Copy Editor
This past week my adopted home of Oregon experienced an act of unbelievable violence.
In the days since the incident, a jaded public has been searching for a sense of closure, a sense of understanding for why our nation is forced to confront senseless mass violence more frequently than ever.
The tragedy that was perpetrated on the Umpqua Community College campus has been blamed on everything from prominent loop-holes in gun control laws, to a lack of public options for mental healthcare.
In all of the soul searching, however, there is one factor that has yet to be discussed at length. That factor is freedom of speech and the World Wide Web.
The shooter took to the internet, posting about his intentions on a site called 4Chan the day before he took his own life along with the lives of nine other innocent bystanders.
For those who chose to avoid the wasteland fringes of the web, 4Chan is an imageboard based web forum (not unlike reddit) where users gather to post on a wide range of topics. While this may seem innocuous, the reality of what 4Chan has evolved into is frequently much seedier than the exterior.
Members of 4Chan were behind the recent mass leak of hacked celebrity personal photos. In fact, several boards on 4Chan are devoted exclusively to the extremely controversial practice of curating revenge porn.
The significance of the gunman posting to 4Chan wasn’t the fact that he posted about it. Many mass murderers have chosen to speak about their acts prior to committing them, and it is especially common when a student seeks to harm their peers.
The significance of the shooter posting on 4Chan is that 4Chan could speak back, and they used that ability to push a desperate individual over the edge. They spoke out in anonymity, urging this man to commit to his act, and even going so far as to give him advice about how to streamline his plan and maximize his kills.
This is horrific. The idea that a group of strangers could be so callous and desensitized as to push someone over the edge, someone who was clearly willing to pull as many souls down with him as possible. It is almost inconceivable.
The problem is, 4Chan’s right to push people over the edge is protected by the constitution. The right to free speech is one of our most well established and protected issues, and especially for members of the press, it is something considered truly American.
So how do you regulate places like 4Chan? How do you address the fact that these people may have directly contributed to the death of nine people? How do you reconcile that what 4Chan did technically wasn’t illegal, with the fact that people have been convicted of accessory to murder for less than what some of those individuals typed?
These questions are complicated and divisive.
Free speech has been used as a defense for all sorts of reprehensible words. Westboro Baptist Church uses their right to free speech to picket soldier’s funerals with offensive signs. Pedophiles sell thinly veiled how-to books on Amazon about child abduction and abuse under the guise of freedom of expression.
However, attempting to police these instances shines light on the slippery nature of free speech legislation. There have been intermittent debates about policing speech, but the consensus is always that you cannot restrict speech even if a majority of the public deem it offensive. To do so would open up avenues for anyone to seek any part of speech be restricted for a litany of reasons.
The ubiquity of the internet has only intensified this debate. As with many other discussions surrounding the constitution, technology has changed since the free speech amendment was conceived and it has drastically changed what it means to be able to say anything you want to anybody.
When our Founding Fathers created these amendments, they couldn’t envision a scenario where everyone in America would have instant and unfettered access to everyone else. They didn’t see how it would be possible for that access to be anonymous, and they certainly had no idea that the idea of free speech could one day be used to defend pedophiles and people like Charles Manson.
It is easy to be disgusted with 4Chan. It is easy to call it the cesspool of the internet. It is easy to call for the site to be shut down, and it is easy for a reasonable person to understand that what those individuals who posted support for the shooter did was no less than resigning those nine people to die.
It is hard, however, to understand that the same right that protects them also protects the discourse we enjoy here on campus. The same right protected African Americans who spoke out and marched in their quest for freedom, and protected women as one of the main precedents cited in the Roe Vs. Wade ruling.
What we need now as a country and as a community is to understand what all of this means for how we move forward in the aftermath of one of our state’s biggest tragedies. Gun control and free speech are protected by the same document, a document that was created in a different time in our country’s history, and they are equally under fire in light of this most recent shooting.
The amendments are not the important part of the constitution though.
The important part is that at one time our country came together to create a reasonable compromise of all our ideals, laying the foundation of the document we hold so dear.
If we did it once, we can do it again. We need to realize we are still that same great country, and that citizens striving for compromise are exactly what founded this country; we’ve just lost sight of what it means to be American.
