Matt Rourke/AP/File

Twitter's app is displayed on a mobile phone. The social media giant has tried to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation, but some lawmakers argue Big Tech needs to do more to block misleading information that could have dangerous consequences for public health. Others, however, worry that valid viewpoints are being silenced in today's digital public square.

When Twitter recently banned a former New York Times journalist dubbed “the pandemic’s wrongest man,” many of his critics cheered. But others, including some who oppose his views, raised concerns about a world in which private corporations – taking their cues from mainstream media and government officials – can silence dissenters in today’s digital public square.

Over the past year and a half, Alex Berenson grew his Twitter base to some 344,000 followers by pillorying public health officials’ approach to the pandemic. Like many Twitter pundits, he was irreverent and provocative. But he also frequently accompanied his assertions with screenshots of data, charts, and scientific studies. 

His supporters lauded him for highlighting inconvenient truths that few others were raising. Many scientists, journalists, and health officials, however, criticized him for cherry-picking scientific data to advance questionable or even dangerous narratives, especially his claims that COVID-19 vaccines were not nearly as safe or effective as touted.

Twitter sided with Mr. Berenson’s critics on Aug. 28, permanently suspending his account after he tweeted that COVID-19 vaccines are at best “a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile.” The company cited repeated violation of its COVID-19 misinformation policies, and removed all his tweets from public view. Mr. Berenson is now writing mainly on Substack, where tens of thousands of his Twitter followers have migrated – many offering to contribute to his legal fees if he sues Twitter.

“I am up against basically the entire media, legacy and social, and the federal government,” says Mr. Berenson in an emailed comment, “and the only answer they had to the questions I raised was to cut off my access to a platform designed for free speech?”

Nearly everyone agrees that misinformation on social media is a growing problem. But what, exactly, constitutes misinformation – and who should have the power to make that determination – is hotly debated. 

Jose Luis Magana/AP/File

GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia talks to the media about her suspension from Twitter, during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 20, 2021.

Congress is increasingly wrestling with such questions as social media companies amass more wealth, power, and influence over public thought and discourse, with citizens increasingly getting news from algorithm-tailored feeds rather than traditional media outlets. And the pandemic has raised the stakes: Many now see the need to thwart misinformation as a life-or-death issue. 

Facebook: safety concerns trump expression

Facebook’s head of misinformation policy, Justine Isola, said earlier this year that when there’s a risk of imminent harm, that trumps concerns about freedom of expression. Many Democratic members of Congress agree.

“I’m on the side of trying to save people’s lives and make sure that companies are not profiting off of spreading dangerous misinformation,” says Sen. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, who has co-sponsored a bill with Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar that would increase social media platforms’ liability for spreading health misinformation in a pandemic if it is promoted by their algorithms. Senator Klobuchar says that platforms should deploy their employees to determine what’s true and not true, just like other media organizations, even if it’s a complex, time-intensive task. “I just think that they should be able to use part of their humongous profits to make sure we’re not getting misinformation,” she says.

But others have deep concerns about Congress requiring a handful of powerful private corporations to effectively censor viewpoints that contradict public health officials. The platforms’ misinformation policies already rely on statements by those officials to determine what is credible. 

“The United States government should not be leveraging its power and authority to try to make these tech companies arms of the state,” says Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican and author of “The Tyranny of Big Tech.”

Critics say there is a clear pattern of bias against conservative viewpoints on social media platforms. On July 7, former President Donald Trump, who was banned from social media for violating their policies, filed class-action lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, arguing they violated the First Amendment.

The First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.” Many legal scholars argue that since social media platforms are privately owned, they are not bound to allow freedom of speech. But there is ongoing debate about that. 

Daphne Keller, former associate general counsel for Google who now directs Stanford University’s Program on Platform Regulation, argues that most of the misleading information on social media platforms that is causing serious harm is protected by the First Amendment, so the government couldn’t require platforms to take it down.

“What many people think is the moral, socially responsible, right thing for platforms to do is something Congress cannot mandate,” she says. “The only way to get it done is for platforms to do it voluntarily.”  

To be sure, contrarians are not the only ones who have been wrong about COVID-19. Scientists, politicians, and journalists have also made assertions that turned out to be incorrect – and while they cite evolving science, critics see politicization at work, too, and say that’s the danger of platforms relying on official consensus for determining truth. 

They note that some things initially dismissed as “misinformation” were in fact later deemed worthy of investigation, most notably the hypothesis that the pandemic may have started with a lab leak in Wuhan, China. When in late May, President Joe Biden ordered the intelligence community to conduct a 90-day review of all available evidence on the lab-leak theory, Facebook changed its misinformation policy the same day. But meanwhile, investigators had lost more than a year in which to press China for answers.

Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times/AP/File

GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is shown at a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 20, 2021. YouTube suspended Senator Paul for seven days in August after the Kentucky Republican posted what the platform said was a misleading video suggesting face masks don't prevent COVID-19 infections. The video was also removed.

Such premature labeling and dismissal of “misinformation” could interfere with the process of scientific inquiry – and that, too, could have deadly consequences, some argue.

“There’s a danger of groupthink, of mobbing people who dissent, and the last place you want that is in science,” says Philip Hamburger, a professor at Columbia Law School and president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance. 

What’s getting banned?

The scope of the challenge adds urgency. Facebook and YouTube have more than 2 billion users each, and far more content than any organization could review in real time; on YouTube alone, 500 hours of video are uploaded per minute, according to the most recent data available. If misleading information didn’t spread so quickly, it wouldn’t be nearly as much of a concern. And if a few tech giants didn’t control today’s digital public square, bans wouldn’t be so consequential. 

“They’ve now become gatekeepers to the public square,” says GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. “You literally cannot engage in political discourse in America if you don’t have access to those sites.” 

So what type of content do social media platforms ban? It ranges from “widely debunked” claims about the adverse effects of vaccines (Twitter), to content encouraging prayer as a substitute for medical treatment (YouTube), to claims that COVID-19 deaths are overstated (Facebook). 

This summer, Twitter said it had suspended 1,496 accounts and removed more than 43,000 pieces of content since introducing its COVID-19 misinformation policies. 

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has removed more than 1 million videos since February 2020 that go against its standards. 

And Facebook has taken down more than 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups, and more than 20 million pieces of content that violated the company’s COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation policies, according to an Aug. 18 statement by Monika Bickert, vice president of content policy. 

Some of Facebook’s takedowns involved 12 individuals dubbed the Disinformation Dozen by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose recent report estimated that these influencers accounted for up to 73% of Facebook’s anti-vaccine content. Ms. Bickert disputed that assessment, which was based on a limited data set. 

Facebook has sought to automate content moderation. But it also works with more than 80 fact-checking organizations certified by the International Fact-Checking Network. In addition, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in July that the Biden administration was “flagging problematic posts” for Facebook.

Ms. Psaki’s admission prompted Senator Rubio to propose a bill that would require platforms to disclose within seven days any request or recommendation by a government entity to moderate user content, or face a fine of $50,000 per day of noncompliance. 

More than 20 bills this year alone

Senator Rubio’s bill is just one of more than 20 bills introduced this year in Congress that target a key legal underpinning of social media platforms’ success. Known as Section 230, the provision protects social media platforms – and other “interactive computer service” companies – from being held legally responsible for user content posted on their sites, with a few exceptions. That protection gives them the ability to moderate content, such as restricting access to certain categories of content, including those they deem “obscene ... excessively violent ... or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a co-author of Section 230, defends it as crucial to enabling social media companies to address misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

“Why would you take away the one tool in law that allows an important participant – the platform – to take that garbage down?” he asks. 

But many note that the digital landscape has changed dramatically since 1996 when Congress passed the provision, which cited the “true diversity of political discourse” offered by the internet and a desire to “preserve the vibrant and competitive free market” online. Both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump called for revoking Section 230 in their presidential campaigns, and an increasing number of lawmakers see the provision as needing to be amended, overhauled, or scrapped altogether – though for widely varying reasons. 

Democrats want tech companies to take more action in cracking down on misinformation, as well as other content categories, such as hate speech. Republicans want to dial back what they see as censoring conservative viewpoints in the name of thwarting misinformation.  

Other solutions besides government regulation

While many in Congress are agitating for change, it’s unclear they can achieve the unity needed to pass new legislation. And some say government regulation isn’t the answer. 

“I think the problem with both Klobuchar and Hawley is they’re looking to government solutions for something that is a social problem,” says Neil Chilson, senior research fellow for technology and innovation at the Charles Koch Institute. “I don’t think we want government dictating to platforms or any other media channel what content they can carry, or how they should make the rules about what is truth on their platforms.”

Part of the challenge is that many social media users are not aware of how algorithms work behind the scenes to influence them. Platforms’ business models are based on maximizing user engagement with content – the more time users spend on the sites, the more platforms can profit by selling users’ attention to ad companies. And misinformation gets greater user engagement than accurate news. The German Marshall Fund found that user interactions with misinformation on social media spiked during the pandemic, and were far greater than average engagement with more than 500,000 news sites. Such misinformation often exploits emotions, leading some to see a systemic issue with social media platforms.

“Content that is engaging is very often content that is enraging,” says Laura Edelson, a software engineer and researcher at New York University’s Cybersecurity for Democracy. “What that means is you do not need to build a system to actively promote misinformation; you can build a system that optimizes for engagement alone, and that will end up promoting misinformation.”

Just how that works, and the role algorithms play, is something she has been trying to understand – until Facebook suspended her account last month for unauthorized collection of user data. She disputes the charge.

When journalist Jacek Pałasiński moved to Warsaw about 15 years ago in the heyday of private Polish television network TVN, Poland was laying down the foundations of a diverse media landscape.

“The atmosphere was phenomenal,” says Mr. Pałasiński of the network’s TVN24, Poland’s first native news channel. “We had a sense of mission; we were creating this station for society. It was a dream place to work.”

The mood has changed.

Today, TVN is in the crosshairs of the Polish government, dominated by the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), which came to power in 2015. A media reform bill – under consideration this week by the Senat, Poland’s upper house of parliament – would ban foreign possession of media, like TVN’s U.S.-based ownership. Dubbed Lex TVN, it could force the network to divest its ownership and cost the TVN24 news station its license.

“The media law is directed against TVN; there is absolutely no doubt about that,” says Mr. Pałasiński, now retired after hosting his own show on TVN for 15 years. “Now at TVN24 there is this terrible focus on not saying one word too many. There’s a lot of self-control; everything has to be documented from three sources because of the political pressure.”

Poland’s dominant party has spared no effort whittling down a once-robust media landscape. After consolidating its control of the state broadcast media, PiS has embarked on a campaign of “repolonization” of private media using licensing laws, tax legislation, and attacks against journalists. The prospect has raised fears that Poland is trying to mimic the media market capture strategies pioneered in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and polished in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

The Discovery network is fighting back by setting up a presence in the Netherlands and vowing legal action based on a 1994 U.S.-Polish bilateral investment agreement. With an estimated worth of over $1 billion, the network represents the single largest U.S. investment in Poland, a NATO ally, and it offers a worldview that sharply conflicts with that of the right-wing government. Removing it would lessen scrutiny on the government and deliver a blow to the opposition.

Kuba Stezycki/Reuters

TVN24, whose studio is shown here, is one of the few major broadcast channels in Poland where criticism of the Polish government, led by the Law and Justice party, can still be publicly heard.

“This is a key pillar in that media ecosystem, so if it can fall to government meddling and interference then essentially any other outlet can fall,” says Jamie Wiseman, advocacy officer at the International Press Institute in Vienna. “It’s also backed by U.S. money, which is incredibly influential in the country, so if PiS can succeed here, then no other independent media is safe.”

A stronghold for independent journalism

Popular with youth and educated elites in the larger cities of Poland, TVN programming offers a socially liberal worldview and – crucial to the functioning of a democratic society – shells out government criticism. There is no shortage of polemic topics to address. Poland is at odds with the European Union over LGBT issues, rule of law, and press freedom.

“The group’s encrypted satellite TVN24 channel has become one of the last strongholds for independent journalism and a forum for the opposition,” says Tadeusz Kowalski, a journalism professor at the University of Warsaw.

“It’s the one major place where Poles can still access critical coverage and hear the views of opposition politicians and parties, can see investigative reports that wouldn’t be reported by pro-government media, and can hear about government scandals,” concurs Mr. Wiseman of the International Press Institute.

Contrast that with the evolution of Poland’s public broadcasters under PiS. Previous governments – on both sides of the political spectrum – had influence on the public broadcasters’ political leanings, but state media professionals could uphold journalist standards. Not anymore.

When former public TV presenter and journalist Maciej Orłoś, travels to smaller towns, government supporters still ask him where they can watch him now. The answer is online – one of the few spaces where independent media still thrives in the Central European nation that has taken a nose-dive in press freedom rankings.

After working for 25 years at the public television network TVP, Mr. Orłoś now runs his own programs on YouTube and Facebook. Relinquishing the spotlight, he explains, was a decision driven by his refusal to be an instrument of government propaganda that has become so aggressive it reminds him of the communist era.

“I did not think that we would ever experience such manipulation in the democratic Poland, which is a member of the EU,” Mr. Orłoś says. “What happens in the public media is ... scandalous ... sowing the language of hatred, deepening divisions in the society, not applying journalistic principles.”

Media freedom advocates and political analysts agree with him that TVP became a government mouthpiece spouting the conservative values of the PiS. Under its governance, Poland fell from its highest ranking – 18th –  in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index in 2015, to 64th out of 180 countries last year.

Slawomir Kaminski/Agencja Gazeta/Reuters

Lawmakers attend a session of the parliamentary commission on an amendment to Lex TVN that would strengthen a ban on non-European firms controlling Polish broadcasters, in Warsaw, Poland, Aug. 11, 2021.

“These ideas and values are in short: God, honor, homeland, Catholic faith, Catholic church, family,” explains Mr. Orłoś, who left TVP in 2016. “[And there is] the national, patriotic theme: saying that we Poles are great, important, and nobody will tell us what to do, especially not the EU.”

That narrative creeps into the entertainment on TVP as well. Invited to participate in TVP’s “Ten to One” quiz show, Adam Miśkiewicz, a young engineer, wore a small pin on his jacket with a heart and a rainbow flag – symbol of the LGBTQ community, which has been subject of a government crackdown.

He says he was pressured to remove it on the dubious grounds that the pin could be interpreted as advertising for the Polaroid company. “I took off the pin, because the atmosphere was getting unpleasant,” Mr. Miśkiewicz says. “There is a kind of pre-programmed attitude among TVP employees that there are things that absolutely cannot be aired, such as the LGBT symbol.“

Mr. Miśkiewicz says he and his friends tune into TVP only to laugh at the government propaganda. But the anti-LBGTQ rhetoric aired on public media has taken a heavy toll on his personal life. His parents, both PiS voters, are still struggling to accept his sexual orientation.

“The PiS message they succumb to is that homosexuality is the destruction of the family,” he says. “If an equality march is shown on television, it is shown through the prism of nude perverts who want to terrorize” and sexually abuse children, he says. “My parents have never been to [an equality] march; they don’t see what it looks like, [so] they succumb to this message.”

What’s next?

The media reform bill has sparked dozens of protests and become a flashpoint of political debates – even splintering a minor partner from the ruling coalition. And even if it is passed, it is not clear that it aids in bolstering the protections cited to justify it. Backers say it will make the nation safe from foreign influence and disinformation, pointing to the threat of Russia and China (even if a U.S.-owned channel is most impacted).

But “there are already many other safeguards that guarantee this safety,” says Kuba Karyś, a leader of the Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD), a pro-European-values civic group. “If TVN constituted a threat to the safety of the state, it would have its license revoked. This is purely a political fight.”

“This argument follows the basic populist rhetoric about external enemy and internal elites used by PiS since the presidential campaign in 2015,” says Joanna Maria Stolarek, director of the Warsaw office of the German think tank Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

The successful passage of the bill is hardly assured. The Senat is expected to object to the media bill and – more crucially – PiS-endorsed President Andrzej Duda has suggested he would veto the bill. PiS, according to analysts, could cobble together enough votes to override the Senat if the bill returns to the lower chamber. But it lacks the supermajority needed to override a presidential veto.

“If the bill is blocked even now Law and Justice will be looking for another pretext to silence the independent media,” warns Mr. Pałasiński.

Mr. Karyś is more optimistic, noting that the fate of TVN has triggered a wider debate about press freedoms, sparked protests in over 100 cities, and brought opposition parties together. The battle is nothing short of existential.

“The world is woven of narratives. ‘Something that has not been said does not exist,’” he says, quoting Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. “If we deprive people of information that is important for political and social life, they will cease to exist.”

Rebeca Persson remembers clearly the afternoon in October 2018 when she and other Malmö residents first met with 10 young men – many from rival street gangs, and all on parole – in the city’s soccer stadium.

The social worker sat onstage next to the other speakers as the gang members filed into the large hall. An audience of 40 people stood to greet them: neighbors, sports coaches, owners of corner shops, leaders in local mosques, and even relatives of the young men.

Neither Ms. Persson nor the men knew exactly what to expect from the gathering. But Malmö had reached a crisis. There had been an unprecedented 65 shootings and 62 uses of grenades or small explosives in 2017 alone, high numbers in a country where possession of guns is highly regulated. So the city had to try something.

Everyone present was gathered to support one message to the young men: We care about you. We don’t want you to die, and we don’t want you to hurt anyone else. We will stop you if you make us, and we will help you if you let us.

It was the city’s first “call-in,” one piece of the anti-gun violence approach that Malmö began to implement in 2018 called Sluta Skjut, or Stop Shooting. The strategy is modeled after the group violence intervention (GVI) approach that emerged in Boston in the 1990s and has seen success in cities such as Oakland, Chicago, and Detroit. In addition to call-ins, Stop Shooting consists of continuous face-to-face contact with members of Malmö’s street groups as well as close collaboration with community partners.

Since the start of the project, severe violence has fallen consistently in Malmö. In 2020, there were only 20 shootings and 17 explosions. Of around 300 men reached by Stop Shooting, 40 are now in prison, but another 49 have joined a city program to help individuals leave gangs and start over.

Experts say it’s too soon to attribute the drop in violence to Stop Shooting. But those who have participated say the approach’s value lies in the way it brings together so many types of people – law enforcement, those in social services, and community members – to rally behind one unified, moral message against violence.

Oscar Morin

Rebeca Persson, a social worker in Malmö, Sweden, is the main point of contact for gang members seeking support as part of Stop Shooting.

“If you do shoot or use explosives, we will know which group has done it, and we will come after the whole group,” says Ms. Persson, Stop Shooting’s project manager, explaining the approach. But that warning comes with a promise. “If you want help, to leave this way of life, or help with anything else, we will help you.”

“That was the moment I woke up”

At the three call-ins Malmö has now organized, speakers are given short time slots to speak: Malmö’s mayor, the police chief and a police officer, a prosecutor, Ms. Persson and her colleague from social services, a mother, an imam, and a deacon.

Some moments are stern, but others are tender. The police chief apologizes for failing to keep the men safe. When the mother speaks of the pain she shares with other mothers whose sons have been shot and killed, tears well in the young men’s eyes.

Ms. Persson’s favorite memory was a time when the imam spoke, assuring the men – many from Malmö’s Arab minority community – that they could still choose a path of peace. One of the men who had walked in with a particularly hostile attitude removed his cap in deference.

“We all care more about what our mother thinks than what the cops think,” says David Kennedy, professor of criminal justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who helped design the GVI strategy in Boston. He says that while a credible threat of punishment and offers of support are essential, “what’s really important is this sustained collective relationship between the team and the streets.”

A former street criminal from Malmö who prefers not to share his name agrees that when offenders understand how their behavior is affecting their families and communities, that makes the biggest difference. He learned this the hard way the night a friend was shot.

“That was the moment I woke up, when I saw his mother and sisters who came to the hospital,” says the man who has since given up crime. “I couldn’t imagine that I could put my mom in that situation.”

He knows some of the young men who have been part of Stop Shooting, and he says the feedback has been mixed. Some are not interested in lectures, but for others who know they need to make a change, the strategy is “very good, because they get all the help they need.”

“These criminals are also human, and they may have not received help or support from their parents, or at school,” says Romdhane Boussaidi, the director of a local mosque and an audience member from the call-ins. “We’re here to tell them, ‘You can stop this and start your life in the right way.’”

Building trust

Noah Dib grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. As a young teenager, he got caught up in gang life, which his friends and cousins are still in. Now, as a mentor in his mid-20s at the nonprofit Flamman Youth Center, he is one of many community leaders making sure the Stop Shooting message gets through constructively. Because he is not a city official, he is able to build trust with the young men in the community more naturally.

After one call-in, he got a call from one of the gang attendees, asking what it all meant, why he had been chosen to be in the spotlight, and if he could trust what the authorities said.

“I told him, ‘Maybe they chose you because they know you’re the best speaker in your group, so you can deliver the message to everyone,’” Mr. Dib says. “Then they take it in a more positive way.”

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Noah Dib, a mentor coach from the nonprofit Flamman Youth Center, is one of a large network of community members supporting the Stop Shooting strategy by clarifying and spreading its message. He knows many of the young men involved in Malmö's street groups personally.

Of course, there are wider problems underlying the violence in Malmö that Stop Shooting cannot address – especially systemic racism directed at Arab communities, says Rafi Farouq, the nonprofit’s director. The societal marginalization and economic disadvantages that many Arab communities in Sweden face still create pressures that help their youth see crime as a path forward.

Nevertheless, Stop Shooting’s commitment to clear, respectful, and united communication with the individuals who so frequently feel shut out of society is a step in the right direction.

Stefan Wredenmark is one of the police officers who conduct “customized notifications” – continuous face-to-face meetings with gang members in their homes, at the hospital, or in prison to deliver the Stop Shooting message.

“One of the messages is that we don’t want you to die. When I said that the first time, I thought, what am I doing? Because normally I would like to lock them up,” says Mr. Wredenmark. Because of Stop Shooting, he tells each person that he wants them safe, alive, and free.

“Now, I get to go straight into the heart of the young men. That’s a much more effective way to reach them.”

It takes a special kind of love to hold back when a Nazi just punched you in the face. It takes a special kind of love to hold back when your house has just been bombed. It takes a revolutionary love.

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a pacifist. He wasn’t a coward. He was a revolutionary, for certain. His beliefs, and more importantly, his actions, changed the world. And while revolution, by definition, suggests a singular dramatic change, King went through several transformations during his quest for social and economic justice.

Those transformations deepened and refined his understanding and practice of nonviolence. But his goal was not personal. He worked to establish the “beloved community” – a society where opportunity was available to all and conflict was resolved peacefully.

Today, in a world of division and strife, particularly over race and economic inequality, King’s legacy could hardly be more relevant. Now is not the time to relegate him to the history books or dismiss his ideas as impractical to the challenges of the moment. Rather, better understanding his legacy – including the less familiar and often glossed over parts – reconnects us to the most effective and powerful period of American protest since the Revolution.

This article begins an occasional series exploring that legacy. We’ll consider everything from the influence of his forefathers to his relevance to the Black Lives Matter movement. We’ll look at his strategies as an organizer and examine how the Rhetorical King differs from the Real King. The goal is to provide a refresher course of sorts for a time in need of King’s commitment to unconditional love.

Meeting fire with love

Two days after King’s Alabama home was bombed on January 30, 1956, he was persuaded to do what many of us might have done: he applied for a concealed carry permit so that he could have an armed guard at his home. What might have become of King’s ideological path if that permit had been approved?

Of course, such a permit would not be approved for an African American in the Jim Crow South, but that didn’t quench King’s thirst for justice. Long before that permit was denied, he had already determined how he would pursue justice, as evidenced in his commentary to neighbors the night of the bombing:

We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them. I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known through the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped this movement will not stop. … For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.

The boycott, of course, was the Montgomery bus boycott. King’s account of the boycott and his mindset during the crucial years of 1955 and 1956 have been chronicled in “Strive Toward Freedom,” published in 1958. The book does an exceptional job of capturing the duality of King – nonviolent, yet zealous. It’s a double-edged sword – a biblical description that fits King, both reverend and radical, to a T. His faith helped him speak to people in a way that divided soul and spirit, that judged the thoughts and the attitudes of the heart.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP/File

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. stands outside Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1981 in Atlanta.

A family of preachers

Yet he did not arrive at this entirely on his own. A conversation about King must include his forefathers. Saying that he grew up in the church is an understatement – his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, brother, and uncle were preachers. Before King’s own theological studies sharpened his convictions, his father was a shining example of nonviolent resistance, as King shared in the first chapter of his autobiography: 

A sharecropper’s son, [my father] had met brutalities at firsthand, and had begun to strike back at an early age. His family lived in a little town named Stockbridge, Georgia, about eighteen miles from Atlanta. One day, while working on the plantation, he keenly observed that the boss was cheating his father out of some hard-earned money. He revealed this to his father right in the presence of the plantation owner. When [t]his happened the boss angrily and furiously shouted, “Jim, if you don’t keep this n----- boy of yours in his place, I am going to slap him down.” Grandfather, being almost totally dependent on the boss for economic security, urged Dad to keep quiet.

My dad, looking back over that experience, says that at that moment he became determined to leave the farm.

Indeed, within months, his father moved to Atlanta, where he began high school at age 18 and continued his education until he graduated from Morehouse College. 

King Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps, attending Morehouse prior to his studies at Crozer Theological Seminary. In the sixth chapter of Stride Toward Freedom, entitled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King outlines his intellectual journey and what he came to understand about the strength of nonviolent resistance:

The phrase “passive resistance” often gives the false impression that this is a sort of “do-nothing method” in which the resister quietly and passively accepts evil. But nothing is further from the truth. For while the nonviolent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong. The method is passive physically, but strongly active spiritually. 

Putting nonviolence into practice

This brings us to the time King was punched by a Nazi, Roy James, during a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1962. King was a literal picture of nonviolence, as shown in a photograph of the two men in conversation just minutes after the attack. James, who initially was remorseful after the assault, later became unrepentant.

King was just as willful and skillful in his response to the SCLC crowd as he was after his house was bombed. Praising their refusal to fight back physically, he said, “I am proud of what happened here today,” he said, “because it indicates to me that the message of nonviolent discipline has been learned.”

For Rosa Parks, who was at the SCLC meeting, King’s actions proved the power of nonviolence. Reflecting on the scene, she said, “His restraint was more powerful than a hundred fists.”

Whether responding to a bomb, a punch, or an arrest, King’s actions reinforced community – the beloved community. As The King Center explains, the beloved community is more than an ideal. It’s a tangible and realistic goal, achievable through a culture of nonviolence.

At the basis of this community is a revolutionary love, a biblical love known as agape. King describes it in “Stride Toward Freedom”:

Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it. Agape is a willingness to sacrifice in the interest of mutuality. Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community. …It is a willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven to restore community.

We often praise King for his ideology of nonviolence, but we should also praise him for his spirit of resistance. He and the people around him were targets in every way imaginable, yet that did not stop King’s ambitions for a better way and a better world. His plan grew out of a revolutionary love; principles and steps were established. Out of this great love, King came to realize the need for not only racial justice but economic justice. In the end, he would strike out against the “triple evils” of poverty, racism, and militarism.

King’s revolutionary love started a movement that would change his world – and holds answers for us today.

Mark Lennihan/AP/File

The 9/11 Memorial & Museum is surrounded by high-rise towers in New York in 2017. It opened in 2014.

For a long time I resisted reading any book about 9/11, but recently, I’ve read many. I’ve been startled by their power, by how my heart pounded and tears came easily, even 20 years on. I still felt the confusion followed by horror and anguish.

I was living through a more personal heartbreak on that day. A New Yorker for more than two decades now, I’d only been in the city for 2 1/2 years as of Sept. 11, 2001. I already had a strong suspicion I was there to stay, though, symbolized by my decision to get married in New York rather than my native Miami Beach. The wedding was scheduled for the first weekend in October.

Then my father, following a brief illness, died on Sunday, Sept. 9. I flew with my fiancé to Florida early on the 10th. In my childhood home in Surfside, recently the scene of its own catastrophe, we awoke on Tuesday the 11th to the news of an airplane flying into the World Trade Center. For the next couple of hours, as the atrocities unfolded, my fiancé and I stared, dumbstruck, at the television. After the second tower fell, we turned the TV off and made our way to my father’s funeral. Numbness upon numbness, grief upon grief.

Reading about 9/11 immediately connects me to my own loss from that time, eliciting emotions that are easier to keep locked away. But the 20-year mark seemed like the right time to look back on the day, and as a reviewer, I was interested to look back through books. I gained much from doing so, from emotional catharsis to historical perspective on the current, awful situation in Afghanistan, which reminds us how much 9/11 continues to shape our world.

Avid Reader

Garrett M. Graff’s “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11” is the volume that moved me most. Published in 2019, it’s based on more than 500 oral histories collected by Graff, a former Politico editor, and by other journalists and historians. Graff has organized them masterfully, vividly conveying the shock of events through the recollections of first responders, survivors, members of the George W. Bush administration, victims’ relatives, and others.

Graff includes transcripts of the final messages people in the air and on the ground left for their loved ones. As wrenching as those are, details of less weighty moments can be unexpectedly gutting. A police officer who arrived at the twin towers was puzzled to see women’s shoes everywhere until it occurred to him that office workers were ditching their heels as they ran barefoot from the scene. An air traffic controller recalls being upset with himself for a lack of professionalism because his voice “did crack a little bit” while he helped fulfill the Federal Aviation Administration’s unprecedented order, minutes after the third hijacked airplane hit the Pentagon, that every plane in the air in the United States land immediately. The book stands out for its raw power, poignance, and moments of grace. 

Harper

Like “The Only Plane in the Sky,” Mitchell Zuckoff’s “Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11,” also published in 2019, seeks to memorialize those who died and provide a clear record of the day. His goal is to “delay the descent of 9/11 into the well of history.” An intimate and beautifully written narrative history, “Fall and Rise” was born from Zuckoff’s early reporting on the attacks for The Boston Globe and is based primarily on his interviews with people connected to the day’s tragic events. We get to know dozens of them, and in many cases, their bravery astonishes. For instance, Zuckoff describes impromptu rescue teams of military and civilian workers at the Pentagon who ran toward danger to help their colleagues, both friends and strangers, up until the affected portion of the building collapsed. Some repeatedly reentered the burning wreckage to search for survivors.

Alfred A. Knopf

Reading about the day itself compelled me to seek out books about the history that preceded it. “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” remains the preeminent source in that regard. Lawrence Wright’s deeply researched Pulitzer Prize winner, published in 2006 (a miniseries based on the book premiered on Hulu in 2018), charts the intellectual and political roots of Islamic radicalism. The propulsive and riveting narrative begins with Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who studied in America in the late 1940s and, in part because of his disgust with the country’s decadence and sexual permissiveness, came to endorse violent jihad. His work inspired, among many others, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who later partnered with Osama bin Laden in the group that became Al Qaeda. 

“The Looming Tower” also covers America’s counterterrorism efforts. As some in the intelligence community sounded the alarm about bin Laden, who declared war against the U.S. in 1996, their concerns were dismissed. “It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic,” Wright writes. “Up against the confidence that Americans placed in modernity and technology and their own ideals to protect them from the savage pageant of history, the defiant gestures of bin Laden and his followers seemed absurd and even pathetic.” 

W.W. Norton & Co.

That mindset helps explain why the government was so unprepared on 9/11. “Existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen,” The 9/11 Commission Report concludes. Released in 2004, the report remains a valuable resource as well as an unlikely achievement, a government publication that’s also a page turner. (It was even a finalist for a National Book Award in nonfiction.) In clear, sober language, the report presents a comprehensive chronology of the day, explaining government procedures in place – many designed during the Cold War to face a very different kind of threat – and their utter inadequacy to meet the moment. Five Republicans and five Democrats sat on the commission that jointly produced the report, a reminder of the brief period of national unity that followed the attacks.  

Lyons Press

The best books on 9/11 are, as they must be, harrowing and heartbreaking. But of the new books being published to coincide with the 20th anniversary, two stand out for their focus on stories of uplift. While there are indelible images of stunned survivors fleeing the World Trade Center on foot, L. Douglas Keeney’s “The Lives They Saved: The Untold Story of Medics, Mariners, and the Incredible Boatlift That Evacuated Nearly 300,000 People From New York City on 9/11” tells of the massive rescue involving passenger ferries, police boats, harbor-cruise ships, tugboats, and even tiny rubber dinghies. More than 100 civilian captains rushed to the scene by boat to help; many vessels transported casualties across the water to Jersey City, New Jersey, where ambulances awaited. Keeney calls the evacuation by sea “a missing piece of the September 11 story for two decades.”

Flanker Press

Finally, Mac Moss’ “Flown Into the Arms of Angels: Newfoundland and Labrador’s Unsung Heroes of 9/11” describes how the Canadian province hosted and cared for 13,000 passengers and crew on 79 U.S.-bound aircraft diverted there on 9/11. (The same events inspired Jim DeFede’s 2002 oral history, “The Day the World Came to Town,” as well as the musical “Come From Away.”) 

Moss, then an administrator at a college campus in Gander, was part of the relief effort. In writing of the impressive coordination involved in hosting and feeding the stranded for days, he offers a heartfelt tribute to his thousands of neighbors “who brought blankets, sheets, pillows, casseroles, salads, and love.”

Love ended up being a big part of my 9/11 experience, too. 

Borne up by our families and friends, we went ahead with our New York wedding weeks after the attacks. There was grief – both for my father and for the unfathomable losses endured so recently by so many. But there was also joy and hope. 

We have two teenagers now, city kids who love New York fiercely. My son picked up “The Only Plane in the Sky” after I finished it, and he hasn’t put it down. As he encounters for the first time what, for him, is history, I remember.

AP

People in China's Hubei province push a van with disaster relief supplies to help those caught in mass flooding last month.

In its latest attempt to alleviate poverty in China – nearly half the population remains poor – the ruling Communist Party last month turned to an unusual source. It announced that wealthy people and companies should donate to charities, which are closely regulated. With a hint of coercion, party leader Xi Jinping said the rich would be motivated by social pressure to “give back.”

The hint was quickly taken, especially by tech firms. E-commerce giant Alibaba, for example, pledged $15.5 billion to social programs. Donations from billionaires are now about 20% higher than a year ago. With the party in firm command of the economy, no wealthy person or corporation wants to be tagged an “iron rooster” – so stingy as not to share even a feather – or possibly be subjected to tough government treatment.

For China’s charities, which have grown along with the nation’s wealth, the added flow of private money was welcomed. But many worry that forced philanthropy is no philanthropy at all. Generosity starts with empathy, such as toward people in impoverished situations. A climate of coerced donations might put a damper on individual giving, the kind that is done from the heart and not in response to implied threats.

The good news is that Mr. Xi recognizes that the party needs private giving for various goals. He just wants to funnel donations in state-directed ways and not create power centers that threaten the party’s control over society.

This is a long way from 1949 when the party took over China and banned private charity. Only in 1994 did it admit that philanthropy was compatible with communist ideology. By 2016 it passed a law that both regulated charities and encouraged giving with tax incentives.

Public generosity has taken root again in China, a reflection of its Confucian past, and especially so with the ease of giving over the internet. It is now seen as part of China’s social safety net, with or without a government nudge.