On Feb. 27, 2013, University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan answered a question posed to him about child pornography during an evening lecture he gave at the University of Lethbridge on the challenges of reforming the Indian Act.
The next morning, in the two-and-a-half hours it took to drive home to Calgary – and completely unaware of what was occurring – Flanagan’s reputation and career was under attack by Canadian media and its politicians.
Alberta’s premier, the leader of the Reform Party and a former leader of the Reform Party, along with his former boss, Stephen Harper, had issued statements denouncing him. The CBC dropped him as a commentator, speaking invitations were withdrawn and his employer, the University of Calgary, quickly released an ambiguous statement distancing itself from Flanagan and his comments.
The quick and harsh response stemmed from a video uploaded to YouTube the night before with the heading “Flanagan OK with child pornography.”
Taken on its own without any context, Flanagan’s recorded response seems that Flanagan could be “OK with child pornography.” But add the context and it becomes apparent that he is not OK with it, but instead was posing a provocative theoretical question meant to get people thinking – a common tactic he, and many others in academia, use to get the collective creative juices flowing.
Instead, he was quickly condemned and attacked for what he would later refer to as badly chosen words.
“I left Lethbridge as a respected academic and public commentator and arrived at Calgary persona non grata,” Flanagan writes in his latest book, Persona Non Grata: The Death of Free Speech in the Internet Age, published by McClelland & Stewart.
Flanagan mistakenly thought because the lecture was held at the University of Lethbridge it was an academic setting, not a political one. However, despite being held at the U of L, an open invitation meant people from the wider community were on hand, including activists looking to discredit him.
Flanagan uses his experience in Lethbridge and the subsequent media and online mobbing to examine the larger issues surrounding the Internet and how the technology can be used to kill, or at least damage, free speech.
One of the key points he found during his research is that the Internet, coupled with smartphones that have the ability to record audio and video – threatens to, Flanagan said, “squeeze the life out of free speech, the spontaneity.
“… If you’re always worrying about being recorded and that something you say could be taken out of context and displayed all over the universe, this is going to discourage people from a) saying what they really think and b) thinking out loud. Every thought will have to be perfectly formulated in advance,” Flanagan said.
“This is why politicians speak in those robotic talking points we all hate. They’re playing defence because they know what will happen if they start thinking out loud,” Flanagan said.
Thinking out loud, however, leads to intellectual creativity by permitting a process of give-and-take. But when free, open speech is not permissible or possible, Flanagan said intellectual creativity and all that comes with it is stifled.
“This is one of the dangers, apart from ruining people’s reputation; this is a danger to our public dialogue, that it becomes stilted and self protected now that it is so easy not only to record, but to post virtually immediately with no editorial checking. You don’t have to please an editor to put something up on YouTube.”
And once politicians become involved, the story gets bigger and moves much faster.
“It was politicians that really gave the story legs. All three of those elements are there and they stoke the stories that sweep through the media,” he said. “Politicians are by definition people of power and they give signals to other people about what is important. If politicians start to mob you, that is a signal for other people to pile on.”
Political involvement, coupled with an intersection of social media and traditional media, appear to be a common element in similar cases, he said, citing Donald Sterling as an example. The National Basketball Association was conducting an inquiry into Sterling’s racist comments when U.S. President Barak Obama became involved.
“They were making an attempt to handle it rationally and then President Obama jumped in, knowing nothing about it in particular except what he was seeing online. But once the senior politicians jump in it becomes almost impossible for anybody to act with cautious judgment,” Flanagan said.
While the book has given Flanagan the opportunity to voice his side of the story and allow him to complete the entire picture of how the incident occurred, he said that more importantly it serves as a reminder that free speech, along with privacy, can be eroded in other ways.
The federal government, he said, is considering legalizing the tracking of metadata – the information that points to how an individual uses the Internet and the information they access – of how Canadians are using the Internet without having to get a warrant.
“This is scary,” he said. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t really want to put all that power into the hands of government because that becomes a society of almost universal surveillance.
“One builds upon the other to either destroy somebody if you wanted to, or build a complete portrait if you wanted to that could be used for all kinds of purposes, not just advertising purposes. Look at cellphones and people aren’t even thinking about it. People are being tracked everywhere they go. Every store you go into, it’s located and that’s how advertisers know.”
Flanagan’s episode, he said, is part of a much larger story about the status of privacy of the wired world.
His book, Persona Non Grata, has given him the opportunity to explain himself and to explore all the facets involved in that explanation.
And what he was attempting to say when he got into trouble: “Mandatory minimum prison terms may not be the best way of dealing with the lowest levels of offences, such as simple possession and viewing,” he wrote, adding that the law provides many other options for sanctions, including probation and house arrest.”
“In a humane society, prison should be the last resort, not the first, for people who have not directly harmed others.”
