Earlier this year, activists opposing the war in Gaza marched onto the Golden Gate Bridge and Interstate 880 in Oakland. They blocked traffic for hours, some chaining themselves to vehicles or cement-filled drums. Twenty-six were arrested and charged.

Similar scenes played out across the country—perhaps most controversially on college campuses, where students found themselves banned, suspended, and expelled—in this latest chapter of the global “age of mass protests.” Participants in historic uprisings from Hong Kong to Paris to Sidi Bouzid have braved tear gas, rubber or real bullets, imprisonment, and even set themselves on fire while standing up for their beliefs.

Headline-making demonstrations raise questions about what protesting requires of us: Are huge risks necessary to engender social change? Do I personally need to step in front of moving cars, spend a night in jail, or launch a hunger strike to advance the causes that matter to me? Does my social media post, bumper sticker, lawn sign, signature on a petition, or attendance at a peaceful rally still make a difference?

According to social science, strenuous and risky protest does tend to make a bigger impact than protest involving lower effort and risk. But studies also show that slacker activists—slacktivists, who stick to low-cost, mostly online activism—play key roles in successful movements.

Costly protest, like when demonstrators suffer violent repression, sends a strong signal to the media, voters, and power holders that activists mean business. If someone is willing to spend hours of their time, endure discomfort, and even put their life on the line for a cause, their grievances come across as more genuine than those of someone who spends a few seconds typing “#MeToo” or “#BlackLivesMatter.” (One caveat is that violence initiated by protesters, albeit costly, almost always backfires—nonviolent campaigns across the 20th century were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts.)

Some protesters bear significant costs simply by virtue of their social identities. Demonstrators from minority groups frequently endure harsher repression than their white counterparts; women face backlash for daring to speak out against the patriarchy; and low-wage hourly workers pay a higher economic price relative to their income (in foregone wages, transportation expenses, etc.) to attend a protest than salaried professionals with flexible schedules. Though unfair, these disproportionate costs also empower protesters by amplifying their messages. Research by political scientist LaGina Gause reveals an “advantage of disadvantage” whereby lawmakers are more likely to support the preferences of low-income and minority protesters than the preferences of more privileged protesters. Gause highlights how protests concentrated in minority and low-income communities of L.A. after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King exerted electoral pressure on Southern California Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis. Lewis, whose Inland Empire district sat just east of L.A., switched his normal voting behavior to endorse the Dire Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act of 1992, a Democrat-sponsored bill to fund relief for businesses destroyed during the protests.

While costly protest packs a punch, scholars also emphasize that activism is not all or nothing. “Slacktivists” strengthen movements in two critical ways.

First, they provide numbers. Hardcore veteran activists (the type who block traffic or take a rubber bullet) are exceptional. Usually, they cannot fill the streets on their own, so they must recruit greener activists into their ranks. One study of the Arab Spring showed that turnout by “peripheral” protesters with few previous activist connections contributed more to rising protest rates than turnout by “central” protesters with numerous Twitter followers. Movements, like viruses, need “fresh blood” to spread.

Second, including casual activists in a protest or movement helps to generate common knowledge about shifting social norms. If even your politically apathetic cousin starts posting “#BlackLivesMatter,” it becomes more socially acceptable for others in their network to endorse that cause—and eventually awkward not to. While support for Black Lives Matter in the general population has dipped from its high of 67% in 2020, a majority of Americans continue to support it. Ideas that were once fringe, like gay marriage and universal healthcare, became mainstream in part through ordinary internet users normalizing them, often from the comfort and safety of their couches.

A common concern is that slacktivism breeds complacency: If people are content to blast words of solidarity with their phones, they may never feel compelled to take up more demanding modes of activism that movements also need to meet their goals. “Someone still has to go to prison,” argued techno-critic Evgeny Morozov in The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.

Fortunately, evidence from multiple countries indicates that dipping your toes in online activism makes you no less likely to perform costlier gestures such as demonstrating, attending political forums, or donating to charity. Slacktivists are not destined to remain slacktivists. Online activism can open a gateway to protesting in real life and to deepening one’s investment in a cause.

If slacktivists are ultimately harmless, and even beneficial, for social movements, then why do they get such a bad rap? For instance, some fans of Taylor Swift and other celebrities chose to unfollow their idols on social media for not speaking out forcefully enough about bloodshed in Gaza. Journalists branded these ex-Swifties as slacktivists indulging in empty virtue signaling rather than undertaking more meaningful action. Why did these former fans provoke such ridicule if they were not really hurting anyone?

The answer has to do with the fact that we are hardwired to judge others by the costs they inflict, or are unwilling to inflict, on themselves. This explains our instinctive admiration for courageous, selfless activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and our disdain for timid, “fake” activists who send nearly costless signals of their political commitments by, say, sporting an awareness ribbon or unfollowing insufficiently “woke” celebrities. Higher risks earn greater rewards.

However, as I elaborate in my new book, we would be wise to refrain from wagging our fingers at slacktivists. For one thing, most of us behave like slacktivists at one point or another. Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai took flak for tweeting “#BringBackOurGirls” after armed extremists kidnapped more than 250 Nigerian schoolgirls in 2014, but it is difficult to seriously question their activist bona fides. As First Lady, Obama spent countless hours on the Let Girls Learn initiative, and Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting girls’ education in Taliban-occupied Pakistan, for which she was shot by a would-be assassin.

More importantly, shaming slacktivists can discourage them from attempting any kind of activism at all. The savvy organizer strives to make activism more—not less—accessible by sharing their wisdom with newcomers. Building a truly inclusive mass movement calls for patience and humility on the part of status-conscious movement leaders. This is its own form of sacrifice for a cause: the sacrifice of one’s ego. Community-engaged scholar Biko Mandela Gray implored fellow activists, “Let us check our egos at the door of political engagement and resistance, and remember that our wellbeing is always connected to the wellbeing of the whole.”

Some slacktivists will blossom into the next generation of devoted changemakers, whereas others will continue dabbling. And that’s OK. Both types of people have roles to play in the collective pursuit of justice.

The post Does ‘Slacktivism’ Deserve Its Bad Rap? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Illustration By Gieneyra Lai Alvarez. Courtesy of artworxla.

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.

Here, our contributors take on the virtual worlds where we connect, from internet discussion boards to “the fediverse.” These very online writers are scrolling the puppies of Instagram, building governance structures to regulate digital discourse, and breaking the spells cast by technological magic.

They were the perfect people to answer the question: What is the future of the digital public square?

The post What Is the Future of the Digital Public Square? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My best friend’s 13-year-old son recently asked me to friend him on the social media app BeReal.

She had decided to let him download BeReal partially because it lets users post just once per day and has very limited chat features, and only under the condition that they had to be friends. But he was free to choose what and when to post, what to comment, and whom to befriend (including, to my amusement, me). My friend was treating it like a learner’s-permit version of Instagram or Facebook. Her son could drive his social media car, but only with an adult present in the front seat.

Like many parents and caregivers, her aim was to develop a way for her son to safely learn about and prepare for our increasingly virtually connected world, while still respecting his right to speech and self-expression in an age-appropriate manner. This vision of adolescence as a driver’s permit to adult-sized rights regularly emerges in my work as a historian of law and childhood. Throughout histories of childhood and youth, my profession is examining the boundaries of young people’s rights in various contexts, from medical consent to due process rights that have contemporary political implications.

But in some states, the law may soon criminalize these very actions.

In the wake of remote learning’s increased screen time and the rise of anti-LGBTQ legislation, predominately conservative lawmakers have been raising a new round of moral panic over young people’s mental health and their exposure to adult content. Their push for a radical new vision of internet access is rooted in political fears about youth and social media, and threatens decades of free speech protections.

There is a long history of moral panics around youth and the popular technology of their eras. The Victorians worried that bicycles enabled teens and unmarried adults to avoid chaperones, and that they contributed to a growing popularity of bloomers over dresses or skirts. For Cold War parents, comic books symbolized the rise of the violent and crazed juvenile delinquent and sparked a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigation. These panics were less a reaction to reality, but rather, they represented cyclical anxieties of generational segregation and control over young people.

Foundational child protection law is already in place in the United States. In 1998, the Federal Children Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibited the collection of online data from online users under the age of 12. In 2013, it was amended to expand its reach. But now, state lawmakers want legislation that would criminalize internet access for millions of Americans.

For adults, this legislation has focused on limiting access to pornography. But more changes in process are targeting young people’s social media usage. In Texas, state representative Jared Patterson filed H.B. No. 896 last December, which would have banned any person under the age of 18 from using social media apps, and allowed parents to request the removal of their children’s social media accounts. Though the bill failed to pass, undeterred conservatives in Utah pushed forward a similar bill, quickly passed and signed into law this March, which prohibits minors from having any social media accounts. It also has created a nearly unenforceable “internet curfew.”

While the Utah and Texas cases represent the most extreme measures in the new efforts to control youth internet access, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers has also introduced the more seemingly palatable Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, a revamped version of the previously rejected Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which aims to censor material considered potentially “harmful.” Yet, as law and technology expert Mike Masnick has written, with no clear definition of “harmful content,” state attorney generals can define the term as it suits them, and use it to target websites they want blocked for ideological reasons. Last year, over 90 LGBTQ+ and human rights groups signed a letter in protest of KOSA.

It’s true that there is content on the internet that poses dangers to minors. The media has featured heartbreaking stories of cyberbullying and online predators. But it’s because of those dangers that nuance in lawmaking is so critical. Blanket bans replicate the very dangers they are designed to prevent: Strict parental controls create a ring of invisibility around domestic abuse, while increasing data collection from all Americans, child or adult.

Likewise, while studies have pointed to social media’s impact on mental health, banning it won’t solve the youth mental health crisis, as the legislation suggests. Social media is just one part of American childhood today, alongside rampant gun violence, anti-LGBTQ+ fascism, and endemic economic inequality.

And then there’s the First Amendment. By seeking to purge children from the internet, conservative lawmakers are denying young people the right to expression, speech, and creativity. Stripping them of their right to speak out on platforms, often about issues that impact them directly, runs counter to decades of precedent for young people.

Young people had their earliest First Amendment victory in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), when siblings Mary Beth and John Tinker, who had been expelled for their silent protest of the Vietnam War, argued that their rights to free speech did not end at the entrance of their public school. The Supreme Court agreed. Subsequent decisions, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988) and Morse v. Frederick (2007), upheld Tinker’s basic ruling, while carving out caveats in favor of school administrators. But until 2021, the Supreme Court had yet to deal with a case regarding youth free speech and the internet.

Then came the memorably named “Cursing Cheerleader” case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. After a student recorded and uploaded a Snapchat story featuring a caption cursing and criticizing her high school, school administrators suspended her from the junior varsity cheerleading team. The case asked the Court if Tinker applied to a student’s social media post. With an 8-1 decision, the Court found that it did. (Justice Clarence Thomas, the sole dissent, argued for a chipping away of Tinker in favor of schools and parents.)

When Utah’s latest social media ban is inevitably challenged in court, the state will need to argue against these Supreme Court rulings that uphold youth First Amendment protections. But it takes time for a case to make its way through the courts. Until then, this law and others like it will deny young people their right to be online, while creating a much more dangerous digital landscape for the very children they allege to protect.

Though the internet isn’t perfect, it can be a space of creativity and intellectual engagement for youth. Ranging from budding craftspeople learning to operate a business, to youth activists working on climate change and LGBTQ rights, young people wield their digital literacy for positive efforts, often using social media in the process. Banning their social media use will merely push them to further hide their online activity, and to speak less freely about the issues they face in digital spaces. It criminalizes their attempts to learn to live in a virtual world and ignores the necessity of the internet for modern life.

It’s better to arm the young people in our lives with digital literacy and open dialogue. Take a page from my friend’s parenting book, give them space to learn, post silly pictures, and teach you a thing or two. And, while we’re at it, encourage them to get outside and ride a bike—no matter the legwear they choose.

The post Let the Kids “BeReal” on Social Media appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Imagine you’re a senior citizen in the midst of the pandemic. You don’t know how to book a vaccine online, so you’ve been on hold for hours. Or imagine you’re a small business owner, eager to expand your business. You invest in a new point-of-sale system to streamline your payments and launch a website to attract customers outside of the state. But it turns out that your town does not have strong enough internet to process a credit card transaction. These scenarios are part of what has come to be known as “digital equity”—a term that captures the issues of high-speed internet (“broadband”) availability, affordability, adoption, hardware, and education.

Affordable, high-quality broadband is not a luxury or a nice-to-have, but a necessity. Broadband access is linked to everything from housing values to economic development, educational gains, telehealth, civic engagement, public safety, and quality of life. This became especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. The federal government’s recent financial commitment to broadband—defined by the government as speeds of 25 megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload—acknowledges this to be true.

A year ago, Congress passed the trillion-dollar Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which allocated $65 billion for broadband deployment, affordability, and education. California is slated to receive the largest allocations of funds—an estimated $3.5 billion—because the state has a major connectivity disparity: Though over 90% of residents have access to the internet, that percentage drops precipitously in rural, remote, and tribal areas. According to one study, only 76% of rural residents have adopted broadband. Other estimates place the rural broadband gap at upwards of 51.3%.

Fortunately, however, California is also one of the best-situated states to tackle digital inequity.

The Infrastructure Act’s broadband funding is divided into three major parts. First, there’s $42 billion for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which will fund infrastructure development, such as installing fiber optic cables to homes and businesses. Next, the Affordable Connectivity Program subsidizes broadband subscriptions for low-income households. Finally, $2.75 billion are allocated for two different digital equity programs, which will fund workforce training, skill development, and digital literacy.

As the largest of the programs, BEAD is getting most of the attention. BEAD guarantees each state $100 million so long as they abide by certain requirements, like submitting a 5-year broadband and digital equity plan. After the $100 million per state, the remaining funds will be distributed according to the number of unserved locations as determined by the Federal Communication Commission’s new national broadband map. California’s estimated $3.5 billion share—which will be matched by nearly $2 billion in industry dollars—will be directed towards the 6% of the state deemed “unserved” or underserved. This will probably include places like Central Valley (20% un- or underconnected) and Los Angeles County (19% un- or underconnected).

There are three aspects of California’s broadband readiness that set an example for other states: the middle-mile, rural partnerships, and “dig once” policies.

Middle-mile connectivity is an often-overlooked element of broadband deployment. Where the “last mile” connects a customer to their Internet Service Provider (ISP), the middle-mile is made up of high-capacity fiber lines that connect a provider to a core hub—often in a larger city—and other network hubs. Without these middle-mile facilitates, ultra-fast broadband to homes is impossible, because the local data has nowhere to go. In California, the lack of a robust middle-mile has been particularly vexing for Native nations. Matt Rantanen, director of technology for the Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association, has said, “the hard part is getting off the reservation to get to everybody else.”

In 2021, California passed Senate Bill 156, which provides a staggering $6 billion for broadband deployment, much of it focused on the middle-mile problem. Even better, the 10,000-mile project that the bill supports is open-access, meaning that any provider can use the network. This will substantially reduce costs, especially for remote and Tribal areas, which are often overlooked in deployment planning. Construction of the network began in October 2022 in San Diego County, and the entire network is slated for completion in 2026.

Piggybacking off this unprecedented commitment to middle-mile infrastructure, California has devoted resources to forging partnerships with rural communities. Since 2021, the Rural County Representatives of California (RCRC) has been working to develop open-access, last-mile municipal networks across the 39 participating counties. In April, 2022 they announced a partnership with Utah-based UTOPIA Fiber to deploy the first round of the project.

The RCRC project is unique in two ways. First, like its middle-mile cousin, it is an open-access network, which will allow multiple ISPs to sit atop it and offer retail broadband. Second, it’s possible that the networks will be placed under local governance, either at the municipal or county level. In communities across the country—from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Ammon, Iowa—local oversight of broadband has proven to be more responsive, accountable, and committed to community concerns and needs.

Finally, California is one of the few states in the nation that has legislation requiring “dig once.” Dig once refers to policies that encourage coordinating construction projects and broadband installation to avoid redundant digging and unnecessary spending. The 2021 Assembly Bill No. 41 requires the California Department of Transportation to ensure that any new highway construction “includes the installation of conduits capable of supporting fiber optic communication.”

Despite these advantages, achieving digital inclusion and equity in California will still be challenging. One challenge is the number of cooks in the broadband kitchen: the Public Utilities Commission, Caltrans, the California Emerging Technology Fund, California Broadband Council, Office of Broadband and Digital Literacy, and California Department of Technology and its newly established deputy director for broadband and digital literacy or “broadband czar” all have a voice in broadband planning in the state.

Another challenge is one faced by numerous agricultural states: mapping broadband to farms. The FCC’s new broadband map omits farm broadband. But in a state that represents 46% of the nation’s fruit and nut production, getting high-speed connectivity to California farms (and knowing where it is already!) is crucial for the future of agriculture.

Despite California’s substantive financial commitment and its innovative “dig once” policies and rural partnerships, it will still be a few years before that remote small business owner or senior citizen sees improvement in their digital lives.

The digital divides of access, affordability, and education will not be solved overnight. But the steps the state has already taken are a good indication that it knows broadband is a must-have for a 21st-century life and is prepared to bring it to all Californians.

The post Can California Bring Everyone up to Internet Speed? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Whether you love or hate people speaking as their pets, using cutesy terms like “pupperinos” and “heckin’ good bois,” or sharing grammatically incorrect cat speak memes, the concept of a “pet voice” has become just as much a part of the social media landscape as images of furry and scaly companions themselves. Indeed, speaking with, and through, animals to convey our very human emotions and thoughts is one of the hallmark practices of internet culture.

But the pet voice phenomenon isn’t unique to the social media age. Media and pets have always been intertwined, and owners and animal fans alike have played with communication through them for hundreds of years.

As historian Katherine Grier details in Pets in America: A History, as early as the 19th century, people were exchanging letters to each other in the voices of their furry companions. Taking advantage of the rise in photographic technology, they also began printing out photo plates of their animals to distribute to their friends. Such interpersonal practices can be seen as the Victorian equivalent of sending cute pet pictures via messaging apps like Snapchat or WhatsApp.

But not all early pet practices were so innocuous. Fashion scholar Julia Long problematizes the way humans have used pets as props. She points to an 1886 Washington Post interview with a woman “lavishing her valuable affection” on the pet beetles she wore as a fashion statement. “When asked if the beetle ‘knew’ his owner,” the reporter notes, “this lady expressed extreme anguish and astonishment at the thought of her beloved pet not returning her affection.”

The thought of wearing a beetle like a brooch, let alone keeping one as a pet, may give many readers pause today. But as a communication tactic, the practice speaks volumes. The act of anthropomorphizing, or attributing human characteristics to non-human entities, is a distancing concept. By pretending to speak as another, particularly one that cannot actually speak for itself, the woman giving the beetles a “voice” becomes removed from their utterances. This distance, however slight, has immense implications in today’s mediated times. One of the most famous New Yorker cartoons features two dogs at a computer saying, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The cartoon demonstrates how speaking through pets plays into the internet’s ambivalence, or the difficulty in ascertaining definitive meanings in online communication.

It’s especially important we understand this tactic today because the anthropomorphized pet voice has taken on new life in the era of Instagram and TikTok. And as I discuss in my new book, The Internet is for Cats: How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives, such animal imagery is often used to mask some of the more insidious parts of internet culture, such as hate speech and harassment.

The “chill amphibian meme” of Pepe the Frog, who the Anti-Defamation League declared a hate symbol in 2016, shows how malicious human posters can warp seemingly innocent images of pets and animals. Additionally, in speaking as an animal, even a cartoon frog, the human poster puts distance between themselves and what they have said. On the opposite end of the political spectrum from Pepe is Jorts the Cat, a popular Twitter account that tweets aggressively pro-union and labor rights sentiments from behind the veil of an orange tabby. And paradoxically, it hits harder when an internet cat critiques a governor over legislation.

The distancing of anthropomorphism also has become a lucrative benefit for businesses and brands. In recent years, pet influencers have skyrocketed in popularity—and become intertwined with sponsored posts and advertising deals. As internet scholar Sophie Bishop has discussed, brands engage in a “safety dance” when recruiting influencers, a process that involves the use of automated tools to gauge the potential risk of a prospective human influencer damaging the brand. Pets bypass that safety dance entirely. Even though there is always a human poster behind a pet influencer, the distance brought by the pet voice makes them “safer,” and in turn, more marketable.

When I attended 2020 PetCon, the annual pet influencer and internet celebrity convention, founder Loni Edwards told the room as much:

You get all the benefits of the human influencer with the cuteness of pets. Everyone loves pets. They’re joyful, they’re cute, they make us happy. But they’re not going to get drunk at a party and hurt your brand like a human influencer.

While pet voice is comforting and common, it does bring with it serious implications to think about in our accelerated and ubiquitous communication in the digital age. But all LOLz are not lost. As one person with a pet account told me, “[S]ocial media used to be this fun thing, but now it can come with a lot of negativity and stress. So, I have followed certain cute animal accounts as just a way to have a burst of positivity in my feed as I’m scrolling. Being able to add to that is nice, too.” As long as we remember the human behind the pet voice, pet images and videos can be a reprieve from the more cumbersome aspects of being online.

The post Pet Voice Isn’t All About the LOLZ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But in parts of rural California, the pandemic also revealed silver linings. Some far-flung schools and districts in our state have made great strides bridging the digital divide, addressing teacher shortages, and supporting English learners.

Recent test scores from the 2022 National Educational Progress Assessment—the nation’s report card for K–12 schools—show just how much damage the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures wreaked on learning. Average test scores for 9-year-old students declined seven points in math and five points in reading, wiping out nearly two decades of progress. Among Black students, average math scores fell 13 points.

But scores don’t provide the full picture. As the 2021–22 school year began, a mental health crisis was taking hold among students, too. More than a third of high schoolers nationwide reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic, and nearly half felt persistently sad or hopeless. Students in rural areas had higher levels of anxiety and depression, partially due to limited access to care.

These declines in academic learning and social-emotional wellbeing underline the need to improve school conditions and accelerate student learning throughout the nation. We do not yet have test scores for California students, but we know student needs are acute, particularly in rural areas.

The state’s rural schools faced unique challenges during each phase of the pandemic.

In what we are calling the first phase of the pandemic, in spring 2020, they struggled on the wrong side of the digital divide. Multiple barriers hinder broadband access and deployment in rural areas. Many internet service providers do not find it profitable to serve rural areas, where low population density makes it costlier to build and maintain internet infrastructure. Making broadband affordable for rural households is also a formidable challenge. Studies show higher poverty rates in non-metro areas across the U.S.

For this reason, the abrupt shift to distance learning in spring 2020 left many rural schools in California scrambling for solutions. In 2017, 74 percent of California households had access to broadband, with access slightly lower—70 percent—among rural households. But this gap grew markedly over time. In 2019, 84 percent of California households had broadband, compared to 73 percent of rural households. More than one in four rural households still did not have high-speed internet when the pandemic hit late in the year. Without reliable internet, students cannot access curriculum, receive live instruction from teachers, complete assignments, or receive academic support.

During the second phase of COVID, in fall 2020, fluctuating enrollments destabilized rural schools. In California, K–12 enrollment statewide declined by nearly 3 percent between the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 school years. Some rural counties experienced an exaggerated version of this trend; enrollment fell 10 percent in Humboldt, Mono, and Inyo Counties. But other rural counties gained students, bucking the statewide trend and placing greater demands on district resources. Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Sierra, and Sutter counties experienced double digit growth, with enrollment increasing 17 percent, for example, in El Dorado.

Statewide enrollment dropped another 1.8 percent in 2021–2022 but counties like El Dorado, Calaveras, and Tuolumne continued to experience growth—1.7 percent, 4.5 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively. Because state funding is linked to student enrollment, declines pose significant challenges for districts—but increases create problems too. Rural districts, which have long struggled to recruit and retain quality teachers, had trouble keeping up with growing enrollment. About a quarter of rural schools nationwide were understaffed prior to the start of the pandemic, and 70 percent said there were too few candidates applying for open teaching positions for the 2022–2023 school year.

And in the third phase of COVID, as caseloads declined and California started to emerge from the pandemic in spring 2021, rural schools brought students back for in-person instruction earlier than schools in other parts of the state, in large part because providing online instruction had been so difficult. Nationwide, 63 percent of rural schools offered in-person instruction to all students in January 2021, compared to only 35 percent of urban schools; some rural schools reopened in Fall 2020. Rural districts in California reopened to all grades in early February 2021, while urban districts fully reopened in early May.

As we worked with rural schools during COVID, we also saw hints of progress.

Lindsay Unified, a small, low-income Central Valley district with 4,000 students, is successfully addressing teacher shortages through a “grow your own” approach. In 2016, the district launched a community Wi-Fi network and shifted some of its curriculum online to facilitate personalized learning. It also created a program to recruit teachers and staff, urging students to attend college on loans that would be forgiven if they returned and taught in Lindsay schools for five years. This past year, the district added a residency program to help teachers earn a master’s degree and teaching credential in one year.

In California’s southernmost reaches, the Imperial County Office of Education (ICOE) has worked with local organizations and agencies for more than 20 years to build and maintain a state-of-the-art fiber-optic communications network for its K–12 schools. In 2018, it launched BorderLink to bridge the homework gap by expanding affordable access to reliable internet at home. ICOE was relatively well-positioned when the pandemic hit to connect students to distance learning. Today the county is leveraging pandemic related stimulus money to upgrade equipment and expand capacity further.

Finally, during the pandemic, the Golden Plains district, which serves mostly English learners, used science content to enhance English language arts and English language development instruction. This integrated approach ensures that science learning and language development occur simultaneously. Before it was in place, English proficiency was a barrier for students to access science learning.

The pandemic has had a profound impact on all students’ academic and social-emotional wellbeing, and in response, school districts have enacted strategies to support their learning recovery and improve their social-emotional wellbeing. It makes sense to acknowledge the special hurdles far-flung districts face.

Fortunately, state and federal governments are investing in rural schools. In 2021, California allocated more than $6 billion to expand broadband infrastructure. Three rounds of federal funding provided more than $21 billion to California schools to support recovery and renewal, included funding for after-school programs at rural schools. Spent on equitable, evidence-based programs, these investments can help rural schools accelerate student learning, address mental health needs, and keep up with the demands of 21st-century education.

The post How Rural Schools Survived the Pandemic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Particularly among those of us who grew up without the privilege of coming out without fear of being rejected, being LGBTQ+ is about trying to understand who you are and how you fit in a world that wasn’t made for you. As soon as we understand we’re different from others, we have to decide how to try to cope and survive to the best of our abilities. It forces us to create a mask early on and get used to the idea that a facial expression, a hand gesture, a wrong or unconvincing answer can be dangerous.

Some of us, despite our effort to grow and unlearn things we picked up to survive, always carry a sense of loss or inadequacy. At least that’s how I’ve felt for a long time, wanting to bond with others but instinctively afraid to let my guard down. I’ve always struggled to actually get that sense of community that has been talked about so much, something that can be a group of friends and acquaintances sharing and learning from their common experiences but also a support network, helping each other in times of need and serving as a reminder that one is not alone when facing the world.

When I moved to Madrid from Venezuela in 2019, I thought I would find meaning. After all, many queer Latin Americans tend to put the country of Almodóvar and García Lorca in a high regard when it comes to tolerance. Instead, I got long evenings in bars in Chueca, Madrid’s gay district, walking around trying to meet someone’s glance or sitting in locales that were too loud and crowded and that made me feel lonely and unsure. It made me think that perhaps, in some way, it was too late for me.

Then COVID-19 came and changed the world in ways we thought were impossible. Suddenly, everyone struggled with one of the most basic parts of life that also was one of the most affected by the pandemic: human interaction. Queer people, like everyone else, looked for alternatives to the closed gay bars, nightclubs, bookstores and community centers. For individuals who don’t feel safe in their households or immediate surroundings, those spaces can be lifesaving; for me, who never found his place in those spaces to begin with, their closures felt like even more missed opportunities.

From my rented bedroom in Madrid, what was originally declared as a two-week lockdown became a month, and then several months, with no end in sight. Friends became little squares on Zoom with names, and some, from college, led me to the mixed blessing that is Discord.

Released in 2015, Discord was originally envisioned as a voice and text chat platform for gamers. I don’t often play video games, but my college friends, spread over four different countries, mostly used it to watch movies and play online games once or twice a week.

I had already been familiar with Discord because many LGBTQ+ communities on Reddit also had their own channels (called servers) on it, though they were less active before the pandemic. Once I joined, I found myself browsing all types of channels and connecting with people from Oslo to Bahra in to Palm Beach to Rio de Janeiro.

We would video chat, play games, watch movies or shows and, every now and then, have a bit of naughty fun. Quite a few left their camera on while cooking, working or sleeping. Anything to feel a bit less lonely.

I was drawn to the conversation. It was nice having someone to talk to, even if it was about unimportant, everyday stuff. I could see most people also had come to Discord for the same reasons and around the same time I did. Time zones didn’t matter, nor usually did labels such as gay, bi, cis, non-binary or trans. We all remained there because we needed it. It was something we lost or never had in the first place: a space, real or virtual, for people like us.

Online spaces are nothing new, of course. Especially for people of my generation and younger—in other words, Millennials and Zoomers—they have been, for better or for worse, a playground detached from prying eyes and suffocating environments during our developing years.

As anyone who has been part of an online community knows, there’s often a dark side to them, too, and Discord is not an exception. The very same platform that was allowing me to talk and share with queer people of every stripe and color has also been used by white supremacists, including those who organized the Charlottesville Rally, before a crackdown in 2017. But when you feel alone in the world, everywhere feels like a potential risk.

I guess what made Discord unique for me was how easy it was to be part of a community or start one of your own, with enough people to make new, lively groups and enough servers that no one community feels overwhelming. Most of my friends and coworkers are straight and they are very important to me. Still, logged onto the Discord servers, I felt I was having conversations I always dreamed of having but never engaged in, in part because of my own fears. The idea that you’re not alone within the LGBTQ+ community rang true for the first time in my life.

There was a certain equality in our solitude, from the rich, white middle-aged gay guy chatting in a fancy apartment to the blue-collar dark-skinned trans kid listening from their retail job. There was an ephemeral element to it that made the experience feel bittersweet but overall, I believe that’s for the best.

More than a second virtual life, it was a nice little pocket dimension—untouched by an all-consuming internship I was doing at a major newspaper—where I could disengage for a few hours and learn how to feel sure of myself as a gay man. I feel it’s no coincidence that in the past few months I found myself steadily dating someone for the first time in my life.

However, as my own previous experience with online communities has taught me, such places tend to stagnate, with the same people talking the same things over and over, and run their course when members go elsewhere, real or digital. While the platform has attracted over 50 million people since the pandemic started, I’ve noticed lately that as vaccination programs across industrialized countries steadily allow people to begin to resume their lives (though new mutations of the virus—partially fueled by people engaging in irresponsible behavior while trying to make up for lost time—threaten to undo the progress), the Discord servers where I used to hang out seem to have emptied.

The other night I logged into a community that I haven’t visited in several weeks and someone joked that people seem to only come back when they are having issues with their partners. A few regulars have stayed, not unlike the patrons at a bar. I wish I could say it was emotional, but the truth is that moving on tends to be so smooth that you simply don’t notice. One day will be the last time you visit a small corner of the internet that was the world to you, and you won’t remember it because your attention is somewhere else now.

But there are always tragic reminders of why such places exist in the first place, and that platforms to connect and communicate with other queer people—Discord, Tumblr, or other—will probably continue to exist in some form or another.

Early in July, I went to Galicia, in northeast Spain, on holiday with the guy I was dating at the time. But our good time together in Santiago and A Coruña was eclipsed by the death of Samuel Luiz, a 24-year-old young man of Brazilian origin who was killed by a group of men as they yelled homophobic slurs at him.

Luiz’s death, which was in the spotlight of Spanish society for a few weeks, hit us particularly hard. It’s easy to buy into the myth of Spain and Europe as places where those types of things don’t happen. Then I think of Ángelo and remember that, despite the time and the distance, this was not a world thought for us.

A lot has been said about the disappearance of queer spaces in the past few years, mainly because of gentrification and mainstream society becoming more accepting (or at least tolerant) of LGBTQ+ individuals. But making spaces where we can be our own, talk about our specific issues and let our guard down matters.

Now I stand at a crossroads, again. The internship that brought me to Spain is coming to an end, and the circle of real-life friends I’ve made in the past two years in Madrid is separating, with many returning to their homes and a few coming back to the Americas.

Every now and then I still pop up into Discord servers to have some small talk about how my day was whenever I see a few of the regulars online, but it’s hardly the same anymore. I guess, once more, I will find another community, whether real or digital.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> My Small, Queer Corner of the Internet appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Instead, internet governance is a contest for power between the most powerful tech companies, who put their shareholders first and want the internet to be a free-for-all, and national governments, which prioritize the political interests of their own officials.

In this contest, both sides create the pretense of democracy. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, has created its own “independent oversight” board of global experts, though it’s unelected, and chosen by Facebook. The European Union touts its tougher regulation of privacy and the internet—but those regulators are also unelected, and impose their rules on people far from Europe.

Which is why the internet needs a democratic government that operates beyond the reach of tech companies or national government. Such a system must be both local—to allow people to govern the internet where they live—and transnational, just like the internet itself.

There is as yet no clearly articulated vision of such a government, but there are many constituent pieces that could be mixed together.

A Europe-based network of human rights organizations has developed a Charter of Digital Rights—Article 4, for example: “Every person has the right to freedom of speech and expression in the digital world”—that could be part of the constitution of an internet government. The NetMundial Initiative, developed in recent years with a strong push from the World Economic Forum and a previous Brazilian government, offers ideas for international governance of the internet built around a council that mixes rotating and permanent members.

There are lessons to be learned from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a somewhat democratic non-profit that, from a Los Angeles base, successfully governed a narrow part of the internet—the domain name system—with participation from more than 110 countries from 1998 to 2016.

An effective internet government must be collective—because the internet’s power, and commercial value, lie not in any individual user or data, but in the aggregation of users and data. In a must-read essay in Noema magazine (which is published by the California-based Berggruen Institute), Matt Prewitt, president of the RadicalxChange Foundation, suggested structuring Internet governance not around individual data rights, but rather around a series of “data coalitions”—online unions that would give communities of users democratic authority.

“Data cannot be owned, but must be governed,” Prewitt wrote. “Data must be the subject of shared democratic decisions rather than individual, unilateral ones. This presents particular challenges for liberal legal orders that have typically centered on individual rights.”

In a similar vein, I’d suggest that the internet’s democratic government combine multiple forms of democratic governance.

The center of such a government should be a citizens’ assembly—a tool used around the world by countries and communities to get democratic verdicts that are independent of elites. This citizens’ assembly would consist of 1,000 people who, together, would be representative by age, gender, and national origin of the global community of internet users. They would not be elected individually, but rather chosen via randomized processes that use sortition (or drawing lots).

The assembly would be supplemented by an online platform that allowed people to report problems, make suggestions, or even petition for proposals that could be voted upon by Internet users everywhere, in a global referendum. The models for such a platform include Rousseau, the controversial online environment through which Italy’s Five Star Movement governed itself for a time, and Decide Madrid, the online participatory framework that has spread from the Spanish capital to more than 100 cities worldwide.

National governments and tech companies would try desperately to influence this government, but they would not be in charge of it. And each citizens’ assembly would dissolve after two or three years—making it harder for the powerful to lobby it.

While the government would live online, it should have a real-world headquarters in the 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s hometown of Geneva.

If such a government endured and succeeded, it could join the ranks of international organizations like the World Health Organization or the International Red Cross. It also could offer a model for international democratic governance to address off-line global problems, from public health to climate change.

The post The Internet Needs Its Own Democratic Government appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The short answer is that Section 230, part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, is the legal underpinning for one of the largest and most consequential experiments in American history.

Since the birth of Big Tech Media 15 years ago—let’s drop the friendly-sounding misnomer “social” media—our nearly 250-year-old republic has become a test case. Can a nation’s news and information infrastructure, the lifeblood of any democracy, be dependent on digital media technologies that allow a global free speech zone of unlimited audience size, combined with algorithmic (non-human) curation of massive volumes of disinformation that can be spread with unprecedented ease?

This experiment has been possible because Section 230 grants Big Tech Media immunity from responsibility for the mass content that is published and broadcast across their platforms. A mere 26 words in the bipartisan law were originally intended to protect “interactive computer services” from being sued over what their users post, just like telephone companies can’t be sued over any gossip told by Aunt Mabel to every busybody in town.

But as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other services scaled over time to an unimaginable size, the platforms’ lack of human editors has resulted in a gushing firehose of mis- and disinformation where scandals and conspiracies are prioritized over real news for mass distribution. Facebook alone sees more than 100 billion pieces of content posted each day, a deluge that its small corps of human monitors cannot realistically contain.

As the gripping videos and photos of a pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol make clear, this experiment has veered frighteningly off course. The protesters earnestly believed that they were trying to stop a stolen election, having been fed this false information by their political leaders for over two months since the November 3 election. Millions of people are now living inside their own “disinformation ghettos” where they do not hear contrary viewpoints. So, President Biden has called for ending Section 230 immunity in order to stop the Frankenstein’s monster this law helped create.

Facebook is no longer simply a “social networking” website—it is the largest media giant in the history of the world, a combination publisher and broadcaster, with approximately 2.6 billion regular users, and billions more on the Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram. One study found that 104 pieces of COVID-19 misinformation on Facebook were shared 1.7 million times and had 117 million views. That’s far more than the number of daily viewers on the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, ABC News, Fox News, CNN, and other major networks combined.

Traditional news organizations are subject to certain laws and regulations, including a degree of liability over what they broadcast. While there is much to criticize about mainstream media, at least they use humans to pick and choose what’s in and out of the newsstream. That results in a degree of accountability, including legal liability.

But Facebook-Google-Twitter’s robot algorithm curators are on automatic pilot, much like killer drones for which no human bears responsibility or liability. Non-human curation, when combined with unlimited audience size and frictionless amplification, has clearly failed as a foundation for our democracy’s media infrastructure.

So, it is time to hit reset in a major way, not only to save our republic, but also to provide the best chance to redesign these digital media technologies so that we can retain their promise and decrease their dangers.

Revoking Section 230 by an act of Congress would be a good start. That’s not a perfect solution, but it would make Big Tech Media more responsible, deliberative, and potentially liable for the worst of its toxic content, including illegal content (like child pornography), especially when their algorithms automatically amplify such content.

But there is also a great deal of reckless online content that would likely not be impacted by 230’s revocation. For example, Trump’s posts on Twitter and Facebook claiming the presidential election was stolen, and his inflammatory speech that YouTube broadcast the morning of the Capitol attack, were false and provocative—but it would be difficult to legally prove that any individuals or institutions were harmed or incited directly by the president’s many outrageous statements. Any number of traditional media outlets also have published untrue nonsense without the protections of Section 230, yet they were never held liable.

The revocation of Section 230 also wouldn’t have stopped the use of Big Tech Media for disinformation campaigns that undermined elections in more than 70 countries, even helping to elect a quasi-dictator in the Philippines; or for widely amplifying and even livestreaming child abusers, pornographers and the Christchurch mass murderer of Muslims, who broadcast his carnage over Facebook (a video then seen on YouTube by millions). And losing Section 230 immunity wouldn’t impact the fact that a majority of YouTube climate change videos denies the science, and 70 percent of what YouTube’s 2 billion users watch comes from its recommendation algorithm.

So revoking Section 230 likely would not be as impactful as its proponents wish, or its critics fear. What needs to be done instead?

The federal government must intervene to change the way Big Tech Media operates. Facebook-Google-Twitter’s “engagement algorithms” recommend and amplify sensationalized, conspiracy-ridden user content for one reason—to maximize profits by increasing users’ screen time and exposure to more ads. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook executives scaled back a successful effort to make the site less divisive when they found that it was decreasing their audience share. Recently implemented warning labels are weak substitutes for actual curation. These greedy companies have purposely weaponized their platforms, and enabled the dividing, distracting, and outraging of people to the point where society is now plagued by a fractured basis for shared truths, sensemaking, and common ground.

In the face of such practices, our government must impose a whole new business model on these corporations—just as the United States did, in years past, with telephone, railroad, and power companies.

The government should treat these companies more like investor-owned utilities, which would be guided by a digital license. Just like traditional brick-and-mortar companies must apply for various licenses and permits, the digital license would define the rules and regulations of the business model (Mark Zuckerberg himself has suggested such an approach).

To begin with, such a license would require platforms to obtain users’ permission before collecting anyone’s personal data—i.e., opt-in rather than opt-out. When you signed up for a Facebook account, you probably didn’t imagine that 10 or 15 years on, you were unknowingly agreeing to allow the company to suck up your private data or track your physical locations, or mass collect every “like,” “share,” and “follow” into a psychographic profile that can be used by advertisers and political operatives to target you. Facebook and its fellow outlets started this data grab secretly, forging their destructive brand of “surveillance capitalism.” Now that we know, should society continue to allow this?

The new model also should encourage more competition by limiting the mega-scale audience size of these media machines; nearly 250 million Americans, about 80 percent of the population, have a profile on one of these platforms. Smaller user pools could be accomplished either through an anti-trust breakup of the companies, or through incentives to shift to a revenue model based more on monthly subscribers rather than on hyper-targeted advertising, which would cause a decline in users. The utility model also should restrain the use of specific engagement techniques, such as hyper-targeting of content, automated recommendations, and addictive behavioral nudges (like autoplay and pop-up screens).

We also should update existing laws to ensure they apply to the online world. Google’s YouTube/YouTube Kids have been violating the Children’s Television Act—which restricts violence and advertising—for many years, resulting in online lawlessness that the Federal Communications Commission should examine. Similarly, the Federal Elections Commission should rein in the quasi-lawless world of online political ads and donor reporting, which has far fewer rules and less transparency than ads in TV and radio broadcasting.

Like many other people, I have benefited from the internet and its revolution in communications. These businesses are creating the new infrastructure of the digital age, including search engines; global portals for news and networking; web-based movies, music, and live streaming; GPS-based navigation apps; online commercial marketplaces; and digital labor market platforms—services and technologies that are being interwoven into the very fabric of our societies.

I believe we can retain what is good about the internet without the toxicities. Like the promise of the internet itself, Facebook-Google-Twitter started out small, and then blew up into monopolistic giants that have established their own greedy and destructive rules that threaten our democracy. It is crucial that regulation evolves in order to shape this new digital infrastructure—and the future of our societies—in the right way.

The post Can We Tame the Wild West of Big Tech Media? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But first, what exactly is local media these days? California Newsroom managing editor Joanne Griffith, the moderator of today’s Zócalo/Center for Social Innovation event, Can Local Media Restore Trust and Destroy Disinformation?,” opened the discussion with that very question.

A key part of local news is “original reporting,” said American Journalism Project CEO Sarabeth Berman. Her venture philanthropy organization invests in nonprofit, nonpartisan newsrooms; the ultimate goal of those newsrooms, she said, is to get people “the information they need to be able to take informed action, to show up at the ballot box, and engage in their communities.”

Voice Media Ventures founder Paulette Brown-Hinds, who is the publisher of Riverside County, California-based Black Voice News, agreed, adding that she uses “local news” and “community media” interchangeably to describe public information sources that educate their communities—and can be anything from corporate-owned newspapers to community weeklies, and also include local ethnic media.

The internet has not been kind to local news outlets that depended on advertising revenue. In the past two years alone, said Griffith, approximately 300 newspapers closed and 6,000 journalists lost their jobs.

“The spread of disinformation is like the weeds that have grown up in the vacant lot that has been left by the decline of local news,” said Berman. And that decline “has had really dire impacts on our communities, on people, on our democracy.” Voting and civic engagement drop, and polarization increases, when people have less information about their communities, she added.

That is not a coincidence or unintended effect but part of the design of disinformation campaigns. Brown-Hinds and attorney Ann Ravel, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission who now directs a project designed to combat “digital deception,” agreed that bad actors spread falsehoods deliberately and intentionally. Sometimes it’s to disenfranchise political opponents; Brown-Hinds pointed to the successful campaign to deny the mayor of Stockton, California, a second term.

“It’s clear that a lot of the origins of this disinformation actually come from elected officials,” said Ravel. National news media—which feed their 24-hour cycles with “outrage and opinion” are also a major source of false statements, which the internet then multiplies, she said. Often, Ravel pointed out, it’s “the most outrageous information and the most inflammatory information” that’s spread widest and fastest thanks to algorithms and the massive amount of data that companies like Facebook use to target users. Ravel hopes that the federal government might step in to regulate some of this, as they have with campaign financing, to create greater accountability and transparency.

Griffith asked if greater media literacy might also make a difference in helping people sort fact from fiction.

The panelists agreed that we need better media literacy in America—but the facts are no match for an absence of trust. “How do you begin to come to a shared reality? I think that has to start in communities,” said Berman, adding that people tend to trust local news, which is transmitted by journalists who live and write in their communities, more than national news. “You build trust through relationships,” she said.

Brown-Hinds said that the Black press was founded in America approximately 200 years ago not just because the Black community was ignored, but also because it was “demonized and criminalized.” In turn, a central mission of the Black press has been to “combat misinformation” and serve “as vital, trusted messengers.” Recently, she has worked to bring together different outlets across California that serve communities of color to amplify their messaging. Together, this group of approximately 20 news organizations was extremely successful in getting the word out about how to vote safely and securely during the pandemic.

One of the elephants in the room when it comes to combating disinformation, said Griffith, is that many people don’t have the “the time or patience or attention to spare to really look at something and look at it critically.” How, she asked, does local media get around such barriers?

Berman’s American Journalism Project is working with a number of organizations trying new models to reach people, including New York City-based Documented, which serves local news to immigrant populations in part through a WhatsApp channel, and Outlier Media in Detroit, a text-based news platform. These outlets are “meeting people where they are,” she said—where they can “hear from their community and speak back.”

But what can fund and sustain these experiments and their more established, traditional counterparts? Berman and Brown-Hinds agreed that a diverse revenue stream that includes philanthropy, membership, public financing, advertising revenue, and events is necessary for local news organizations to succeed in the current climate.

The funding discussion continued in the audience Q&A session—with questions submitted via live chat—as the panel was asked why there is pushback against government funding for local news.

“People are worried [government funding] is going to have an impact on what is covered,” said Ravel—which she doesn’t think should be a concern. She suggested levying a fee or advertising tax on social media platforms, which have become news aggregators, to go toward local news organizations, and also having governments set aside funds for local and ethnic presses. “Government always has done certain legislation to impact independent companies and the like for the public interest, and that’s what they should be doing now,” she said. “I would advocate for that.”

The panel ended on a decidedly upbeat note, with each speaker offering a way that local media can help combat the problem of disinformation. For Ravel, it’s transparency; for Brown-Hinds, increased philanthropic funding; and for Berman, a new generation of news organizations that have the potential to rebuild our civic infrastructure.

In closing, Griffith exhorted everyone to step up for their local outlets: subscribe, become a monthly member, write a letter to the editor, she said. “Support your local media in any way you can.”

The post Ending the Disinformation Era appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.