This was published 7 years ago
Ghosts of extreme free speech could haunt Twitter
My mum took me to see the original Ghostbusters, and it occurs to me I should probably take her to see the remake. It's her birthday this week. She might like it. We saw Version 1.0 at the Wintergarden in Ipswich and whenever I hear the theme song decades later it takes me back to that Saturday matinee.
I do wonder what she would make of the sociopathic douchebros who went after Leslie Jones - the African American comic who stars in the remake. I suspect she would disapprove of their poor manners. Mums are like that.
It's a pity, I think, that comment threads, Facebook discussions and Twitter feeds aren't moderated by everyone's mothers, because the world would probably be a much nicer place if they were.
If that sounds naff ... well, OK, it is. But it's worth pondering how much of modern life is made awful by the open sewer that passes for public discourse around everything from politics to ... well, everything.
Leslie Jones as Patty Tolan in Ghostbusters.
Because everything is politics now, isn't it? The Ghostbusters remake can't just be a quirky reboot of a movie that is fondly remembered, but hardly high culture. It's legacy was arguably done much greater damage by the abysmal Ghostbusters 2, released in 1989. If anybody should have been pursued by an angry mob it was the studio execs in charge of that stinker.
But no, because the gimmick of this re-release is an all female cast it must be fed into the shredders of the culture war. The film's genuine strengths and weaknesses - it undoubtedly has both - get lost in the shrieking banshee theatre of Left vs Right.
This reflexive politicisation of everything makes us dumb, and the more we succumb to it the dumberer we get. It's a problem for both sides. For every arch conservative trollumnist making bank for Rupert Murdoch, somewhere online there is a mirror image progressive being just as awful. The Right has something approaching a stranglehold on the old media establishment because newspapers are legacy businesses buttressing established power. That's why many old media commentators are so obsessed with disparaging the so-called Twitterati - because it's a channel they don't control and its messaging is diametrically opposed to the political and economic interests they serve. There's actually nothing wrong with that, but unfortunately the message of both sides is often lost in the increasingly crude ugliness of their rhetoric.
I'm not so much talking about a really unpleasant column by some appalling lackwit here. Right or left, in the old media they at least tend to be constrained by law. The problem is the rhetorical violence inspired and amplified by the loudest of these voices, by those with the largest audience.
You see it at its worst on Twitter, probably because the format reduces everything to essences. But the ugliness is everywhere. From YouTube comments to the threads below blogs and online columns.
A couple of years ago we made a decision at Brisbane Times, that we wouldn't be publishing every comment. I wrote a blog about it. We had to censor many of the comments. Meta, huh? But many comments you just can't publish, because they're defamatory or full of poorly spelled obscenities. On the other hand, others don't get published because they're simply abusive. Coherent and grammatically correct, but violently abusive.
Violent abuse is not what we talk about when we talk about "free speech". But it seems to be what some people think of as the natural and legitimate end game of free speech. It's not. The free exchange of ideas can be hard, even rhetorically bruising, without descending into the cage fight that characterises so much online discourse.
The standard for acceptable discourse is not hard to discern. Ask yourself before you post a comment not just, "Would I be willing to say this to someone's face?" but, "Would I be likely to get punched in the face if I said this?"
If you would, perhaps you should think about rephrasing.
For Twitter, this could become an existential problem. It is not the friendly place it used to be. Once upon a time it honestly did feel like your neighbourhood bar, where you could roll in for a drink and a chat without fear of getting mugged or caught up in a five alarm brawl. It doesn't have to be an echo chamber. But unless it does something to radically enforce the sort of civility we expect in real life, more and more people will leave.
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