As the pieces of shrapnel continue to whizz past our ears from the on-going Facebook bombshell involving a shady British firm, Cambridge Analytica, that has mined private information from no less than 50 million users without their knowledge, the more people are becoming aware of the fine line that divides free speech from hate speech. This can be seen from the perspective of both the social media and the everyday exchange of political thought.
Last week, three high-profile activists of the right-wing group "Generation Identity" were banned from entering the UK and even held in so-called detention centres only months after the group had opened its British section. Free speech? They have of course been dishing out the venom on social media having had to face fierce left-wing opposition from irate "Antifa" members at public meetings and rallies. Hate speech at both ends?
All the social media rumpus circumnavigating our lives today simply shows how humanity has decidedly gone by the old Maltese maxim of "iddaħħal il-lifa' f'ħobbok" (loosely explained as placing the poisonous viper into your own bosom). What once was reserved for the beer-box platform on the party lorry at bleak corner meetings attended by a score of bored and boring followers has been turned into a global hurricane. This has shockingly given Americans their Donald, the Brits their Brexit, Italians their current extreme right-wing conundrum, while sustaining many other not so plausible plots and subplots across the world.
What is undoubtedly a wonderful instrument of communication almost two decades into the 21st century is now also a highly dangerous weapon of mass destruction. It is not ruled or regulated by ideology, but by economic and financial considerations. The horrific Facebook revelations have shown, for example, how both Democrats and Republicans have exploited it in the US. Just thinking about what has been done and is being done in the war zones of the Middle East and elsewhere gives one the shivers. It is not just fake news and fake pictures, but also fake experts and correspondents, fake stories from the frontline and fake actions and reactions, fake bloggers, fake developments and other fake things that include theatrical re-enactments, as was the infamous picture the unfortunate Syrian boy whose face was later discovered to have been made up with fake blood. Hate speech in photographic horror mode.
It is impossible to bring this spiralling globe to a halt, give it a sensible break, or give it a breather, because everyone everywhere is doing it, of course at different levels of pace and persuasion and in different scenarios. Everyone is screaming about the right to free speech just as everyone howls in protest when the hate bits are removed or when someone understandably opts to take legal action against them. The examples are multitudinous, many also on the local front where we have witnessed people taking exception to the fact that someone says enough is enough and chooses to take court action over things written about him or her. Why? Because in the digital psyche it seems you are expected to treat free speech and hate speech as the same. They are not. Free speech is a right to cherish. Hate speech is a bullet between the eyes.
Free speech carries with it the burden of personal responsibility. If you let it transmute into hate speech, as it can so easily do and as we have unfortunately seen happening in most electronic news online and blogs, local and foreign, you should not expect the injured parties to smile back and say thank you. To take a metaphorical page from the current Malta news diary, even having monuments erected to your glory has no posthumous assurance. However, I would certainly opt for a monument to free speech any day. It would also serve as a much-needed reminder against hate speech as we float haplessly along in this hypocritical age.
There are distinct ways on how to criticise and reveal, how to carry out investigations and how to deal with people, whether they have a public profile or not. Hate is not an ingredient we can have in the baking process of free speech. There will always be the vipers scrambling across the bosoms of nations everywhere, but having them isolated, taking them for granted and for what they are, hoping they will eventually end up biting their own tails, could possibly offer some respite from this frustration in the digital jungle. Tolerance is a virtue they seem to prefer to ignore, so torture them with more tolerance, say I.
Crossing the fine line is also a temptation by way of reaction and it would be unwise on the part of all those of us involved in the media to take the sanctimonious attitude of not actually having been, or still live, in a glasshouse of our own like the rest.
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Californian inspiration
It is to be admitted a lot of good also comes out of the United States that the rest of the world is inspired by, take up and adopt. The growing battle against plastics in our oceans has been given a timely injection following the unanimous decision of the city of Malibu in California to impose a ban on plastic cutlery and straws along its 21 miles of Pacific coastline.
Campaigners in this one of the most iconic beach cities in the world, seen in countless Hollywood films and television series, have rightly said the ban should be an inspiration to communities everywhere. Malibu had earlier banned plastic bags and Styrofoam containers as part of the strategy to eliminate single-use plastics.
Needless to say, the Malibu ban has led to some grumbling about quality and costs from businesses in the city as they are now expected to provide straws, knives, forks, spoons and stirrers made of alternatives to plastic, such as wood, bamboo and paper, but comply they will. In the US alone, it is estimated that 500 million plastic straws are produced every day.
Small and enclosed as it is by comparison, the Mediterranean faces an even worse future unless something is urgently done. The Malibu example should indeed serve as an inspiration - from a tourism zone to another one. Perhaps tiny Malta should be the first with a massive initiative on this one too.