7-Opinion T his past week, there was a little drama in the race for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District. Sheridan Lund, the precinct chair of the Democratic Party of Bernalillo County and candidate for the congressional seat, tweeted a now-deleted attack on one of the candidates. The charge being leveled was that Victor Reyes, a former top aide to New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and one of the candidates for the congressional seat, was only pretending to be a person of color. Reyes is a second-generation Mexican-American. Many of the other candidates running for Congress in this district released statements condemning the attack. What interested me is that at the time that the offending tweet was deleted, it only had about two likes and two negative quote tweets. My recent tweet about Fortnite skins got more likes than these poorly thought-out musings on colorism. By responding to Lund’s message, every candidate in the race was able to accrue some political capital and establish themselves as the candidate of racial justice. But they shouldn’t have responded. This falls in with a trend with which I’ve taken issue recently: treating certain social media posts as much more influential than they actually are. Media literacy is important and constantly evolving. Today I am offering an additional digital rule of thumb: Don’t engage with posts that don’t have traction (likes, shares, etc.). If a post doesn’t have engagement, that is the internet’s way of telling you that no one really found the post to be compelling, so you won’t actually be swaying any opinions by condemning it. Actors on the digital landscape, no matter how large or small the audience, have a responsibility to only respond to a piece of media they disagree with if it has an actual audience. Otherwise, they aren’t countering the sway of the original idea. On the contrary, they are amplifying it to their audience who wouldn’t have been exposed to it in the first place. Those who devote themselves to criticizing irrelevant posts that gained no traction on the merits of the idea presented are distorting the narrative — and doing a disservice to themselves and their audience in the process. Highlighting the fringe is how many figures of the online political influencer class make their livings. Ben Shapiro, probably the most influential conservative online pundit, recently released a YouTube video entitled “Leftists OUTRAGED Over Bill Burr Jokes at 2021 Grammys.” The premise of the video is that there are currently swathes of rabid Democrats who want to take your comedy away from you, a premise engineered to infuriate his audience. This simply wasn’t true. If you looked on Twitter, where the outrage was allegedly coming from, a couple of negative posts had gained a few hundred likes. But it seemed for every negative tweet about Bill Burr with five or ten likes, there were scores of people absolutely indignant that people could be so sensitive, all producing the same ten offending Tweets as evidence for a larger cultural sickness. So what should people respond to on the internet? I would offer a couple of criteria for a post to be considered worthy of a response. First, how much traction did this idea actually get? If Joe Schmoe posts on Facebook that we should put the Social Security Trust Fund into Bitcoin, and the post receives two likes and one “Interesting!” comment from his second- grade teacher, I am confident that the national narrative would not benefit from a prominent account screenshotting it, posting to their thousands of followers, and doing the 21st century equivalent of eviscerating the person on a daytime talk show. However, if Joe Schmoe’s post somehow manages to gain traction, then it might be worth engaging. On the other hand, if Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist, tweets that we should put the Social Security Trust Fund into Bitcoin, regardless of how much or how little engagement the post gets, this thought is relevant and merits a response. Overall, you should respond if the thinker is prominent or if the reach of their thought was large. These criteria apply less and less the closer the person is to you. I still want to empower you to get into Facebook arguments with your cousins about what time of year is best for seeing geese, because that person actually has a huge audience relative to your life — you and everyone close to you are the intended audiences. In a lot of ways, the internet is not necessarily a public forum. It is the Diag. You aren’t there to speak about and listen to a specific topic, you are there to do your own thing. If someone is shouting at the top of their lungs from one of those benches in front of Hatcher Graduate Library, you and everyone else would probably walk right by them. But if you see a crowd of a thousand listening to some weirdo’s ideas about the Federal Reserve, you have much more of a desire to comment. On the internet, we perceive things to be much more oriented at us than we do in real life. The phenomenon I am talking about is based much more on remoteness. If Facebook arguments with relatives are hand-to-hand combat, I am preaching against snipers: rummaging through the internet for the sole purpose of becoming enraged, finding the worst articulation of the offending concept, and pulling the trigger. Let’s circle back to the tweet that caused all my strife in the NM-1 congressional race. What should the candidates have done? I don’t want to sound too much like a kindergarten teacher, but ignoring it is often the best policy. Platforming the fringe is a poor decision. If an idea isn’t held by a significant number of people, it isn’t important enough to bring to the attention of your audience, or even worth your time. I know it’s almost all I write about these days, but this phenomenon contributes to political polarization. Picking the least articulate, least important post which was unable to gain any traction on the merits of its ideas, and magnifying it — responding to it as if it’s something greater — causes audiences to perceive society as a split between themselves and those who formulated the odd ideas in question. And that is rarely an accurate map of the populace. There is a genre of accounts that will find a post with not much traction, expressing the least developed version of an idea, and compile it with thousands of others with the goal of proving how much better X or Y ideology is than the other. Ignoring fringe posts won’t solve much. It won’t dismantle polarization, bigotry or online rudeness, but it will avoid unnecessarily elevating an idea no one listened to in the first place. It’s also a way to practice some self- respect. Often the only way we can interpret social media is as a direct message to us, and one which needs a response. Thinking of the internet as the Diag instead of a conversation or a forum can help you escape this mindset. People aren’t talking to you, they’re preaching into the air. It isn’t your responsibility to counter every silly thing someone says from their digital soapbox, but if other people start engaging with the idea, then you have the right to add your own commentary about the original post. With these criteria for social media non- confrontation, you can become a beacon of restraint in the digital age. Opinion Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 13 The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ALEX NOBEL | COLUMNIST O n a basic level, humans need four things to survive: food, water, shelter and air. Three of these have already been commodified, leaving only air untouched. Human beings take an average of 22,000 breaths per day. Whether someone is exercising, sick or breathing polluted air, breathing is something that isn’t noticed until it’s difficult to do. Between the COVID-19 pandemic, the West Coast wildfires and an increase in global pollution, clean air is becoming more and more of a luxury. Air cannot become commercialized like food, shelter and water already have; this would put the lives of millions of people in danger. COVID-19 has taught us many things about the way our society functions, but one major takeaway is that even basic tasks like breathing can become disrupted by unexpected phenomena. As elementary, middle and high schools move to reopen, they have faced the question of how to fit hundreds of students into hot, poorly ventilated classrooms. At first glance, schools should be hotbeds for viral spread. Infections are 18.7 times more likely to occur indoors, where virus particles remain in the air for up to three hours. However, schools have invested heavily in high-efficiency particulate air filters that work to prevent molecules from being transported by air. While these are not perfect, they have done a solid job in classrooms that have invested properly in the air filtration systems. But what happens when a school district cannot afford the ventilation systems that satisfy Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines? A federal watchdog service found that 41% of grade schools needed to update or completely overhaul their air filtration systems prior to COVID- 19. These schools often faced tight budgets and had to opt for the cheapest filtration systems. New York City’s public schools have bought over 30,000 new air filtration systems since the pandemic started, but teachers, concerned they will not be enough to ensure students’ safety, crowdfunded an additional $159,000 to purchase more. Schools in poorer neighborhoods need to upgrade their current systems just to reach the pre-pandemic filtration level of those in schools in rich neighborhoods. Unfortunately, this problem extends beyond classrooms. Due to cheap construction materials and techniques, the air in our homes can be up to five times dirtier than outdoors. As people are spending more time indoors because of the pandemic, they are spending more time breathing dirty — albeit, COVID-19 free — air. Dozens of health issues have been linked to unclean indoor air, such as asthma, allergies, depression and sleep apnea. Yet, outdoor air can be just as dangerous. Data from the World Health Organization shows that nine in every 10 people globally breathe air that exceeds WHO standards for pollutant levels. That same data found that seven million people die every year from air pollution, and air pollution is responsible for roughly one out of every eight deaths worldwide. The United Nations estimates that air pollution costs all nations combined around $5 trillion every year in prevention and mitigation efforts. In the United States, the Clean Air Act has helped lower lead air pollution by 92% since 1980, but globally, half of all people are experiencing worsening air quality. Last fall, California, Oregon and Washington experienced unprecedented wildfires. The fires were not only unprecedented in their severity, but also in their effect on the nation’s air quality. As a result of the fires, one in seven Americans experienced dangerous levels of pollutants in their air. The fires impacted air quality in nearby areas such as Portland, Ore., which had the world’s worst air quality, but their impact was also felt across the world, including in Europe. As climate change increases the frequency of forest fires, they will only continue to harm global air quality. Urban centers generally have the worst air quality, and as more people continue to move to cities around the world, they give us a good place to start improving air quality. One basic step that cities can take is creating more green spaces. Whether by planting trees, creating roof gardens or expanding public parks, creating these green spaces reduces air pollution and provides residents with cleaner, cooler air, along with many other health benefits. Another major step that can be taken is transitioning toward electric buses and trains and encouraging biking and walking through safer trails and sidewalks. Motor vehicles in Philadelphia contribute to about 60% of the city’s total air pollution, demonstrating how switching to green transportation could significantly lower emissions. Like all aspects of climate change, air quality issues harm vulnerable populations the most and compound existing inequities. Solutions must take this into account or risk worsening inequalities. Air quality isn’t about preserving the planet or environment for generations to come. Rather, it is about improving public health right now and averting preventable diseases, health problems and premature deaths. The price of clean air LYDIA STORELLA | COLUMNIST Michigan’s sex-ed hurts students’ sexual health Lydia Storella is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at storella@umich.edu. V accines. The epitome of short- term pain, long-term gain. A scientific achievement and feat of human accomplishment that can be received in a grocery store pharmacy. A quick pinch in the arm gives people more hope than they’ve felt in a year. The vaccine is nothing short of a miracle and likely what will usher us out of the current pandemic. While it seems like campus is abuzz about the vaccine, especially with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s, D-Mich., statement about vaccine availability for all adults aged 16 and older on April 5, I am deeply concerned by a pattern of behavior that has emerged: lying about one’s situation expressly for the purpose of getting a vaccine. Like all education in the United States, individual states set their own standards for sex education. Many states need to reform these standards. Only 39 states and Washington, D.C., require sex ed and/or HIV education, and it only gets worse from there. A mere 17 states require that the information provided be medically accurate — five of which don’t even require sex education in classrooms. Additionally, five states require only providing negative information about homosexuality, and 19 states require that sex ed must teach that it is important to wait until marriage to have sex. The last time the state of Michigan updated its sex-ed standards was 2004, nearly 20 years ago. It includes relics of the past, such as forbidding teaching that abortion is reproductive health and requiring “stressing abstinence from sex.” While Michigan requires HIV/AIDS education, it, along with 19 other states, does not require sex education. Family planning drugs or devices (e.g. condoms) cannot be handed out to students. In fact, much of the content about contraceptives (labeled “risk reduction” in the summary) is left to the discretion of the school districts, which means that many Michigan students do not receive education about birth control options, leaving them vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy. Sex education has positive effects on the health of students. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assesses that the benefits of providing quality sex ed to students include delaying sex, having fewer experiences with unprotected sex and avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancy. The CDC provides sex ed standards for fifth, eighth and 10th graders, which culminates in the 10th grade with discussions about contraceptive options (which includes condoms as well as abstinence), consensual sex and sexual health. Leaving so much important information to the judgment of individual school districts means that the quality of sex ed varies widely across the state of Michigan. The required emphasis on the importance of abstinence and forbidding discussions of abortion as reproductive health in all Michigan public schools only works to limit the knowledge of Michigan students about birth control, which impacts their sexual health and safety going forward. The sex education standards also make no mention of content regarding LGBTQ+ issues or sexual orientation in general. Considering that the percentage of Americans who identify as LGBTQ+ is growing, especially among the younger generations, it is imperative that such information be taught in Michigan’s public schools, which have over 1.5 million students. While Republicans tend to prefer including abstinence and Democrats were more likely to prefer including discussions about birth control, consent and sexual orientation, both Republicans and Democrats want some form of sex ed to be taught in the classrooms. But it’s difficult to get state lawmakers to be proactive in fighting for sex education due to the topic’s controversial nature. Even in progressive states, it can be difficult to implement sex ed reform; in California, comprehensive sex ed wasn’t required until 2016. In states with a Republican-controlled branch of government, like Michigan, implementing sex education reform can be even more difficult. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans think that premarital sex is morally unacceptable, compared to 27% of Democrats, leading many to oppose material that could be seen as encouraging students to have sex. Not only does comprehensive sex education help to reduce rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, but preaching abstinence doesn’t even help to reduce the rates of teenagers having sex. Studies have shown that abstinence-only education does not delay sex, but instead leaves students unsafe and at risk for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But few topics are as important to the Republican Party as abortion, which is the second-most important issue for Republicans when deciding which presidential candidate to vote for. States that emphasize abstinence in sex education have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and teen birth. Thirty-one percent of teenagers who get pregnant have an abortion; access to birth control dramatically reduces pregnancy and abortion among teenagers. While free and accessible birth control is a separate issue from sex education, it is possible that teen abortion rates would decrease if all states included a judgment-free discussion of contraceptives in their sex education and diminished the importance placed on abstinence. This could help to reduce abortion rates, something that Republicans certainly support. Michigan sex education needs to be updated. Stressing abstinence and making discussion of contraceptives discretionary only makes Michigan students unprepared for sex whenever they choose to have it. Considering that sex is a natural and vital human function, it is ignorant to assume that abstinence is a helpful way of teaching teenagers about sex, especially since it has been proven that comprehensive sex education reduces rates of unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Michigan, along with the rest of the country, must update its sex education standards in order to educate its students on safe sexual health and experiences. Alex Nobel is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at anobel@umich.edu. Design by Sharon Kwan SHUBHUM GIROTI | COLUMNIST Enough is enough — we must defend the Uighurs O n Monday, March 22, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada coordinated with the European Union in sanctioning China over their treatment of Uighur Muslims in their country. This move begs the question: why did this policy take so long to be enacted? The Uighurs are a minority Turkic- Muslim population located mainly in northwestern China who have recently become the target of Chinese monitoring and detention. Starting in 2016, the Chinese government was found to have been creating “re-education camps,” or facilities in which they captured and imprisoned the Uighurs. China spent a long time denying that their camps were actually being used for malice. Instead, China asserts that the prisoners were simply being re-educated because some had become “extremists,” although no such evidence exists. In 2018, the Chinese government finally acknowledged that these places existed and were not for re-education. They said they were imprisoning individuals for low-level crimes and vocational training. However, anecdotal accounts completely reject this notion. In 2019, U.N. representatives sent a letter to the U.N. High Commissioner explaining their concern with the large number of Uighurs being imprisoned, and the fact that the Chinese government was violating human rights laws. During former President Donald Trump’s administration in September 2019, the U.S. finally spoke up and condemned China’s actions on an international scale. Critically, former President Trump himself said in the summer of 2020 that he had been holding off on sanctioning China over their treatment of the Uighurs for the past year to preserve trade talks. This leads us to the question of where we should morally draw a line between our economic prosperity and human rights abuses happening in other countries. It is no secret that economics and global politics play a massive role in domestic politics, but this issue highlights how far will some countries, specifically the U.S., will go to protect trade talks and economic negotiations when human rights abuses are transpiring every day. The protection of human life and preservation of human rights must be the utmost priority. One major goal of the Biden administration must be to build back the U.S.’s image on the international stage after world leaders both literally and figuratively laughed at Trump and the country. From Trump criticizing NATO to taking the U.S. out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, our international reputation has taken a hit. While President Joe Biden did return the U.S. to the United Nations Human Rights Council, this is not enough. Taking a firm stance on human rights would set the ball in motion for the U.S. to come back as a key player in the international community. Joining in on these sanctions is a step in the right direction, but it would be even better if the U.S. decided to stop doing business with companies associated with Uighur labor, such as Nike, Amazon, Gap, Adidas and many more. Biden should call on the U.S. Senate to fast-track and pass H.R.6210, the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act. This act, which passed the House of Representatives on a bipartisan 406-3 vote, ended up stalling in the Senate committees. If Biden is truly committed to ensuring Uighurs in China are treated fairly and better protected, he must use the bully pulpit of the presidency and place a magnifying glass on this issue for the world. The time to favor economic benefits over the internment of hundreds of thousands of individuals and human rights abuses is over. We as a society need to recognize that our economy and individual monetary success pales in comparison to the livelihood of individuals we may not personally know. It is imperative that as we continue to pressure the Biden administration about the human rights of people of color in this country, we do not forget that his influence goes far beyond just these 50 states. If Biden takes a firm stance on defending the Uighurs, we can finally say our president is working for everyone. Shubhum Giroti is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at sgiroti@umich.edu. JULIAN BARNARD | COLUMNIST No comment: the value of restraint in the digital age Julian Barnard is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at jcbarn@umich.edu.