Protests in a time of media abundance
If you’ve been following the news, you’ve probably seen the evolving story about the student protests at Columbia University that led to an administrative crackdown and arrests. As often happens in cases like this, the crackdown did little to quell the protests. Quite the opposite. The students returned, and the protest has spread to universities across the U.S. as students show reciprocal solidarity. It’s an oft-repeated rhyme of history, that aggressive response to isolated uprisings often serve as publicity for those efforts and only grow them. Star systems slipping through fingers, etc.
Still, there also are chilling callbacks in history that we should be mindful of. The militarized response to peaceful protests only creates opportunities for violence that recall terrible moments in U.S. history, such as the Kent State massacre in 1970. That’s what I feel, at least when I see images of police in riot gear at the University of Texas called in to provide a show of force in response to a protest that wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity of violent. I don’t want another Kent State. None of us do. But without some calm and perspective, things like this are made possible by overreacting with a disproportionate response.
Putting aside the protests' purpose, the story on this has all the complicated layers you see in moments of activism, the kinds of things that make it hard to make sense of what is going on. You’ve got heightened national coverage that by a measure of quantity has the potential to skew our sense of how big these protests are relative to daily life on campus. You’ve got political actors and ideological media with an incentive to gin up fear and anger.
But the biggest thing I’m noticing is the impact of self-publishing. Unlike the ‘60s and ‘70s when protests existed to get the media coverage needed for message spread, protests in 2024 don’t need news media as their sole lifeline for publicity. Young people at protests have phones with social media access, and they are using their tools to post pictures, videos, and messages to an audience. These posts are sometimes the only access point for a good portion of the public that isn’t reading the news, or for those locked into an ideological information environment built by self-selection and algorithmic filtering.
I think a lot about the power dynamics of free expression, and it’s a topic we don’t give enough weight to. Free expression principles say that, yes, we should all have the right to speak without restraint. But inherent in any free discourse is the fact that we approach conversations in unequal ways. In a classroom environment, for example, I have more power than students because of the power dynamics that govern grading and academic progress, so I try to keep that in mind in conversations lest I get too strident. Similarly, administrators at universities have tremendous power over students, not just academically but also because it sets the basis for curricular and university life. Any speech uprising by students runs up against this dynamic; simply put, there is more risk for a student to speak out against a university policy because by definition they have no decision-making power and risk their status in an attempt to stand against something.
Broadly, I’d say this is a problem that cuts across all sectors of society. Citizens have less power than their leaders or from policing authority, or corporate interests. A culture of free expression isn’t merely based on equal access to the microphone (though this mere right to speak matters a great deal!), but also gives deference to those with less power and more to lose. A politician or major CEO with 240 million Twitter followers and the ability to get on TV the minute they speak simply has more opportunity to speak and the ability to be heard. When I think of free expression rights, people with power aren’t the ones to worry about. They will be fine.
So back to self-publishing. Yes, these students have more access to the microphone than ever, which tech CEOs would have you believe levels the playing field between average folks and those with power or influence in society.
It doesn’t.
Self-publishing creates an abundance of microphones, but it also fractures audiences. If you go back 35 years before the time of the public internet, publishing and broadcast ability were power, full stop, because the audience had far fewer choices. What self-publishing broke was that oligopoly, but in doing so it led to a time of custom feeds instead of appointment TV or the same subscriptions my neighbors had. This is largely how we have solved for X in a time of information abundance, because just as oligopoly has side-effects so does unfettered access to infinite streams of information.
We are speaking more to an audience of less, at least directly. The potential is greater, but in typical practice, there are few moments to tap into the limitless speech reach of the internet without acquiring influence and power in the long run. This is not to denigrate the viral people power of the internet but rather to keep it in perspective. Loud voices still drown out most speech even when the speech is free. Every Elon Musk or Donald Trump social media post can become a news story; not many folks on the planet have that kind of power.
So, more microphones are out there but it’s also harder to reach an audience of size. Couple this with declining daily news use that has been going on for five decades now, and one of my worries long has been that we are increasingly lacking a common verified information template that serves as a framework to assess all our self-published opinions and thoughts. So in situations like Columbia, we are all in media environments full of opinion and self-published reports on the ground that are of varying reliability and quality.
In times like this, media dependency theory tells us that we’d turn to the news to give us the goods on what is happening. Journalism’s methodology built on verifying before publishing can be helpful in times of confusion. But for a lot of reasons, there’s less impulse to turn to the news in times of distress compared to times past. Gutted newsrooms that are under-resourced can’t cover a complex story like this as well, and the fact that many younger people, in general, tend to be news grazers without loyalty to a particular brand means what they’re encountering on social networks is a product of algorithms and their friend networks, which is not the same thing as self-seeking nuanced, credible information out of curiosity.
This is the information status quo the student protesters are up against, and so what we’ve seen the past week has been a case study on how to grab attention. Many people who heard about the story the first time fell into knee-jerk reactions based on who they were or what they were advocating for, which is understandable given that it aligned with the information environments they constructed for themselves. The only way to disrupt that customized-yet-mass narrative is by self-publishing. That is, we are not in a world where many on the left or right will intentionally seek out information or reporting that is likely to contradict their worldview. So protesters have two aims here that work hand-in-hand in a time of abundance: make counter-narratives go viral, and change the news agenda.
When I look at the Columbia coverage, I see stages. First was the initial crackdown, which was met by the predictable partisan cheers or boos by those with outsize speech power. Those early speakers influence the initial narrative of the event, which can become the frame by which the public comes to accept the initial news, usually through pre-baked ideological lenses in our current media culture. But what’s happened since the initial reaction has shown how brittle power narratives can be. You get more nuanced views on the ground, such as reports about Jewish students saying the crackdown makes them feel more unsafe than the protests, or details that indicate many of the worst agitators were not Columbia students but rather outside joiners looking to make trouble. You see viral videos of students or faculty members being roughly handled by police despite not doing anything suggestive of violence or brandishing anything resembling a weapon. As that material goes viral, it circulates online. It can pierce information bubbles and reshape how news organizations cover events, creating opportunities for more complex stories that go beyond leadership sources.
Mind you, some stay in their filtered world. The bubble doesn’t always get pierced, and the initial view becomes the hardened view. This is a fundamental problem about humanity and democracy, in that nobody can force you to widen your surveillance of the day’s information and news. Whereas once we could count on that by habit due to oligopoly, now protestors have to post shocking counter-narratives that could potentially shake someone into investigating more deeply.
And yet what we’re talking of here is the thin line between changing narratives and publishing propaganda, a problem any particular camp within a debate is subject to. Self-published information online has the same problems I talked about earlier. It could be selectively edited video or information that leaves out critical details that would reframe what is being shared. The people posting could be lying. And in an information environment that tempts one to defer to the firehose of abundance over nuance and verification, it is very easy to accept lies and half-truths uncritically.
So what’s coming from these protests is perhaps all lies or all truth, or more likely some unequal mix of those two, and that represents a difficulty for the viewing public. My point here is less about the truth about what’s being shared and more to say that protests in 2024 need the quality of going viral on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and the like to shake us out of the sameness that comes from the feeds we’ve constructed to combat information overload. Herein lies the danger then for administrators tempted to get too harsh. It’s easy to look at a piece of content as one tweet or one video that has just a few views, but you cannot predict when it’ll catch the eye of enough people that it’ll take off like a rocket and become the news. You also don’t know what types of fractured niche audiences exist for that viral content, meaning you have no idea who you’re outraging with a particular decision.
Administrators making decisions because of the outsize demands of wealthy donors probably don’t have to worry about a few online posts, but they do have to worry about a viral media firestorm that enrages rank-and-file alumni, parents, and students who are crucial to the future of their institutions. Because of that, administrators are in the business of combating both truth and misinformation, having to deal with the consequences of both online realities while also having to place policy bets based on the fact their assessment of the situation on the ground is influenced by observations made both online and offline
My hope is cooler heads prevail at our U.S. universities. Some latitude to college students testing out views and ideas is mission-critical to the university, and it fundamentally squares with the application of free speech doctrine in the U.S. I have always admired the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his dissent in Abrams v. United States:
Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
Holmes is arguing for the value of exchange of ideas as a way to test the rightness of our position. Raw power can enforce a view, but it cannot convince, and the best way forward in a democracy is to convince people of your position. Implied in this is that we also might change our minds if the conversation is honest and not competition for its own sake. The truth will win out, in other words.
He goes on:
Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system, I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.
Holmes’s opinion was a dissent to a Supreme Court decision, one where his view of the situation did not win the day. Abrams, the plaintiff, was appealing a conviction he received for speaking out against the war effort in the U.S. during World War I. Abrams lost, but I’d argue Holmes’ dissent probably won in the long run because it was right. In that sense, the injustice Abrams faced for exercising his right to speak out against his government was subjected to the very process Holmes argued for. With time and persuasion, people will come around if we give them a chance. That is the optimism embedded in free speech doctrine.
One of the notable criticisms of Holmes’ “marketplace of ideas” concept is it doesn’t account for power. Again, too many people come to discourse with outsize influence and throw their weight around, quashing the ability of regular people to have a say and be heard. I am sympathetic to this critique, which is why I tend to preach deference toward speakers without power so long as they aren’t making the kinds of threats that imminently lead to criminal behavior by their very utterance. This last part is a tough needle to thread at times because it involves assessing the amount of daylight between words and actions. But the broad-based crackdown has swept up speakers uttering threatening slogans and peaceful slogans alike. Our response cannot be to disband protest altogether, to burn down the village in order to save it. Not if we want to keep a democracy, at least. Commitment to free expression and dialogue means we must be more precise than that.
Our students are smarter than this, and they are wise to what is going on. If campuses undercut their message about places to learn in dialogue, they undercut the mission and the whole thesis for enrolling. We can’t say this is the place to come learn how to change the world, then say, “But not like that.” To see student protests writ large as coming from people with no real power is to recast what’s going on as something we should encourage in the absence of true threats, whether we agree with them or not. Students don’t have federal or state governments at their disposal, let alone national guard troops or police forces. That by itself is reason for restraint.
Before I go, a few things on Israel, Gaza, and the protests I’ve read the past week that have been deep and worthwhile:
Jeremy Littau is an associate professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University. Find him on Bluesky, which is now open to the public.