Is It Over For Freedom On The Internet?
Today, members from Spark AR Community of creators on Facebook, woke up with some controversial news:
The policy update prompted a heated debate between many creators. Why? Why are we making a big deal about this? Are we into plastic surgery? Well, not me, personally, but you know why matters? It matters because for many of us, it makes no sense. It’s not cohesive with Facebook or Instagram storyline at all.
This isn’t about plastic surgery. This is about FREEDOM. Is about preserving the most valuable and unique thing we own: Who we are. Our individuality. But that’s being taken away from us, when the minor possibility to offend the public surfaces.
These days anyone gets offended by anything, and due to political correctness, demagogy, fear of being call out, and cancel culture, it translates into an automatic ban. YOU’RE CANCELED.
Facebook haven’t explained to us yet or given any example of what exactly they consider “associated to plastic surgery”, but you can get the idea, right? Will they remove and ban all face deformation filters? Or only those who their reviewers consider offensive from their point of view? Only pop culture related plastic surgery? Or sci fi plastic surgery will also be going away? Only occidental beauty standards point of view related plastic surgery? And as another creator from the community said: “it’s short sighted”.
At least they don’t deny they have some more thinking to do:
I wrote an article for the first interactive art piece I made: Usuario (User). A 3D installation that got an Innovation award from Buenos Aires’s Secretaría de Cultura (Culture Department) back in 2016, and I’d like to revisit the piece, since it goes about how we could be FREE in a virtual space. How we could explore multiple identities with our users, and how they became a prosthesis from ourselves, that sometimes, is more true and real that the identity we project offline.
For example, there are some countries where you can be killed for being gay, or for speaking about certain things if you’re a woman. We’re privileged in different degrees in comparison with people who suffer from real life threatening oppression in the world.
But the internet was our free space. It was a mask, yes, indeed. A mask that served us to be able to BE TRUE to ourselves. Express ourselves beyond our bodies, beyond our physical realities, explore the trans-human and the fantasy. Because not everyone has the opportunity to escape physically from an oppressive environment. Run away, and express they true selves. But the internet provide us with a space to explore sexuality, thoughts, and also get some validation, getting to interact with people with similar values and beliefs, be ourselves without being judged, or being judged, yes, because I’m not gonna deny online bullying, but you can delete your account and create another, or migrate to another virtual space. You cannot do that in the offline world when your life is in danger.
How many people would die from depression because their family is cruel and don’t understand them, if there wasn’t a stranger on the other end of the world supporting them? Telling them “you matter” and “there’s nothing wrong with you”. This is why is so important for me keeping the internet as free as possible. And why I won’t sit back and let privileged self centered people take it away from us in the name of demagogy.
I also want to paraphrase some ideas from the chilean author and Phd Axel Kaiser. He talks about us living in the age of political correctness, “freedom of speech, and the right to offend”. So, to summarize, the concept is about how we, as free human beings, have the right to express ourselves, even when that can — and will, with over sensitivity spreading over the world like a disease — offend someone else. And he points out some very clever thoughts about how offending can be good to evolve as a society in many cases. He says, in spanish, but I’ll try my best to translate the idea: “gay marriage offended lots of people, women voting offended lots of people, slavery abolition offended lots of people” and there’s so much true in it that it hurts. Because where will we be, as a society, if we were so scared to speak up because we would offend one, or thousands, or millions of people? Think about this. It’s important that we have the freedom and the right to offend, otherwise, how many vital ideas are being stop from spreading? And the only people who benefits from it, it’s the people who benefits from us as a society living in fear, being silenced and being one against each other or cancelling our voices all the time to fit in. I’m not gonna get deeper into that. But I encourage you to think about it.
Now, getting back to plastic surgery ban policy. They said they want a “positive” and “healthy” experience. It’s safe to suspect they’re doing this for demagogy and to “cover their ass”, because Facebook has been focus of huge controversy for the past years. Just google if you’re not familiar with it, but you probably heard about it. But of course, their storyline, is that they care. They care for impressionable teenagers. They care for low self esteem people that will go get surgery because they hate they face and they’ve seen how instagrammeable they look with the filter. They care for mental health. Well, guys, sorry to break it to you, but you built this monster. It was never about the filters. Don’t try to shame and ban creators now. I made a face deformation filter and it went viral, organically. I had no original exposure and I didn’t even advertised it once. It went viral because this is the world we live in. This is world culture now. We didn’t introduced nothing new. Other filters don’t go viral because they don’t relate to culture. Art imitates life, right? And banning filters is not a solution to the problem. If you really cared about it. But why do I and so many other users suspect you don’t really care about it?
Let me quote (and translate) some ideas from Uruguayan Neuropsychologist Silvia Perez Fonticiella, which I consulted on this matter:
“Internet is a semiotic space, a mole in which there are signs, expectations, and projections of meanings and desires that are managed individually and collectively, in the society of each historical-social era. The Internet user, the viewer, the audience is not passive, internet content is actively co-built between users and developers. Perhaps it is fair to say that the developer is the one who has been able to “read”, decode better, the deepest needs, desires and passions of the society of his time.” Silvia Perez Fonticiella
“The belief that plastic surgery filters prompts users to get plastic surgery, or alter their bodies in any way, it’s simplistic and unknowing of the nature of the human psique. If we support this belief, we also have to forbid war games, because under that generalization, we would believe that a kid that spends many hours playing war games will end up being a serial killer or terrorist.” Silvia Perez Fonticiella
So, under this belief, is Facebook planning on banning plastic surgery ads also? What about the Kardashian? Because a lot of us would love to look like them, and there are tons of people running to get surgery to look like them. Will you ban beautiful people? People with plastic surgery? Will you ban rich people? Vacation pictures? Because for sure it’s not good for people with low self esteem’s mental’s health, currently working two jobs, to see pictures of other people vacations. I don’t think you do. Because you cannot start banning everything that triggers people, or there will be nothing left in the platform (and maybe that’s why most young people is migrating away from Facebook and Instagram into TikTok anyway).
What’s the point of freedom? Having a choice. You can choose not to follow, not to watch, disconnect. You can. But once you ban, there’s really not much choice, right?
There were also some concerns about what the platform considers unhealthy and negative.
Other user implies that there’s no place for dystopia and unclassified faces in the platform, citing a Rachel Syme excerpt.
Or are you saying there’s no room for comedy and fun in your platform anymore?
Unless is under your terms. That sounds a little bit like a dictatorship of ideology to me. And it’s ok. It’s your platform. You can do this. We’ll just continue to leave. Migrate to another virtual space where we can laugh together and tolerate each other under the policy of freedom of speech, and understand that DIVERSITY is natural. Diversity of sexuality, of capacities, of color, of thought, of speech, of bodies, of faces.
Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Please Internet makers, stop taking the worst from reality into our virtual spaces.
Kindly,
Florencia Solari
Disclaimer: The screenshots are meant as examples of users concerns made in Spark AR Creators original post. That does not imply these users agree with my thoughts, and they didn’t have any involvement with this article being published. I take full responsibility for this article.
