What in the word?

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he reinstated accounts of people who frequently had plied misinformation on the site, and he seemed unconcerned about the platform’s takeover by people with a disdain for fact checking or “the truth.” As a result, Planet Word backed away from posting on Twitter, now X, its values seeming at odds with ours. The result wasn’t a dramatic change in usership — we were seeing most traffic on Instagram and Facebook.

And now, Mark Zuckerberg has announced an end to in-house fact-checking on Meta’s platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and Threads — shifting the responsibility to the user community. This change includes lifting restrictions on contentious topics like immigration and gender identity “that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate,” framed as a move toward “free expression.” But, as I wrote following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, freedom of speech is not an excuse to allow the proliferation of slander, misinformation, or hateful rhetoric. My words are as true now as they were then: “Only when we freely agree to limit our speech to words that unite rather than divide can we protect the wider freedoms that we so rightly cherish.” So, we face a new dilemma.

Is there going to be a place left online for people and institutions that don’t want to be tainted by association with haters and purveyors of misinformation? Will the voices of civility be drowned out by louder, cruder voices?

The question that arises for us at Planet Word is, if we left Facebook and Instagram, too, where would we go? How would we get our message out? Because let’s face it, social media is the most convenient and affordable (read, free) tool we have to make ourselves more widely known. Being on these platforms has been helpful to us — we use them to get the word out about our upcoming public programs and about word-related news that we think will be interesting to our followers. We use them to announce museum events and openings on our staff.

So we will remain on Meta’s platforms — for now. I think the best response to their problematic changes is for Planet Word to commit to its followers that we will never lower our standards in order to “blend in” with any change in tone on Facebook or Instagram. Our posts will continue to be truthful, fact-checked, evidence-based and will avoid snark or ad hominem attacks on individuals. We will always stay true to our core values of being fun, playful, meaningful, motivational, unexpected, and inclusive.

—Ann Friedman, founder of Planet Word

As always, a poem can say this better than my prose. Enjoy “If—” by Rudyard Kipling.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!