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OPINION
Thursday, June 27, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com OPINION
M
edia has the power to teach.
Sometimes what it teaches
us is dangerous — our bod-
ies are disgusting, our love is invalid
— but sometimes what we learn from
media has a positive impact. I wrote
about this power in my last column, and
the sentiment rings true in today’s piece.
Today, media is teaching us to stop for-
getting history, and instead allowing it
to guide our future decisions.
The story of the Central Park Five
reached infamy far before my gen-
eration existed. I personally only knew
small details about the case, and had
only been exposed to it because of
Donald Trump’s involvement and its
discussion during his 2016 presidential
candidacy. For those alive in the year
1989, the case of the Central Park Five
is comparable to OJ Simpson: You don’t
forget where you were when you heard
it.
Now, the Netflix mini-series “When
They See Us” has catapulted the story
of the Central Park Five back into the
public eye. For those who haven’t
watched the series or are unfamiliar
with the story: After a night of crime
and violence in Central Park, a female
jogger is found brutally raped and
assaulted the next morning. Five young
men of color — four Black and one Lati-
no — are arrested. All of the boys are
under the age of 16, and they only con-
fess to the crime after hours of abusive
interrogation. Some went over a day
without proper sleep or food, and none
had a parent or counsel present. The
boys were all convicted, and spend a
range of five to 12 years behind bars for a
crime that DNA eventually proved they
did not commit.
“When They See Us” is a heartbreak-
ing journey through the trials and
convictions, demonstrating how hor-
rifically these men were treated. Near
the time of the trial, President Donald
Trump spent $85,000 on a full-page
ad in four newspapers calling for the
return of the death penalty just to exe-
cute the teenage boys, an act for which
he refuses to apologize. As five men of
color accused of raping and beating a
white woman, these five boys were vili-
fied and presumed guilty by the media,
a prejudice that hung a dark cloud over
the court and led to the harmful, unfair
result of their trials.
The mini-series has reignited the
rightful outrage against people on the
wrong side of justice. The lead prosecu-
tor, Elizabeth Lederer, resigned from
her position at Columbia Law follow-
ing backlash sparked by the mini-series.
The head of the sex crimes division of the
NYPD, Linda Fairstein, also resigned
from several boards thanks to criticism
associated with “When They See Us.”
The backlash mirrors what followed
2015’s “Making a Murderer,” which
profiled yet another wrongful convic-
tion. Again, the prosecutor in this case
received widespread disapproval —
people just couldn’t grasp how this man
could be put away for something he
didn’t do.
The problem is, this happens every
single day. Wrongful convictions like
the Central Park Five happen all the
time — which is far too often to make a
Netflix series for each. The roar of out-
rage when these shows premiere is jus-
tified — the American criminal justice
system is significantly broken. But even-
tually, the next hot thing comes along,
the outrage dies down, and thousands
of disadvantaged people are left to deal
with trials built to lock them away.
A great pairing to “When They See
Us” would be “13th,” a documentary
on the epidemic of mass incarceration
that plagues this country. If you are left
heartbroken and angry from the story
of the Central Park Five, “13th” will piss
you off even more. But at the very least,
you’ll recognize the institutional racism
and classism that landed five young boys
of color in prison 30 years ago. The Unit-
ed States is the world leader in incar-
ceration, with over 2.2 million people in
jails and prisons, a 500 percent increase
in the past 40 years. Out of those 2.2 mil-
lion people, 67 percent are Black, despite
Black people only making up 37 percent
of the American population. A Black
man has a 1 in 3 chance of being incar-
cerated, a Latino man 1 in 6, compared
to the 1 in 17 probability among white
men. These are the basic statistics of
the disparities in the criminal justice
system, and they only get more dis-
gusting as you go deeper. Private pris-
ons, drug laws, bail money, felon voting
laws — all of these and more benefit
from keeping poor people and people
of color on a one way road to prison.
So what are we going to do? Are
we going to forget this outrage until
Netflix formulates another true crime
drama to rake in subscribers? Don’t let
this outrage go away, because the real-
ity of the Central Park Five sure won’t.
There are still young men of color
being wrongfully imprisoned, and
sticking them in a harmful cycle soci-
ety has made nearly impossible to end.
There are young children being tried
as adults because they were not given
the resources or treatment necessary to
prevent this. Public outrage is good, but
there is always more.
Internalize the message of ‘When They See Us’
SAMANTHA DELLA FERA | COLUMN
Samantha Della Fera can be reached at
samdf@umich.edu.
OLIVIA TURANO | COLUMN
A
pop-up in my Facebook
browser
prompted
me
“How
much
do
you
think Facebook cares about its
users?” I thought about it for a bit,
and decided that “neither agree
nor disagree” most adequately
summarized my feelings.
So when Facebook thanked
me for my feedback, promising to
“use it to improve Facebook,” and
asking me to share any additional
thoughts, I decided to do my civic
duty and participate in the demo-
cratic process.
I said: I think Facebook is
becoming a monopoly and needs
to be broken up. It’s been done in
the past with every generation’s
new monopoly: Ours is just online
giants like Facebook and Ama-
zon. Don’t take it personally, Mark
Zuckerberg, you just own way too
much of our information for any
one person to have.
We’ve been hearing about Face-
book consistently in the news since
its inception, but increasingly so
since January 2018, when the news
of the Cambridge Analytica scan-
dal broke. This raised red flags
about how much of our informa-
tion Facebook really has, how that
information was misappropriated
and the influence platforms like
Facebook could have had on the
2016 election. This incident was
followed by Mark Zuckerberg’s
two appearances on Capitol Hill
last April when he testified in front
of Senate and House committees
on Facebook’s business practices,
ethics and protection of user data.
More Facebook scandals have
continued to appear in the news,
remaining at the forefront of the
emerging dialogue on the influence
and power of Facebook and other
companies like it.
This is all part of a bigger pic-
ture, beyond just Facebook and
the scandals that characterized
2018. Since the turn of the twenty-
first century, media and technol-
ogy giants have continued to grow
with almost unchecked power. At
2018’s World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, George Soros
described Facebook and Google as
a “menace” to society, intentionally
engineering their services to be
addictive.
“They claim they are merely
distributing information. But the
fact that they are near-monopoly
distributors makes them public
utilities and should subject them to
more stringent regulations, aimed
at preserving competition, innova-
tion, and fair and open universal
access,” Soros said.
In May 2019, we heard from
Chris Hughes, co-founder of Face-
book, in a New York Times op-ed.
Hughes described the extent of
Mark Zuckerberg’s power and
control over Facebook, Whatsapp
and Instagram. Zuckerberg has
an astounding 60 percent of Face-
book’s voting shares. He doesn’t
just run Facebook — he completely
controls it.
Facebook is worth half a trillion
dollars and by Hughes’s estimate,
over 80 percent of the world’s social
networking revenue. He argued
that Facebook has reached monop-
oly status, “eclipsing all of its rivals
and erasing competition from the
social networking category” and
has called for the company’s lead-
ership to be broken up.
Despite Facebook’s scandals,
it continues to thrive. “Even dur-
ing the annus horribilis of 2018,”
Hughes wrote, “Facebook’s earn-
ings per share increased by an
astounding 40 percent compared
with the year before.” Hughes
offered two explanations for Face-
book’s continued prosperity; first,
less people are going off Facebook
than we think, with most deletions
being temporary due to the lack
of a compelling alternative; sec-
ond, those who do choose to leave
Facebook often turn to Instagram,
which is owned by Facebook.
Sleeker and simpler, Instagram
has somehow managed to remain
separate from Facebook’s scandals.
I was surprised to learn that
Facebook
is
still
prospering.
Among college students, on the
precarious edge of millennial and
Generation Z, it feels like Facebook
use is dwindling. Only four years
ago, Facebook was integral to the
high school social scene and cul-
ture. For over a decade, people have
used Facebook to unite over shared
experiences online. Today, I notice
my friends posting on Facebook far
less, and many high schoolers don’t
have Facebook accounts.
I don’t think our constantly
updating news feeds have gradu-
ally dwindled because of fear
about information security, or even
because we know that Facebook
influenced the 2016 election. I
think it’s because, quite simply, it’s
going out of fashion. Facebook ren-
dered MySpace obsolete by 2010,
and as 2020 approaches, Face-
book is being crowded out by apps
that capture our young, impatient
minds’ attention more. And yet, we
are all still on Facebook. Why?
I think Facebook comes in handy
for the small things that don’t add
anything extremely valuable to our
lives anymore, but make it worth
not deactivating — it’s not much
more than updating photo albums
for your friends and family, sharing
articles and providing commentary
on current events, but we’ve been
doing so for so long that it makes
more sense to continue than to stop.
But whether or not we’re actively
using Facebook, our information
remains in the company’s hands
nonetheless. Even if we delete our
Facebook accounts, we’ll still be on
Instagram. Echoing what seems to
be a common sentiment of many
millennials and Gen Z-ers alike,
Mashable published an article in
2018 entitled, “I will delete Face-
book, but you can pry Instagram
from my cold, dead hands.” In fact,
I would argue many of us aren’t
even ready to delete Facebook —
because if we were, wouldn’t we
have already done so?
I’m not suggesting that we all
will, or even should, get off social
media. Maybe it’s our biggest
enemy, but it’s sometimes our most
important friend, essential to our
social lives today. Technology is
irreversibly ingrained in our exis-
tence now, and denouncing it alto-
gether isn’t feasible or productive.
We could all theoretically delete
our Facebook accounts, but that’s
just the tip of the iceberg. Once
we delete Facebook, what about
Instagram? What about Google,
Amazon and Apple? What about
the streaming services, email lists,
financial institutions and thou-
sands of other providers to which
we’ve inevitably provided informa-
tion?
The turn of the twentieth cen-
tury was characterized by monop-
olies. Now almost 130 years after
the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890,
many monopolies have been bro-
ken up, from Standard Oil in 1911 to
AT&T in 1982. The technology that
revolutionized the world a hundred
years ago needed eventually to be
regulated, controlled and divided,
and the arguably monopolistic
power of all tech giants deserves, at
the very least, a thorough examina-
tion.
Facebook’s influence
Olivia Turano can be reached at
turanoo@umich.edu.
Read more at michigandaily.com
Read more at michigandaily.com