Mark Twain advised us to “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” Good advice, perhaps, but not the end of the story. This kind of acquiescence in the face of injustice did not impress Martin Luther King, Jr., who said that “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” King also warned that “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict” and “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
These are two great and wise Americans, and both were keen moral observers of our society. In Twain’s case, his quote wasn’t intended to be taken entirely seriously, although he was issuing an important warning. What’s changed since his day is that ordinary citizens don’t need to purchase ink by the barrel to reach the eyeball’s of millions of people. We have blogs and the Internet, now. Those who seek to combat injustice are no longer bringing spitballs to a tank fight.
That is, unless the Supreme Court has the tanks. I can get quite anguished about how far to go to protect free speech, and issuing threats on social media should not be legally protected in all circumstances. Certainly, making threats to kill that are perceived by the proposed victim as credible has to be crossing the line.
But I also have noticed that governments across the world like to censor (or attempt to censor) social media whenever they are facing popular unrest. And there is a temptation to try to draw distinctions between eyewitnesses on Facebook and Twitter and the “press,” which is sometimes defined in a way that excludes anyone who doesn’t work for a large corporate entity.
What I do for the Washington Monthly isn’t really materially different from what I’ve been doing for ten years at Booman Tribune, and the way I am treated legally shouldn’t be any different in the two cases.
It’s a very difficult subject. In the case of people making threats, I fear that we’ll use our legitimate desire to stop the next school shooting to aggressively go after dozens of teenagers who were just having a bad day and wrote some ill-advised and impulsively intemperate things. Maybe we even want to err on the side of caution, knowing that we’ll be ruining some people’s lives in the process.
But I get nervous whenever the Supreme Court starts to consider the limits of free speech. I don’t want to go back to the day when you had to buy ink by the barrel to get heard in this society.
