Thursday, October 23rd 2008

By mavis vaz

     By the time you read this, your votes for the DVD Referendum will most likely have already been cast. Or not, depending on how ‘disgusted’ you were by the Elections Committee’s initial ban on online-campaigning or the associated ‘censorship of free speech’ that some felt they suffered as a result of this ban.

     As someone whose political stance is firmly rooted in liberal policies, I am highly opposed to almost any form of censorship. However, there is something that worries me even more than this perceived sense of censorship. It is the fact that students actually likened the Elections Committee’s position (based on the premise that it is easier for false and incomplete information to be disseminated online) to a right that people for centuries and the world over have given their lives up for. Even more disconcertingly, these same students felt that they were ‘fighting for their right to free speech’ by spending five minutes opening a Facebook group on the matter.

     Congratulations! Apparently, those five minutes in front of your computer screen make you a champion and advocate for free speech. But what I foresee is now that the referendum is over, the rhetoric of free speech that caused tempers to run so high in the last week will disappear with it. Now that the question of free-speech is no longer tied to a time-sensitive, opinion based referendum, it appears that these Facebook groups will lose their steam.

     For those of you so concerned that the Elections Committee banned online-campaigning in a plot to take away one of your fundamental rights, here’s a heads up: now that the referendum is over (and ever since the Elections Committee decided to reverse the ban to prevent a further bias), you can bring your concerns about censorship of free speech before the MSU openly. In fact, you could do this at any time before, during or after the ban.

     Unfortunately for you though, that would involve some work. It would require you to log off of Facebook and do some research into why the Elections Committee put the ban into effect in the first place. Ironically enough, to prevent unfair biases. It would require you to come up with a well-formulated, and well-researched stance on the alleged ways that the MSU has stifled your right to free speech.

     But then again, it’s much easier to espouse your lofty ideals of free-speech when to you, this involves typing out slanderous insults on an un-moderated Facebook group. It is easy to feel that you are somehow pioneering the next counter-cultural movement to take back the rights that have been stolen from you when all that this requires is continuing an online discussion that is banned. But now that the referendum is over and you were allowed to campaign online, it turns out that your free speech rhetoric has no grounding.

     At the time of the ban, these students would freely throw around in online discussions how they felt that the SRA and MSU were abusing their power and really did not have the needs of students in mind.  But just remember that when they DID have the chance to actually bring their complaints of free-speech censorship before the MSU in an educated and informed manner (any time in the last few years they have been at Mac), these students who claim to care so much about free speech chose instead to remain uninvolved, uninformed and rather, to simply ambiguously claim that the MSU and SRA were doing nothing for them. Who’s abusing their right to free speech now?