The Case of Ms. Emily Ratajkowski — When Intolerance is the Free Speech of Morons
After having read on social media the series of insults and sexual “invitations” hurled at Ms. Ratajkowski, who committed the unspeakable crime of involving herself in politics, I thought it timely to re-publish the following article. I wrote this a while ago.
Insults, vicious innuendos, slander, false claims, hatred, verbal abuse of every kind. The comment sections on news blogs, on social media and even in the mainstream media, have become a new sporting outlet for the Morons of the world, who take pleasure at spewing their venom at everything that moves. They see no difference between killing an invader on their gaming system and shooting down the character of a real person on the internet. But it’s the price we have to pay so that even the most unsophisticated foul mouths can have their say on the news stories of the day.
Intolerance has been elevated to an art form, and there’s a daily spectacle of insults directed at people, groups, nationalities and races. On occasion, we can also witness what I now call “mob journalism”, by which a writer gives such a one-sided treatment to a story, and presents it with enough nasty innuendos, that the article ends up inciting these Morons to post the most spiteful comments they can think of against an individual, an opinion or a belief.
It’s sort of a throwback to 18th century European salons, where on some nights a spontaneous contest developed, with the unavowed objective being of finding who among the guests could hurl the most injurious reply to another member. It was the kind of evening Voltaire felt at ease with, but which Jean-Jacques Rousseau despised wholeheartedly. The only difference with our era is that participants were actually literate, and there was more intelligence around that table than can be found today in one full page of outbursts on the Internet.
How did we get there?
First we must look briefly at how the Internet has changed the world of journalism. We all know about the traumatic effects it had on the wallets of the media’s corporate parents and, inevitably, on the profession itself. Everyone, without exception, had to adapt rapidly or die slowly. And then things got a bit more complicated when a new breed of “news writers”, called bloggers, started demanding to be treated as journalists, or close to it. Many of them knew a thing or two about various fields of interest, so why not?
The problem was that they knew close to nothing of the profession and of the rules, written and unwritten, governing it. But an interactive revolution was taking place, and it demanded the democratization of information, whatever that meant. Not surprisingly, a lot of people started to think that the mainstream media was finally losing its grip on the pole position.
There were long debates, public and private, on how organized media and professional journalists could and would adapt to this new reality, how they would save their own jobs, and how they would respond to the scores who, as soon as they had opened an account for a free blog on the Internet, were asking for the right to play with them in their sandbox.
One result of these deliberations and self-analyses was that professional journalists did adapt. They simply inundated the market with their own blogs, they opened Facebook and Twitter accounts, and gradually, like all the other bloggers out there, they made sure a large and visible section of their websites was reserved for readers’ comments. Mainstream media went the same way, giving a lot of space to their readers, and even giving away “medals” and “points” to those who blabbered the most. This practice is still in use today. It is democracy, writ and large.
That’s when a new career was born: the Internet Moron, who instead of blogging spends an inordinate amount of time trying to put his fictitious name under as many articles as possible, or in as many professional blogs as possible, and who is often capable of the worst verbal excesses against anyone holding views that he despises or just disagrees with.
And so it happens that, while society was trying to clamp down on student bullying on the Net, and while serious newspapers and television news channels put in place rules of behaviour, precisely to keep these nasty people out of their websites, many news bloggers and a fringe in the mainstream media persisted not only in welcoming “tough” language and a colourful variety of slander, but they also allowed and encouraged anonymity.
We can always debate the merits of anonymity and colourful language in the defense of fundamental rights when stuck inside some nasty authoritarian regime, but in a free society such as ours, we should be able to disagree publicly, and in a respectful manner, and we should certainly have the courage of our opinion by putting our name under it.
These websites, and these media, where character assassination has become a daily show in the comment sections, swear that they’re doing it, and letting it happen, in the name of freedom of speech. Frankly, I doubt that giving to the ignorant the protection of anonymity, and to the bully moron the freedom to disgorge all the indignities he can think of, does anything particularly good for freedom of speech. The risk is much higher that their victims will prefer to shut up rather than enjoy their free speech at such a cost.
It is really not funny at all to hear those Morons insist on their right to anonymity as a way to safeguard their “freedom of speech”, while they conduct character assassinations on the internet against anyone who uses his or her freedom of speech.
A while ago, I had the honour, not once but twice, of tasting the sour fruits of a special treatment at the hands of one mob journalist, as well as the vicious comments she managed to provoke from some of her readers (and from many other readers, once her attack had been picked up and copied by “news” bloggers).
It is important to understand that a journalist’s success on the Internet is measured in various ways, but one very important metric is “readers’ engagement” (number of readers on a given page; number of shares, of tweets and retweets; on-site comments, etc.). The first story must have been good for her, because she later came back for more.
As for the Morons, their version of free speech is that “everything goes”. Yesterday it was “Hey I’m on the teevee!”; today it’s “Hey I’m going viral!”
The last thing we need now is for mainstream and social media to incite and encourage this type of gross behaviour. While transgressing every ethics of the journalistic profession, they are giving in to, and even leading, the most vicious instincts of today’s and tomorrow’s troublesome moron and bullies.
More deliberations, and more self-analyses, are in order.
P.S.: I should add, in the case of Ms. Ratajkowski, that I don’t see much difference between the pigs of Cologne who grouped together to assault women while they were walking by and the cowards who hide behind fictitious names to congratulate each other when one of them has the audacity to say “Shut up and show us your tits” because she had just given a political speech. But while authorities are trying to crack down on the former, social media, it seems, is encouraging the latter.
