Washington University Student Union (SU) Senate talked about how to balance freedom of speech, student protection, and transparency in reference to the recent Israel-Hamas war and backlash towards an SU Executive Board statement on the subject, during their weekly meeting on Oct. 17. 

The conversation comes in the wake of a recent statement from the SU Executive Board about the Israel-Hamas conflict that led to anger from students before one of the slides of the post was deleted and comments were disabled. SU issued an apology for their words in an Instagram Story but did not externally acknowledge that part of the statement had been removed. 

The meeting began with an open discussion where senators talked about the ongoing conflict and ways in which their branch of SU could respond. They discussed promoting mental health resources and potentially releasing their own statement about the conflict, though many senators expressed reluctance to do so. 

Sophomore Ashton Lee said that since nobody in Senate is an expert on the Israel-Hamas war, he didn’t think releasing an additional statement would be beneficial. Instead, Lee suggested that it might be beneficial to instead talk with impacted students. 

“I think when you’re dealing with groups who are most impacted, [they] might feel left out by us making a broad statement on the post,” Lee said. “I feel like if we were meeting those groups, even if we can’t answer all their questions or give solutions, we could just know they’re hurt and they know that we see them.” 

The discussion then shifted towards talking about a resolution presented by Senate leadership that would prevent SU from deleting or archiving posts put on their social media, and would also ban the  disabling of the comments on a post. The resolution was slated to be discussed during the meeting and voted on at a later date. 

Senate Diversity and Inclusion Chair and sophomore Sonal Churiwal said that there were transparency concerns from the Senate leadership that led to the creation of the resolution.

“Because the initial exec post was only out for a day, not everyone had the chance to see it and that just brings up a concern of transparency,” Churiwal said. “That’s what the resolution outlines, that anything that’s put up on Instagram cannot be archived and any comments that are criticizing SU cannot be taken down.”

Junior Emma Hammer said that she was worried about leaving potentially offensive or inflammatory statements up on Instagram.

“My concern is that we’re saying we want to create a safe space for people on campus but if people are going to the Instagram and seeing a post that they find deeply offensive and then reading comments from other students that they find deeply offensive, I think that’s not really creating a safe space,” Hammer said.

Senators also discussed potential ways of increasing transparency without leaving up potentially harmful statements, including providing explanations when part or all of a statement is taken down. 

Senate Health and Wellness Chair and junior Braeden Rose said that comments should only be deleted if they are prejudicial, not just if they criticize SU, in order to better maintain free speech. 

“The language [in the resolution] says specifically hate speech or bigoted comments are exempt,” Rose said. “If someone is putting comments under an SU post, those can be removed [if] they are hate speech, but having the unilateral authority to completely turn the comments off, I think it’s not a great thing.” 

Junior Andrew de las Alas, who serves as Vice President of Engagement for SU, elaborated on the reasoning behind turning the comments off as a member of the SU Executive Board who signed onto the original post

“The decision came because we were seeing a lot of antisemitic comments starting to roll in,” de las Alas said, “as well as attacks that went beyond critiques of Student Union.”

De las Alas noted the potential bias involved in having individuals decide what constitutes as prejudicial within a comment section.  

“Logistically, deleting comments and putting the responsibility of determining what is hate speech or what is not hate speech, what is violent or what is not violent, we have whole Supreme Court cases that decide that,” he said. “My personal opinion, especially as the person who might have been put in that position, is that you should not put a student in that position. That can open you up to all kinds of bias, all kinds of abuses of power.” 

SU adviser Sarah Edmondson also stated that even if speech is considered to be hate speech, it is still protected by the First Amendment, complicating the notion of deleting certain comments.

“Anything that limits the free speech ability of students in general is very heavily scrutinized and opens you up to liability of all forms, even in private institutions,” Edmondson said. 

The resolution will now be re-examined by Senate leadership, who initially proposed it, before they make a decision about whether or not to re-present it to the larger Senate body.