When New York City schools closed abruptly last month to in-person learning as COVID-19 positivity rates reached 3%, Caroline Goldrick was incredulous. On her street at the northern tip of Manhattan, her daughter’s elementary school doors were shuttered. Those of restaurants and gyms remained wide open. 

“It’s so backward. To be honest, when I stop and think about it, I almost start crying. I don’t get it. I don’t understand what the priority is here,” says Ms. Goldrick, a theater teacher and mother to a first grader in the public school system. 

The daily commute is the opposite for Uwe Berlo in Berlin. After he or his wife escort the kids to school, they can’t pop into a cafe for coffee or meet up with friends for a leisurely restaurant brunch. As German officials have nervously watched the country’s COVID-19 case count tick up toward 25,000 per day in recent weeks – with a countrywide positivity rate between 5% and 10% – their priorities in pandemic-management are clear. Restaurants, bars, and gyms have shuttered to fight the second wave, so that 2.8 million primary schoolchildren can remain in class learning. 

“The risk of not going to school is much bigger,” says Mr. Berlo, a crisis management business consultant in Berlin. “I think we [as a country] are differentiating between what we can fix with money, and those things that can’t be fixed with money,” he says. “Psychological problems can’t be fixed with money. It’s the right thing that schools are open.”

Annegret Hilse/Reuters

Students at Martin-Buber-Oberschule secondary school wear protective masks as school resumes following the autumn holidays in Berlin on Oct. 26, 2020.

Decisions whether to open or close schools, like so much else during the pandemic, are a moving target. Best practices are still evolving and schools shift course as the virus does. 

Yet as case counts rise across Europe and North America, many districts in the United States have done the opposite of Europe: They’ve kept kids away from their classrooms since March – from Chicago to Los Angeles – even as nonessential businesses have stayed open. In Europe, where positivity rates in some countries far exceed the 3% threshold that originally sent New York City public school kids home, bars and indoor dining and other nonessential businesses have been re-shuttered to safeguard schools. 

Certainly, many of the same challenges affect school systems across the globe. Unions battle for better safety measures, while many teachers feel as though they have no choice but to return to class, even if they feel unsafe. Parents everywhere worry – both about keeping their kids out of school and about putting them in.

But the decision-making around how and where American schoolchildren will spend their days has been affected by political polarization and a distrust of authorities that have made it harder to find consensus on responding to the pandemic, including education policy. A set of cultural values in the U.S. that emphasizes freedom and individual choice above all else has also undergirded decisions to open or close school. Whereas in Europe and Canada, the costs of rising inequality and a desire to keep social safety nets firmly in place have prompted authorities to implore society to do its job – by forgoing nonessential activities – to help keep schools open.

“During a crisis you have to ask yourself what is really important. On the question around reopening, do you open cinemas first or schools?” says Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. “These are values questions. Societies need to make tradeoffs between the present and the future, and they do that very differently.”

Still, some backtracking in the U.S. is happening. More Americans have started to push for schools to reopen – essentially asking states to shift priorities to improve conditions for doing this. New York City, which had opened with a hybrid model, only to close about two months later, announced earlier this week it will return some pre-kindergarten and elementary students to in-person learning starting on Dec. 7 and do away with the 3% positivity threshold for closing. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield has said that schools can operate with “face to face learning” and can do it “safely and they can do it responsibly.” Some U.S. school districts have had to delay reopening plans due to surges in cases. Rhode Island recently chose to limit bar seating and close bowling alleys for a few weeks, while offering grants to business owners and keeping schools running – more along the lines of what Europe and Canada have done. 

“Education is a certified right”

Historically, the consequences of school closures can be long-lasting. A September OECD study estimated that students in grades 1 through 12 affected by closures in 2020 could expect an average 3% lower income over their lifetimes. 

The most affected will be students who are most disadvantaged in the first place, says Harry Patrinos, practice manager at the World Bank’s education global practice. From the Spanish flu of 1918-1920 to World War II, losses have been traced decades later. “I worry that the longterm impact is going to be huge,” he says. “Past crises like influenza of 1918 and other catastrophes had lifetime impacts.”

In March when the pandemic was declared, 1.6 billion children around the world were sent home as schools shuttered. It was during spring and summer, when nations turned to the task of planning and prioritizing and seeking to strengthen social trust through the process, that educational paths diverged. 

For Germany the goals were clear from the beginning – even if the path to reopening was not without emotion or debate.

“Education is a certified right in Germany. We are an industrialized country and have relatively few natural resources, so we need professional workers who have a sensible education,” says Norman Heise, the elected chairman of the Parents’ Committee in Berlin, which represents the families of about 330,000 schoolchildren in the capital city.

For a wealthy country, Germany has a low level of digitization in schools, with only a third of children having access to online learning, well below the OECD average of 54%. German schoolchildren’s access to computers is also below the OECD benchmark. 

Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters

Teacher Eike Postler holds a tablet computer on which quarantined teacher Tobias Honnen is seen from his home office during a virtual English lesson at Alexander-Coppel-Gesamtschule school in Solingen, Germany, Nov. 17, 2020.

This, coupled with the government’s longtime focus on mitigating educational inequality, factored into the federal government-level decision to keep schools open. The heads of Germany’s 16 states, who are responsible for delivering education, might disagree on the extent to which economies should be shut down, or the logistics of keeping schools open, but agree on the importance of getting kids into classrooms.

School closings potentially exacerbate all kinds of social problems for children, from experiencing more domestic violence to falling behind because they lack access to Wi-Fi or laptops. For some children, schools provide their only hot meal of the day, or a safe space to interact with adults outside the family. Concern that educational inequalities would widen even further is a major factor in German decision-making, says Guido Küssner, an educational consultant at the German online school Wilhelm von Humboldt. Public school closures could drive parents with resources to devise their own workarounds, including enrolling in private schools or employing tutors. “There’s a real fear of ‘privatization,’” says Mr. Küssner.

What’s next in the U.S.?

In the U.S., there are few doubts that the pandemic will accelerate privatization of education in the country – intensifying a debate that is deeply polarized there. 

Public education was a foundation of the nation from its inception, says Derek W. Black, professor of law at the University of South Carolina in his new book “Schoolhouse Burning.” The federal government underwrote public education and forced states to provide for it in their own constitutions – to guarantee and shield it from the political process.

Kathy Willens/AP

Two students wave goodbye to teachers and counselors at West Brooklyn Community High School in New York after attending an in-person blended learning session and hearing from the principal that the school would be closed until further notice due to rising cases of the coronavirus on Nov. 18, 2020.

But the ideals of an education for all have never been realized. A history of exclusion and segregation still manifests in stubborn racial and socioeconomic inequalities today, while the American localized approach leads to a patchwork of standards. And many believe the privatization of education – which has gathered force since the Ronald Reagan administration – has made the system more vulnerable during the pandemic, which will in turn accelerate the trend. 

“Today we talk about education as though it’s a commodity rather than a constitutional commitment. And now we are shrinking our obligation to it in ways we never have before,” says Dr. Black. “We talk about the importance of education but the implementation and reality of that commitment is far more difficult because the stock market and the unemployment rate rule America in a way that it doesn’t necessarily rule the rest of the world.”

The federal government has given school boards little guidance. And with misinformation surrounding the pandemic fairly common, distrust over how to respond has influenced local districts and teachers unions. Initially, unions were behind some of the push to keep schools closed. Even where state governors have prioritized school openings, the community spread of the virus makes that logistically tenuous. 

In New York City, where some schools are set to reopen Monday, parents are keenly aware the system could close back down at any moment. Some, like Ms. Goldrick, who opted to keep her daughter in virtual classes because she doesn’t trust the safety of sending her back, is now considering pulling her out altogether and homeschooling instead. “She’s sitting in front of a screen for five hours a day, which is terrible,” she says. “It starts to affect her attitude towards school, which is something that’s really hard to watch.”

It’s not that the situation is seamless for parents and teachers anywhere, including Germany. Silke Steltner, a public school teacher in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, uses a pseudonym because she’s gotten threats for speaking out against school reopenings. She says she has teacher friends who are high-risk or live with high-risk family members. 

“We teachers are being sacrificed for the economy,” says Ms. Steltner. “It’s more about the working population being able to continue working. So we are a bit like nannies.” 

“Are we doing this the right way?”

Yet despite those universal concerns, Mr. Schleicher of the OECD says collaboration, not confrontation, has led countries like Germany to functioning academic fall terms while many places in the U.S. are still flailing.

The U.S. spends above the average of its peers in education but it neither values teachers enough – financially or intellectually – nor treats the school system as the heart of society, he says. In China, or Singapore, or northern Europe, various actors have together grappled with the school question during the pandemic, whereas in the U.S. decision-making has become commodified and siloed. “It makes you a customer rather than a participant in the process,” he says. “Where the social fabric of education is stronger, they are managing a lot better in this crisis.”

Robert Pianta, dean of the school of education and human development at the University of Virginia, says this crisis has laid bare where America’s failings lie. “It has definitely exposed weaknesses, in the same way 9-11 exposed the weaknesses in our homeland security,” he says. “I would hope that we are able to sit back and ask, ‘Are we doing this the right way?’ and double down on our efforts to dedicate ourselves to ‘harden’ that system.”

In Germany, those questions were already settled. Decision-making has been driven by research that shows children and young people are not the driving force behind the pandemic. Nationwide, infection figures have remained low in schools, with the education policy officials highlighting the need for public cooperation. People have a responsibility to restrict private lives and meetings with friends so that “our children and young people can get the education they are entitled to,” announced Stefanie Hubig, president of the conference of ministers of education and cultural affairs, in late October. “This is our educational policy, but it is also our task for society as a whole.”

Nearly a decade ago, after a string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists shook Tehran, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was assigned the task of guarding them.

The very presence of the powerful IRGC was meant to be deterrent enough to prevent enemy intelligence operatives from further killings, conducted as part of a covert war waged in earnest at the time by Israel and the United States to slow down Iran’s nuclear advances.

“Israel targeted the nuclear scientists because it understood that they did not have the security protection of the IRGC,” Gen. Mohammad Hassan Kazemi, the deputy commander of the IRGC security branch, boastfully announced in late 2013.

But any claim such a deterrent effect still existed disappeared Nov. 27, when the brazen killing in broad daylight of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh – long reputed to be the “father” of Iran’s nuclear program – exposed deep vulnerabilities in Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus.

The scientist is often described as being in charge of a clandestine weapons effort until it was shelved in 2003. But in 2018 he was mentioned pointedly by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he presented Iranian nuclear files stolen from a Tehran warehouse that he said proved that aspects of a weapons program headed by Mr. Fakhrizadeh were ongoing. “Remember that name,” he said.

Though close to retirement and using a cover story as an academic – which was used to deny inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to him, despite repeated requests – Mr. Fakhrizadeh in fact held the rank of deputy defense minister and was given a dayslong state funeral.

He was a known target, and would have been well protected by the IRGC’s Ansar-ol-Mahdi “secret service” unit. Amid a wave of internal Iranian finger-pointing that has followed the attack, analysts say Iran’s intelligence apparatus often appears to be looking in the wrong places for threats.

“The Fakhrizadeh assassination came as a shock, not because [they] didn’t expect it, but exactly because they did expect and prepare for it, and yet they couldn’t prevent it,” says Maysam Behravesh, an intelligence analyst on contract with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security from 2008 to 2010, and now a Sweden-based researcher with Clingendael, the Netherlands Institute of International Relations.

“This and past hostile operations could not have been carried out successfully, against all odds, had there not been a complex network of spies and moles deep in Iran’s security structure and intelligence community,” says Mr. Behravesh.

Bodyguards tipped off

The dozen assassins that took part in the ambush of Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s convoy of four armored vehicles melted away after the attack, according to a detailed account posted by Javad Mogouei, a documentary filmmaker who has worked for the IRGC, that was backed up by eyewitnesses and family members quoted by Iranian media.

The hit team deployed a car bomb, a machine gun, assault rifles, and two snipers on a barren rural road near the town of Absard, 40 miles east of Tehran. Officials say Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards had been given explicit tipoffs from other Iranian intelligence agencies that they would be hit.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed “definite punishment,” but said the first priority was finding and prosecuting the “murderous and brutal mercenaries.”

“Breaches, holes, and infiltrations” led to the assassination, Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, a military adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei and former defense chief, told state TV. General Dehghan, a candidate in Iran’s June 2021 presidential election, called on security officials “to answer as to how such infiltration occurs.”

Majid Asgaripour/WANA/Reuters

Protesters burn pictures of President-elect Joe Biden and President Donald Trump during a demonstration against the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's top nuclear scientist, in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 28, 2020.

Analysts say the killing of Mr. Fakhrizadeh will complicate efforts by President-elect Joe Biden to resuscitate the landmark, multilateral 2015 Iran nuclear deal. President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA in 2018, in favor of a “maximum pressure” campaign of punishing sanctions.

On Wednesday, Iran’s conservative Guardian Council approved a parliamentary bill requiring the government to boost uranium enrichment and stop IAEA inspections if sanctions aren’t lifted by February. Such a step would remove Iran further from the limits of the deal.

String of breaches

The assassination, meanwhile, is the latest in a chain of security breaches that indicate how agents of Iran’s archfoes, Israel and the U.S., have found ways to penetrate Iran’s intelligence infrastructure and operate relatively freely.

In August, for example, Israeli operatives in Tehran gunned down Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, one mastermind of the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, “at the behest of the United States,” The New York Times reported last month.

In July, amid a summer of unexplained explosions across Iran, a mysterious fire damaged Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Officials attributed it to “sabotage.”

This past January, a U.S. drone killed the commander of Iran’s IRGC Qods Force, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, in Baghdad.

The latest killing “is expected to prompt some serious soul-searching within the leadership as the enemy is apparently ‘closer to them than their necks’ veins,’ as some in Tehran like to put it,” says Mr. Behravesh.

Iran blames Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, which has a decadeslong history of conducting targeted assassinations across the Middle East and beyond. Israel has not denied a role, nor sought to dispel the sense that it operates with impunity in the Islamic Republic.

“The truth of the matter is that there are people inside the regime that are likely leaking this information,” says Afshon Ostovar, an Iran expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

“They’ve got a leaky ship, and I think that’s the scariest issue for them, because there’s no clean way to deal with that. It’s going to be messy,” says Dr. Ostovar, author of “Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.”

“If Israel really is behind all of these assassinations over the years, they’ve obviously got it down pretty well,” says Dr. Ostovar. “But when you combine this with the Al Qaeda assassination, with the stealing of the nuclear documents ... it’s kind of like Iran is going to school every day and doesn’t know when the bully is going to take its lunch money.

“I don’t know if that is how the Islamic Republic sees it. But if I’m in the security forces I’m really frustrated, because this stuff is just not being prevented,” he says.

A specific alert

Ali Shamkhani, chief of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told state TV that Iran’s intelligence agencies had “precisely predicted” the attack and its location, and the scientist’s security had been boosted. But “due to the frequency of reports [about attacks on him] over a 20-year period, precautions were unfortunately not observed, and the enemy succeeded this time,” he said.

Government spokesman Ali Rabiei went further, saying the Ministry of Intelligence had collected specific details about the pending attack and shared them as a “terror operation alert” with the security organ in charge.

“They could have made the crime fail if they had been a bit careful and followed the security protocols,” Mr. Rabiei told a virtual news briefing.

The backlash has been fierce, with groups of protesters – most of them hard-liners – gathering outside the president’s office, Foreign Ministry, and Parliament, demanding revenge and calling on Iran to spurn the nuclear deal.

For Iran, with its “powerful system equipped with thousands of skilled [intelligence] forces, a security breach is not acceptable,” wrote the hard-line newspaper Kayhan, noting that producing someone of “super-strategic importance” like Mr. Fakhrizadeh was a 50-year project.

“There is no chance we can look the other way in the face of mistakes and failures that have been committed with regard to infiltration,” Kayhan wrote.

Looking at the wrong targets

But looking in the wrong direction may be part of the problem, says Dr. Ostovar. IRGC intelligence has invested heavily in rooting out “infiltrators,” but for years pulled in dual-citizen academics and journalists.

“They’re just spending time on the wrong targets,” he says. “What gets in their way, probably more than anything, is that they really misunderstand the adversary. When they arrest [journalists] like Jason Rezaian and Maziar Bahari, they legitimately thought these guys were part of some spy network.”

“They really are paranoid, the IRGC in particular,” adds Dr. Ostovar. “You wonder if the omnipresence of the threat that they perceive actually obscures the threat in their midst. They only see the forest; they don’t see the trees.”

In the most recent example, a Swedish Iranian disaster medicine scholar, Ahmadreza Djalali, reportedly faces execution this week. He was arrested in 2016 after being invited to a conference in Tehran, then sentenced to death in 2017 on charges of spying for Israel. A group of 153 Nobel laureates signed a letter calling for his release.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Iran, actual foreign operatives appear to work with few limits.

“It’s been just like American action movies,” wrote Mr. Mogouei, the pro-regime filmmaker. “The whole file tells us that the intelligence apparatus has suffered serious holes for years, very deep ones. We need to drive back and cleanse the system.”

Carlos Barria/Reuters

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden is seen making remarks on his plan to fight COVID-19 on a monitor from the White House Briefing Room, after pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said its experimental COVID-19 vaccine was more than 90% effective, in Washington, Nov. 9, 2020.

“America is back.” President-elect Joe Biden’s message to the world has been clear, to friend and foe alike. That could prove easier said than done, though, and one early challenge awaiting the next U.S. administration will serve as a signal.

Unsurprisingly, it is pandemic-related: What will Washington do to distribute promising U.S. and European vaccines in developing countries, amid concerted drives by two strategic rivals, China and Russia, to promote vaccines of their own as part of a broader effort to extend their political and economic influence?

Mr. Biden has already announced that he will reverse the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization.

But that is just a first step toward the incoming administration’s broader aim: not just to rejoin international institutions, but to reclaim the broad and multifaceted leadership role that the U.S. built in the decades following World War II.

And that, in turn, will mean healing a serious rift at home, one that’s been widening since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. It is the cleavage between U.S. administrations which make foreign policy – both Republican and Democrat – and the huge numbers of American voters who have come to see such concerns as a waste of money, often a waste of lives, and a distraction from dealing with domestic priorities.

In other words, Mr. Biden will have to make the case that American leadership abroad is valuable not just for the world, but for Americans as well.

The vaccine question will put that proposition front and center from the day he takes office. The pandemic is a borderless threat, Mr. Biden’s team will argue, and one from which Americans cannot ultimately be safe without coordinated success in turning it back in other countries.

Inevitably, the incoming president’s first task will be to deal with the effects of the pandemic at home. His team has already been devoting its transition work to ensuring the earliest and widest possible distribution of vaccines to Americans.

Yet he does seem alert to the need to “bring America back” with a post-pandemic economic recovery plan and trade policies that protect everyday Americans and their jobs. Introducing his foreign policy team, he said of Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, “Jake understands my vision, that economic security is national security, and it helps steer what I call a foreign policy for the middle class.”

Still, the administration will also be aware that the U.S. can assert its renewed leadership on pandemic issues only through the very international institutions, investments, and involvement that President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach has worked actively to oppose or weaken.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

U.S. President Barack Obama (L) shakes hands with Dr Margaret Chan, director-general of World Health Organization (WHO), after speaking at the United Nations meeting on the Ebola outbreak, in New York September 25, 2014. At center, is Chairperson of the African Union Commission Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.

The clearest example is the World Health Organization, the U.N. body Mr. Trump has accused of mishandling the world’s pandemic response. But effective U.S. leadership implies a broader approach, the kind former President Barack Obama took in 2014 to deal with another pandemic threat – from the Ebola virus in Africa.

As his then-U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power, pointed out in a Foreign Affairs article last month, the Obama administration took the lead in mobilizing more than 60 countries behind that effort.

She argues that the U.S. should now do more than rejoin the WHO, and end the Trump administration’s boycott of COVAX, the 184-nation alliance pledged to make some 2 billion vaccine doses available to people in developing countries. It should draw on the long experience of bodies like the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the federal government’s foreign aid arm, the U.S. Agency for International Development, in working on other immunization programs with less-developed countries.

Within America’s so-called foreign policy establishment, the case for why such an initiative – and a wider reassertion of U.S. leadership – ultimately benefits Americans themselves is clear.

It begins with principle, though the current domestic political climate of division and anger has undermined this argument: the historic importance of America’s international voice in favor of democratic governance, freedom of assembly, expression, travel, and other human rights.

But beyond that, say the establishment traditionalists to whom Mr. Biden is entrusting U.S. foreign policy, Americans’ own interests – their national security, and their economic health – lie in being able to counter moves by undemocratic states to expand their international influence.

Increasingly, this balance-of-power case centers on Russia and, especially, China.

There’s an important additional dimension to that argument: that the effectiveness of American leadership, especially on security, has been hugely bolstered by the strength of alliances with like-minded democracies, above all in Western Europe and in Asia, which Mr. Trump has generally disdained.

Still, making the case is one thing. Getting it heard, and accepted, could yet prove difficult.

Last summer, I was a keynote speaker – via Zoom – at the annual conference of the School of Public Policy at the Central European University, the post-Cold War institution established by philanthropist George Soros in Budapest. In the discussion afterward, the CEU’s Canadian-born president, Michael Ignatieff, raised the issue of the policy rift that Mr. Biden now faces.

“There’s been an uncoupling of American foreign policy from its domestic base of political support, and unless that’s renewed, you can’t get the democratic support for an outward-faced foreign policy,” he argued. Repairing the link would be “a huge job,” he said, and he did not sound particularly hopeful.

But then he paused, and added “America’s an amazing place. So why not?”

Michael Reynolds/Reuters

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears on a monitor as he testifies remotely during the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing "Does Section 230's Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?" in Washington, D.C., Oct. 28, 2020.

Back in 1996, when the World Wide Web was just beginning to revolutionize the ways human beings could communicate, many of those helping to build the emerging online tech industry were filled with a boundless sense of optimism.

The core of this optimism was the confidence that the internet could be a truly open space for freedom of speech. It was an ethos embodied that year by a much-circulated and somewhat sly “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by the cyberlibertarian essayist and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. He declared that the legal concepts of the world of matter, “concepts of property, expression, identity,” simply did not apply to the internet, a virtually pure digital space for freedom of speech beyond the “governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel.”

“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” Mr. Barlow wrote.

Aram Sinnreich, among the first internet industry analysts, remembers those heady days well. “Nineteen ninety-six was this moment in which the idea of the internet as a return to a kind of Eden was born in the popular consciousness,” says Dr. Sinnreich, now the chair of the communication studies division at American University’s School of Communication in Washington.

“It was posed like this stateless, identity-less, free flow of consciousness that would liberate us from – from sin, from ‘original sin,’ really – and from nationalism and from violence and from racism and sexism and from all the other isms.”

That same year, too, Congress passed the so-called 26 words that created the internet, the once-obscure Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which created a new legal landscape for the internet and its portals of speech and information. 

Reflecting the ethos of time, Section 230 granted emerging interactive services on the internet a general immunity from most speech-restricting civil codes in the weary world of flesh and steel. Given the virtually borderless scope of the cyberworld, policymakers believed the industry would never flourish if it was liable for every iota of libel or reckless disregard for truth its millions of potential users might post to their sites. 

Nearly 25 years later, optimism has turned into a general state of unease about the state of free speech online. And this year critics from both the left and right have been calling for those 26 words to be repealed, or at least significantly changed, as each cite the growing power of social media giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, whose algorithmic architectures have in many ways come to control the information people see – or don’t see.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump threatened to veto a defense policy bill if Congress didn’t include a provision to have Section 230 “terminated,” as he and other Republicans believe social media companies, and Twitter especially, have abused their far-reaching control of information to censor conservative views. Both the Democrat-led House and the Republican-led Senate are bringing the bill up for a vote anyway, with Republican lawmakers saying the defense bill is unrelated from Section 230 and shouldn’t be held up because of a separate issue.

But President-elect Joe Biden also suggested earlier this year that Section 230 should be “revoked” since social media sites, he said, had become virtual cauldrons of misinformation “propagating falsehoods they know to be false.”

At the same time, many liberal critics say the founding laissez faire principles that shaped ideas of free speech online combined with the immunities granted internet companies helped foster “an information environment that is incredibly polluted, that’s making everyone sick, and where only the powerful really feel at liberty to speak freely,” says Mary Anne Franks, professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law. 

“So in the end, not a big win for free speech,” she says. “Everyone else is kind of where they were before, which is, yes, you can speak, but be prepared to be harassed, be prepared to be defamed, be prepared to be abused and possibly threatened. And the most powerful members of society will continue to be able to shout over you and have bigger platforms than you ever could possibly get.”

Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP/File

"We are the men of Facebook" is written on the ground as anti-government protesters gather in Tahrir Square in Cairo on Feb. 6, 2011. The staunchly pro-government Egyptian Parliament passed a bill July 16, 2018, targeting popular social media accounts that authorities accuse of publishing “fake news,” the latest move to suppress dissent and silence independent sources of news.

From the Arab Spring to troll culture

A decade after the passage of Section 230, however, the emergence of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter in the mid-2000s fed another wave of optimism about the possibilities of cyberspace and the cause of human freedom, says Dr. Sinnreich.

“So there’s this second moment in time when basically people are being told, ‘OK, so the internet’s not going to erase sin and reset the human condition,’” he says. “But what it is going to do is provide these tools that are going to democratize cultural power.”

An expert in the history of government regulations of media, he shared some of that optimism, seeing the possibilities of new forms of human communities that could potentially flourish outside government and corporate powers. Social networks online could enable “horizontal” cultural power, leading to political and social changes that diminish the power of elites.  

At the time, the Obama administration was championing similar notions of internet freedom around the world, making it one of the paramount values of American foreign policy.

“The idea was, if we can build platforms that allow everybody to participate in the cultural process, that will lead more people to participate in the civic process,” Dr. Sinnreich says. “Which will then force autocratic and hierarchical governments to become more democratic, which will then open the doors to new markets, which will allow capitalism to flourish even more in the global arena.”

Events such as the Arab Spring in 2011 and other “revolutions” enabled by online social networks like Twitter only seemed to confirm this optimism that democracy and its bedrock principles of free speech could spread around the world.

But then it all came crashing down. The promises of the Arab Spring never materialized. Edward Snowden’s revelations uncovered massive online surveillance by the U.S. government. And then a new menace emerged: Troll culture, often clothed in anonymity, used the internet’s social networks to build online communities committed to misogyny, racism, and white supremacy. 

At the same time, the structural architecture of social media platforms enabled a massively lucrative business model rooted in the relentless and meticulous surveillance of billions of users’ online behavior, experts say. Social media companies then mine this data with algorithms that determine the limited, attention-grabbing information that flows to users’ news feeds. 

Scholars often call this business model “affective engagement,” or the monetization of human psychology – the strong emotions that tend to keep users glued to their feeds. 

“I’m kind of worried about how this has caused people to silo into their own kind of media ecosystems and echo chambers,” says Tim Weninger, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, who has studied the structural impact of social media algorithms and the corresponding proliferation of misinformation and “fake news.” 

“The challenges right now are to make people aware that their clicks and likes and uploads and retweets – all those go into Twitter’s and Facebook’s and Instagram’s and Reddit’s algorithms in order to feed back more information to keep you on the site,” he says. “The primary goal is to keep you on the site so that you will click an ad and buy something, or do those things to help them generate revenue.” 

How rage and fear power fake news

In one of his studies, Dr. Weninger and his colleagues found that 75% of users who share news stories online only read the headlines of those stories – which are often sensationalistic and evoke strong emotions. His research also found that even a single share or “like” of certain posts has an enormous impact on how often algorithms will then push those posts to others. 

“What happens is that vote, that retweet, or that ‘like’ goes into the system as a signal to, hey, someone likes this, so show this to more people,” Dr. Weninger says. “So as the algorithms take into account our votes and likes, coupled with the fact that we don’t really read the thing before we post them – those are basically the antecedents to fake news.”

To make matters worse, this kind of structural architecture lends itself to what he and other experts call “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” in which nefarious actors in places like China and Russia can game the system with posts and likes and shares for false information that pique users’ emotions and help fake news go viral. 

And the primary emotions driving affective engagement are often fear and rage – emotions that a recent body of research suggests are a significant factor in making misinformation go viral, says Linda Peek Schacht, professor of leadership and public service at Lipscomb University in Tennessee.

“We have had several generations now where that critical thinking, that media literacy, so necessary for the democratic process has not either been taught or nurtured,” says Ms. Schacht, also a longtime board member of the International Women’s Media Foundation. “If you attack science enough, if you attack the press enough, if you attack the government itself enough, you are in fact creating such distrust and rage that I would argue you’re burning down the democracy house.”

This year especially, however, as misinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19 and voter fraud began to proliferate on their platforms, companies like Twitter and Facebook have been forced to reconsider their outsize roles in the nation’s toxic political discourse and ever-widening divides.

Civic responsibility vs. unfettered free speech

Social media giants have also had to come to grips with what might be their unavoidable civic responsibilities as they conduct the flow of information essential for any functioning democracy and their digital public spheres come to dominate public discourse. 

In fact, earlier this year, after President Trump tweeted that mail-in voting would be “substantially fraudulent” and contribute to a “Rigged Election” in November, Twitter executives made a momentous decision: The company would, for the first time, post a warning label on the words of the president of the United States, calling his claims “unsubstantiated.”

Facebook soon followed suit, though in a different way, posting a label to Mr. Trump’s similar post about mail-in voting leading “to the most CORRUPT ELECTION in our Nation’s History!” with a link to official information about voting procedures.

When Twitter was founded 14 years ago, company executives like to joke that it was “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” with few restrictions on the information their users post. But the company has been forced to adjust, given the issues that have made Republicans and Democrats question the nation’s social media giants and Section 230.

“What we saw and what the market told us was that people would not put up with abuse, harassment, and misleading information that would cause offline harm, and they would leave our service because of it,” Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey told a Senate panel in mid-November. “So our intention is to create clear policy, clear enforcement that enables people to feel that they can express themselves on our service and ultimately trust it.” 

There are currently at least five new bills before Congress, and government regulators are continuing to seek ways to rein in the enormous power social media companies have come to wield. 

But scholars like Dr. Weninger prefer to see the “invisible hand” of the market continue to shape these kinds of valuable services, with a minimum of new regulations.  

“I’m actually kind of happy that we’re having this kind of societal discussion right now,” he says. “Most of my job is to point out things that are broken, the things that are wrong. But overall, I’m optimistic that we’re going to figure it out.”

AP

People take escalators at a shopping building in Tokyo in August.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the first global crisis since World War II. Since March, it has pushed each nation to largely struggle alone. Like that horrific conflict eight decades ago, it has left humanity to question whether progress itself is still possible. Wars, plagues, natural disasters – they often numb the capacity to perceive the good at hand and bring it into reality. They deflate an appreciation for the centuries of progress.

After World War II, that destructive negativity did not prevail, a point to recall as the end of the pandemic appears in sight with new vaccines. The war’s victors made a strategic decision to prevent future wars by lifting up the most vulnerable people, starting with vanquished former enemies. Those leaders created global institutions built on universal values. They directed massive resources toward those most at risk of poverty and despotism.

Because of their wide and caring embrace of the least well-off, progress did return. Since 1945, “humans have become (on average) longer-lived, healthier, safer, richer, freer, fairer, happier and smarter, not just in the west but worldwide,” wrote Harvard scholar Steven Pinker last year in the Financial Times.

The world is now at a similar inflection point with serious doubts about progress. Yet once again, leaders are countering those doubts with a concern for the well-being of all. Nations are deciding how to allocate the coronavirus vaccines based on who is most at risk, such as health workers, and who is most vulnerable, such as those who are older, homeless, and incarcerated. Nations are also in a second or third round of aid for pandemic-hit businesses and individuals, with an eye first on those most in need. In the United States, lawmakers are nearing a consensus on a second economic stimulus, this time more precisely aimed at the weakest in society.

Progress, after all, must be universally shared to really be progress.

The most widely felt damage from the pandemic has been economic. Borders have been closed and businesses shuttered. Crops have withered in the fields and investments in new ventures have shrunk. Much of the world is in the deepest recession since the 1930s. “The year 2020 has shown that the forward march of human progress is not an unstoppable force that can be taken for granted,” states the United Nations humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock in a new report. “In the space of a few months, decades of development have been knocked off course by a virus.”

Already this year, 1 in 45 people worldwide needed assistance for basic needs like food and water – the highest level since records have been kept. The U.N. estimates 1 in 33 will require help next year. Extreme poverty has risen for the first time in more than 20 years. Yet wealthier countries has also given a record $17 billion in humanitarian response to COVID-19.

“As we approach the end of this difficult year, we face a choice,” says Mr. Lowcock. “We can let 2021 be the year of the grand reversal – the unravelling of 40 years of progress – or we can work together to make sure we all find a way out of this pandemic.”

Despite the many crises the world has faced, the drivers of progress – moral ideals, reason, and empathy – are not going away, states Mr. Pinker. “The progress we have enjoyed has come from empowering the better angels of our nature.”

Those angels are the thoughts and actions that uplift people who are poor or sick, and even those skeptical of progress. This is not wishful thinking or naive hope. That which led to past progress will sustain it.