5
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

