Americans like free-speech, you can say almost anything! But for the sake of free speech itself, maybe we should be more responsible. Let’s look at the case of social media.

To share students and save money, my university recently integrated with two other state-owned institutions. We just revamped our Facebook page to follow suit. Lately, I have been posting short biographies of prominent dead sociologists.

I created an account on X to expand our profile. After scrolling the “for you” section of X, however, I am having second thoughts. The first post is often Musk showing his rockets in action. The second might be people playing with a handgun who accidentally shoot the passenger in the head — completely unedited. The next might be people having sex, their nude bodies bent so the camera sees everything.

The list goes on: Brutal industrial accidents, gang shootings in Mexico, Asian women in tight skirts removing their underwear in public. So there I am looking at pornography on my state-owned computer in my state-owned office on a social media platform owned by the man in charge of government efficiency.

I noticed that Facebook has gone a similar route likely since Mr. Zuckerberg, its owner, declared his commitment to free speech. In the reels section, I have been seeing alligators eating dogs who are frolicking at the water’s edge. The rare event is fascinating and sad, but if you watch carefully you suspect it is not faked, but staged. Each reel is a different dog in a different location and the poster seems to have his camera ready. Is there an uptick in chance alligator-dog attacks or is there now a market for the movies? Are people sacrificing dogs to feed our phone addictions?

Our vice president chastised Germany for compromising free speech. It is a crime in Germany to damage someone’s personal honor by lying. This might shock an American, but the Germans have an interesting rationale. Enforcing such rules actually encourages free speech. Americans might assume that these rules stifle people’s willingness to speak out. Americans would not want the police knocking at the door. But Germans might be less afraid of expressing themselves as the result of this law enforcement. It does not compromise free speech at all.

Many Americans are afraid to speak out not because they fear the government, but because they fear their fellow citizens in places like the dreaded comments section. So many American commenters on social media or news items hide behind false social media profiles or they put their own social media settings to private. They want to dish it out, but they are afraid of taking it. We have even developed a new language. They are “trolls,” like angry little men grunting under a bridge. They don’t want to be “doxed” or exposed.

Anonymity enables people to be careless in accusations and language — some sloppy citizenship. This is not what Thomas Jefferson and the other American superheroes imagined. They wrote the First and Second Amendments so we could regulate ourselves in open forums. Norman Rockwell painted “Freedom of Speech” of an ordinary man in a soiled jacket nervously standing to speak in a New England town hall. In this way, you are responsible for what you say.

Most Americans understand the responsibility that comes from the powers of the 2nd Amendment. Just because the US constitution allows you to bear arms, does not mean you can run to your neighbor’s house and shoot him. A few Americans obviously do not understand.

I sense a scam, especially in light on Mr. Trump’s actions. He has kicked some reputable journalists out of the press pool. He has referred to “illegal protests” and “illegal boycotts.” House speaker Johnson called the sergeant-at-arms to remove an elected representative during Mr. Trump’s address to congress. Lately, other politicians have abruptly left town hall meetings or are canceling them altogether — Norman Rockwell be damned.

Is someone leading us to believe that pornography and street fights are good replacements for more honest freedoms of speech and the press? Is this, like old Roman times, the bread and circuses of our era? Will we watch alligators eat dogs while abdicating our republican duties?

Greg Walker is a sociologist at Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania at Lock Haven. A precocious old book about this subject, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, is available through Stevenson Library. www.facebook.com/LHU.SOCI.ANTH.GEOG.DEPT/