Decreed Quiet

If there is going to be a discussion of the role of social media in spreading violence, with the goal of making the point that it's now reasonable to suppress online speech in the name of a safe society (for some definition of "safe"), I would submit that domestic violence is a much more pressing problem than political violence.

Political violence makes headlines precisely because of its rarity. That, and the fact that it tends to befall people other than the usual victims. Domestic violence, on the other hand, is newsworthy only locally, if at all, specifically because it is so common, even if it's only about 20% of the overall homicides that take place in the United States. Unless it's a wealthy or a celebrity family, it's simply background noise.

Political violence tends to be regarded in the same way as (suburban) school shootings; political figures, like suburban schoolchildren, are presumed to have an entitlement to "safety" that large swathes of the general public (including many married women) are not granted. It's only certain violence that's "not supposed to happen." But if society is going to be okay with the rest of it, the sudden hand-wringing over specific incidents feels like people attempting to make the things that frighten them into public concerns. Which seems a tough sell in a nation that's demonstrated a remarkable ability to ignore the problems of millions of people through judicious application of the Just World Fallacy.

There's no reason why, however, if the propensity for violence is transmitted from one person to another via uncontrolled online forums, that domestic violence wouldn't move from person to person this way. It doesn't take long to find examples of violent sexism online... one doesn't really even have to look for them most of the time. There are any number of male-dominated online spaces where casual, and sometimes unthinking, justifications for violence against girlfriends and wives are nearly guaranteed to pop up. Stopping the spread of such speech, even if it only cut the rates of intimate partner abuse by a quarter would likely do much more than dropping the rate of politically-relevant killings in the United States to zero.

Humanity has managed to be remarkably violent long before the advent of social media. Accordingly, the idea that clamping down on Facebook and the like will make it easier to maintain peace seems to be wishful thinking. And many people suspect that the Trump administration understands as much. While much of the criticism is clearly partisanship talking, the President is open enough in his opinion that his political rivals should lack the equal protection of the law that a suspicion that this is the actual end goal doesn't seem unreasonable.

But it's worth pointing out that there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for the idea that protecting everyday women is a better reason to go after freedom of speech than protecting the Conservative celebrity class among the Republican base. And I think that this is less about overt sexism than it is about partisanship. For many people, the difference between a random crazy person and a "radicalized," politically-motivated assassin is the politics of the target, and therefore the presumed politics of the killer. Politics is something so important that only other people would kill for it. As I noted before, domestic violence is widespread enough that it's everywhere.

And that, I suspect, really makes the difference here. Cracking down on social media companies in order to force them to police the speech of political opponents is just that, a way of going after political opponents, people on the wrong side of a high-stakes debate over the future of the nation. Looking to the social media (and regular media) landscape to protect the public at large tends to implicate the public at large. And it's common for people to avoid mirrors when they think the reflections won't be flattering.