The astonishing and disturbing news from Lakewood about a group of teenagers, including a daughter of a State Trooper, sent out antisemitic tweets showing themselves dressed as Nazis or threatening Jews in the neighborhood. One picture, for instance, showed a girl with a doll wearing a swastika and was captioned “Adolfa hitler [sic] supporting her daddy.” Another tweet claimed, “I really wanna [sic] drive around Lakewood and run over every Jew with my car.”
Anyone with a heart should be disgusted by these internet posts. I myself recoil at the hatred and terrible words these teenagers were spewing. But were they arrested? Were they penalized at all? Right now, that isn’t clear. The Prosecutor’s Office of Ocean County didn’t file any charges, and the teens’ school is remaining silent on whether the school district will be disciplining them.
The whole event raises challenging questions. Are what these teenagers wrote protected, as horrible as it is, by the doctrine of freedom of speech? Or have they crossed the line? Does what they wrote count as a true threat or is it just in the worst taste possible, but not a hazard to Lakewood’s Jewish community?
I feel like I can offer a unique perspective here by taking a look at how the pictures were originally posted. I don’t think the articles I’ve read have picked up on this subtlety, but many of the pictures have their caption superimposed inside a black band stretching across the photo, and often a number in the corner inside a circle. These details show that the pictures were taken with an app called Snapchat. For the uninitiated, the original idea behind Snapchat was to let friends send short pictures and videos to each other that would only last for up to 10 seconds. Once the time is up, the media vanishes forever. Snapchat now offers a feature called “Snapchat story” that allows a person to post a series of pictures or videos that will last up to 24 hours, and all of his or her friends can see them until they expire.
Why is this all important? I mean, Snapchat isn’t intrinsically a bad app. I use it all the time to send cute pictures to friends or to share small moments on my “story.” But like any social media platforms, it can be used for good or for bad, and in the case of this news story, it was used for what I would call modern-day evil. Even worse, the ephemeral nature of Snapchat leads people to think that they’ll send their silly photo (I’m sure the Nazi-loving teenagers found their shots hilarious), the recipient will watch it for five seconds, and then it’ll be gone for good. Except that there’s nothing at all the app can do to stop the recipient from taking a screenshot and thus having the photo for good. (The sender is notified that “So and so took a screenshot!” but has no real recourse, understandably.) Once again, this isn’t intrinsically bad; a person could take a screenshot of a funny snap and enjoy keeping it as a good memory. But then these Snapchats in this story were screenshotted, posted on Twitter (a far more public and permanent platform!), and used to show hatred towards the Jewish community. I’m hard-pressed to think of a worse way Snapchat and screenshotting could be used, with the exception of if they actually threatened a specific Jew in the community.
(None of this means that I’m done using the app—once again, it’s a tool, a platform; some of the people who use it are the ones who cause the issues, similar to email and Facebook.)
Now let’s think for a moment about the freedom of speech issue. I’m not going to claim to be any sort of legal expert (the closest thing to the bar exam I’ll probably ever have was probably my recent history midterm), but I know there are laws against harassment and slander. I don’t know exactly where this case fits in, but the posts sound as if they’re harassing and maligning an entire community. There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and I don’t think hate speech can go unpunished. And for those who might say that what I’ve and many others have written in favor of the Jewish people and the state Israel and against its enemies could be seen as hate speech against those enemies, I would strongly disagree. We are allowed to defend ourselves, to state our beliefs forcefully, and I believe that we have not overstepped any line. We demand freedoms and rights, we cry for justice, but we don’t cry for anyone’s destruction or demand that a whole group be maligned. And that’s what these teens, with their bizarre neo-Nazi ideology, are doing.
There’s really no way to defend their words. I do wish they had been charged; the fact that Senator Robert Menendez is trying to reopen the case in federal court is promising. In the meantime, I urge the Jewish community of Lakewood to go about its business normally. Stay strong, united, and free. And don’t let anyone stop you.
Oren Oppenheim, age 17, is a junior at Ramaz Upper School in Manhattan and lives in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. He spends his free time writing and reading, and hopes to become a published novelist, but currently is drowning in emails from colleges. You can email him at [email protected] and see his photography at facebook.com/orenphotography.
By Oren Oppenheim
