.” This is in contrast to Europe, where there is “a certain degree of multicultural relativism that said everyone can just live their own lives and practice their own practices even if they were very illiberal practices” and that Europeans have “tended to neglect the issue [of immigration]”. He goes on to make the point that in the U.S every immigrant is trying to assimilate, that every immigrant in the U.S wants themselves and their children to speak English as there are huge economic incentives for doing so. As opposed to the xenophobic rhetoric of President Trump, who often portrays immigrants as the “other,” and as foreigners seeking to come into the country bringing elements of the old culture here, Zakaria paints a different picture of immigrants. He describes immigrants not as people who wish to come to the U.S and retain an “other-ness” but as people who wish to become American and assimilate into the country’s culture.

Democracy:

In the face of numerous events at UCLA that have been canceled or disrupted by student protestors, The Daily Bruin reporter Megan Daley asked Dr. Zakaria about the excessive “political correctness” that is often at fault for such disruptions on university campuses across the country. These students subscribe to a type of individual identity politics that Zakaria finds detrimental to free speech. Last year, for example, Bruin Republicans had planned on hosting conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, but canceled the event amid fears of protests similar to those that occured at UC Berkeley and UC Davis that turned violent and forced the event’s cancellation.

In relation to these events on our campus and others, Zakaria spoke about how excessive political correctness can be detrimental to the university’s goal of creating an environment for discussion and academic discourse. While acknowledging that he understood the impulses of historically marginalized groups who “feel that they want to be full participants, that they want to have their voices heard, [that] they don’t want to be demeaned or marginalized again, or excluded again,” Zakaria argued that the instinct to shut out and not listen to speech they find offensive is harmful and might actually make that speech more attractive to people who see this type of inflammatory speech as “ideas that nobody wants to hear”. He argues that the problem with completely shutting down these ideas “is that the nature of an intellectual arena has to be one that allows open, unfettered conversation, discussion, and debate. And the best answer to bad ideas are good ideas, not to shut down those ideas, to not hear them”. He then broadened his explanation of what he believed to be a systematic problem with the way politics are framed on college campuses.

“People want politics to be primarily about their experience, their identity rather than a shared experience and a common identity. Because if it becomes all about your identity, first of all it becomes impossible to have a common, joint conversation that includes everybody. Secondly, if it’s all about your identity, almost by definition, nobody else can understand it as well as you, so your answers are always going to be right. And again that can’t be the basis on which you can construct a policy. So I think there’s almost a bigger problem which is that politics has become very narrowly personal and very narrowly about these kind of identity issues”.

More recently on February 26th, US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin came to UCLA to give the Arnold C. Harberger Lecture. I attended the lecture that afternoon after the Generation interviewed him. During the lecture, protestors were extremely disrespectful and hissed at Mnuchin as he was speaking. He attempted to laugh off this hissing, and even addressed a protestor directly about why he was hissing, to which the protester replied “I think you’re full of shit!”. These protests made Mnuchin very hostile, flustered, and essentially prevented him from discussing what he came here to discuss, which was United States economic policy and international sanctions. This is an excellent example of Dr. Zakaria’s discussion of identity politics and how this type of politics can prevent academic discourse. These students were only reflecting on their own personal identity as people who feel as though they have been harmed by the Trump administration, and failed to allow for a productive academic discussion. You may not agree with Mnuchin’s policy or business decisions, but shutting down his ideas and not allowing them to be heard only further polarizes people and does not fight “bad ideas” with “good ideas” as Dr. Zakaria advocates academic discussion should do.

Given that that the U.S was recently downgraded from a “full-democracy” to a “flawed-democracy” by The Economist’s Intelligence Unit, Zakaria also discussed the concept of an illiberal democracy as described in his book “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.” A liberal democracy is one that we find in places such as the United States, where there is protection of individual liberties from the majority and the government and popular participation in democratic processes. An illiberal democracy is one that keeps its democratic processes but loses its individual liberties and checks and balances. Dr. Zakaria finds this lose of liberal democracy in the United States problematic on “two levels”, for Americans and non-Americans alike. Using disenfranchisement of African American voters as an example to illustrate how this is a problem for citizens, Zakaria stated:

“We are the only democracy that I know of, I haven’t done an extensive study, but certainly the only advanced democracy I can think of where there are systematic efforts to disenfranchise people, to ensure that certain parts of the public don’t vote. You can see this happening today as the supreme court relaxed it’s interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. A whole series of states put in place laws that had only one purpose, which was to make it harder for certain groups of people, primarily African Americans to vote. That’s a pretty big flaw to be living with in a democracy”.

The Supreme Court Case Zakaria is referring to, Shelby County v. Holder (2013), struck down sections 4b and 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which required states to get preclearance from the federal government before changing their voting practices and declared which states must obtain this preclearance based on analysis of past discrimination. Since the decision, states such as Texas and North Carolina among others have enacted Voter ID laws and gerrymandered districts to disadvantage minority voters.

Zakaria then discussed how the downgrade of American democracy is damaging on an international level:

“When you look at violations of democratic rights, of civil rights, of human rights around the world, over the last 25 years certainly, the United States has been a pretty consistent and strong voice opposing. It didn’t always do as much as it could have but this is one thing I think Americans can take a great deal of pride in that the United States was always a voice cataloging these issues and highlighting them”.

This is in stark contrast to what Zakaria sees happening now.

“Today we have a completely different atmosphere. Almost every authoritarian ruler in the world today that has in some way attacked, imprisoned, bankrupted or punished members of the media in his own country has cited Donald Trump’s use of the word ‘fake news’… So here we have our situation where the United States is becoming a role model for an illiberal democracy rather than for democracy, human rights, liberty, and the free expression of ideas. I cannot think of a time in recent memory when you have had dictators around the world using the United States as an example to justify its practices.”

Leaders in Syria, Cambodia, Libya, and China have all used Trump’s term of “fake news” to deny or downplay atrocities in their country or silence political opposition. Rhetoric from leaders of the United States has global influence, and this can either be used to promote democracy or to weaken it. As Dr. Zakaria points out, it currently appears to be doing the latter.

Journalism:

The students from Daniel Pearl Memorial High School asked Dr. Zakaria about the atmosphere when covering stories at the White House during the presidency of Donald Trump. While he does acknowledge that “it’s a great time to be a journalist because the public is fascinated by the news”, he finds covering the White House difficult for two reasons. “One of which is a lot of the interest frankly is in the circus of what is going on in Washington”. He goes on to compare now with what it was like shortly following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, people were concerned about policy and why these events were happened, but “what now we are witnessing is the fascination with the circus of the Trump administration and Trump personally”,

The second reason Zakaria finds it frustrating to cover the White House is because of the hostility towards the press coming from the White House.

“You are living, working in a circumstance where the President of the United States and the administration are systematically and actively hostile to the press, hacking it, threatening legal punishments, non legal punishments, demeaning it, and that’s a very weird atmosphere to live in.”

As discussed earlier, the term “fake news” has spread to leaders around the globe thanks to Trump’s. In January, President Trump handed out “Fake News Awards” to organizations who had given him unfavorable coverage. Dr. Zakaria says these attacks on the press can be especially dispiriting because the United States is meant to be one of the freest countries in the world and the oldest constitutional democracy. He also postulates on what this attitude may mean for the future of democracy in America:

“You think to yourself it’s fine, the institutions are strong but you know, they are only strong until they collapse, until they get weak. I’ve seen that happen in other countries. America is not somehow you know endowed by the creator with some kind of magic force field that will prevent that so that’s the worrying part about this”.

To conclude the interview, I asked Dr. Zakaria what advice he had for novice international affairs journalists such as ourselves. He emphasized that the challenge of writing about foreign places and people in the United States is making Americans care about it. Zakaria elaborates:

“I think we have a huge problem in this country in that we are a vast continent surrounded by two benign neighbors and two vast oceans and so it’s easy to think that the world doesn’t affect the United States and that you can imagine an America First or America Alone agenda, but the reality is that we are deeply interconnected with the world, as we should be.”

Yet Zakaria thinks this problem can be overcome by making the issues more salient to readers. As journalists, he believes we need to show this connection and explain why these problems are important to an American audience. While broader issues such as ethnic rivalry or sectarianism often catch people’s attention, sometimes just “telling a great human story” allows people the opportunity to relate. He concluded, “just recognizing those people out there who look different, and sound different, and worship different gods, you know, there’s often an element of common humanity that we forget.”

Dr. Zakaria was incredibly articulate and a pleasure to speak with. I was both impressed and grateful that he took the time answer all of our questions thoughtfully and thoroughly despite the fact he usually works with higher profile individuals, including presidents and prime ministers. His comments and ideas on immigration, democracy, and journalism come from years of experience as a journalist, and this experience showed. Many thanks to him for taking the time to sit down and talk with us.

March 28, 2018 0 comment