‘Safety’ Is the Worst Word in the English Language

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, December 11, 2022

 

The word “safety,” in the abstract, is no better or worse than any other. The dictionary tells us it means “the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury.”

 

It derives from the Middle English saufte, from the Old French sauvete, from the medieval Latin salvitas, and from the Latin salvus.

 

The word’s first known use was in the early 14th century, long before anyone possibly could have conceived of the circumstances that would lead to its degradation in the early 21st century.

 

“Safety,” together with its close cousin “harm,” is now one of the worst words in the language, an anodyne term wielded by the forces of illiberalism as a catch-all justification for imposing their bizarre priorities.

 

If there were any doubt about this, it should have been removed by the Twitter Files.

 

The secret shadow-banning group written about by journalist Bari Weiss — a.k.a. “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support” — included Yoel Roth, who is a creature of the most expansive and ridiculous notions of safety.

 

The former Global Head of Trust & Safety speaks of himself as a privileged cisgender male — hey, no one’s perfect — and couches the decisions he made at Twitter, not in terms merely of what people would read or not, but whether or not they’d be exposed to danger.

 

Once upon a time, safety meant don’t turn over the lawnmower while it’s running to see if something is wrong with it, or don’t operate heavy equipment while taking Quaaludes.

 

The quest for physical safety eventually resulted in absurd overkill, but more portentously the concept itself changed to encompass the notion of emotional safety.

 

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff detailed this change — from a commonsense definition of safety to a sweeping “safetyism” — in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Not surprisingly, Oberlin College was a pioneer. In 2014, it pushed faculty to use trigger warnings to “show students that you care about their safety,” and warned that using the wrong pronouns for students “prevents or impairs their safety in a classroom.”

 

Back then, this use of safety seemed esoteric; today, it is mainstream. Indeed, it informs the thinking about speech, and the rules for what can be said and not, at companies that are hugely important to America’s political and cultural discussion.

 

Not too long ago, safety in the internet and social-media context meant, say, preventing terrorists from using platforms to publish beheading videos.

 

Now, these companies have gone from trying to prevent people from being kidnapped or exposed to pornography to trying to keep them from encountering unwelcome ideas or potentially offensive speech.

 

Add to the mix the reaction to the 2016 election, when Donald Trump supposedly won on the basis of misinformation, and the license to censor became broad and far-reaching.

 

As Roth wrote in a direct message to a colleague noted by Weiss, “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/vitality of content is a good way to do that (by just reducing prevalence overall).”

 

Roth recently explained in an interview how the Babylon Bee’s satire makes trans people unsafe and, joke or not, its misgendering of Rachel Levine as its “man of the year” was “still misgendering.”

 

The censors at Twitter were obsessed with the Libs of TikTok account. If you aren’t beholden to woke gender ideology, what Libs of TikTok does is publicize the self-created videos of people who literally seek to expose children to harm by evangelizing for exotic notions of gender and sexuality.

 

As Weiss shows, the Twitter censors admitted internally that the account did not violate the platform’s Hateful Conduct policy, but they found ways to ding it on technicalities anyway.

 

This is why it should be encouraging that members of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety Council” have quit in frustration, alleging Musk is supposedly shutting them out.

 

There are multiple layers to Elon Musk’s challenge to the status quo in his takeover of Twitter. He’s trying to vindicate a free-speech-oriented approach to social media and show that a company doesn’t have to be scared of its entitled woke workforce. Also on his agenda should be taking the word “safety” down a notch, in a step toward removing the ideological stink around what was once a perfectly fine word, and perhaps can be again.