Daily Archives: February 22, 2021

Facebooks recent decision to block its Australian users from sharing or viewing news content has provoked a worldwide backlash and accusations of hubris and bullying. The row has also exposed the fragility of Facebooks founding myth: that Mark Zuckerbergs brainchild is a force for good, providing a public space for people to connect, converse and cooperate.

An inclusive public space in the good times, Facebook has yet again proved willing to eject and exclude in the bad times as a private firm ultimately has the right to do. Facebook seems to be a bastion of free speech up to and until the moment its revenue is endangered. At that point, as in the case of the Australian news ban, it defaults to a private space.

My recent paper explores social medias spatial hybridity, arguing that we must stop seeing companies like Facebook as public spaces and platforms for free speech. Equally, given their ubiquity and dominance, we shouldnt see them solely as private spaces, either. Instead, these companies should be defined as corpo-civic spaces a mixture of the two and regulated as such: by internal guidelines as well as external laws.

The recent Australian news block is part of a new set of laws developed in Australia to counter big techs monopoly power. The law in question responds to news companies complaints that they are losing advertising revenue to dominant content-sharing platforms such as Facebook. The law compels Facebook to agree a fee with news companies in an effort to reimburse them for the advertising revenue they lose to Facebook.

After lengthy negotiations during which Google threatened to withdraw from Australia, the company eventually chose to agree to those fees. Facebook didnt follow suit. Instead, as if by the flick of a switch, the company turned off the news in Australia. Caught in the crossfire and also finding themselves blocked on Facebook were charities and government organisations, as well as Pacific communities outside of Australian jurisdiction.

The news block has played poorly for Facebook. Having claimed impotence in the face of growing disinformation for years, Facebooks new-found iron fist has raised eyebrows. But this apparent inconsistency can be explained though perhaps not justified when we see Facebook as a public space with private interests.

Social media firms arent the only organisations straddled between the private and the public. Shopping centres are a common example in the offline world. So are some apparently public spaces like New Yorks Zuccotti Park where, in 2011, Occupy Wall Street protesters found themselves evicted both by police and by the parks private owners, Brookfield Properties.

Social media platforms operate similarly. Just as a shopping centre relies on footfall, Facebook profits from active users on its platform. For Facebook, this profit is generated almost entirely via the revenue provided by online advertising.

It shouldnt surprise us that, when confronted with the choice of whether or not to hand over some of that revenue to other companies, Facebook chose not to even if that decision deprives Australian users of news content and a civic space to share and discuss it.

The Australian news block is the latest example of a social media company falling short of its own principles. Governed by community standards that are effectively in-platform laws, platforms such as Facebook have a history of enforcing their rules on an ad-hoc basis. For years, researchers have argued that this system is inadequate, inconsistent and open to abuse.

Most glaring is social medias inconsistent enforcement of its own community standards. Facebook and Instagrams moderation has previously targeted womens nipples and has forced sex workers offline, while self-professed Nazis were only forced from Facebook after their participation in the US Capitol riots on January 6 2021.

During the run-up to the US election in 2020, Mark Zuckerberg actually invited regulation from the government, which seemed to be an admission that Facebook had grown beyond its ability to regulate itself. Yet, as weve seen with events in Australia, the corporate half of these online civic spaces baulks at any external regulation that might be bad for business.

So how should we regulate these hybrid spaces with competing and sometimes contradictory interests? My recent paper turns to third space theory for answers. Third space theory has been used to understand spatially ambiguous places, like when peoples homes become their workplaces, or when people feel a tension between their ancestral and adopted homes.

When applied to ambiguous spaces between the corporate and the civic, third space theory can help us better understand the unique regulatory challenges associated with social media companies. Facebook, for instance, is neither a wholly corporate nor a wholly civic space: its a corpo-civic one.

A corpo-civic governance approach would recognise that to heavily penalise and restrict social media companies would be to risk dismantling valuable civic spaces. At the same time, to see Facebook solely as a platform for free speech gives it licence to place maximising profits above ethics and human rights.

Instead, a corpo-civic governance model could apply international human rights standards to content moderation, putting the protection of people above the protection of profits. This is not dissimilar from the standards we expect of shopping centres, which may have their own private security policies but which must nevertheless abide by state law.

Because social media platforms are global and not local like shopping centres, it will be important for the laws that govern them to be transnational. Facebook may have blocked the news for Australians, but it wouldnt make the same decision for hundreds of millions of users across several different countries.

Australia might be Ground Zero for laws aimed at reining in big tech, but its certainly not the only country drafting them. Having those state regulators work together on transnational policies will be crucial. In the meantime, events in Australia are a warning for tech companies and state regulators alike about social medias hybrid nature, and the tension between people and profits that emerge from corpo-civic spaces.

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After blocking Australian news, Facebooks free speech myth is dead and regulators should take notice - The Conversation UK

Last Monday, following over a month in exile after being dropped from Amazon Web Services, Googles Play Store, and Apples App Store, the social media app Parler returned to life with a new hosting service and new content guidelines. Parler has become popular among the pro-Donald Trump right, as tech companies have increasingly cracked down on far-right content over the last year, and it now boasts 20 million users on what it calls the worlds premier free speech platform. Parler is just one part of a mass conservative reaction to increasing social media scrutiny of Republican commentators and politicians, culminating in Twitters permanent ban of President Trump. But although legal experts agree the social media bans that have led to the migration to Parler do not violate free speech, the fact that so few companies control the dissemination of speech in America should concern those across the political spectrum.

It is generally accepted by legal scholars that freedom of speech does not mean that social media platforms cannot ban or restrict the speech of whoever they like, just as any business can deny service based on non-demographic categories. This is explicitly encoded in the Section 230 provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which allows platform hosts to restrict user-submitted content as long as they are doing so in a good-faith attempt to remove objectionable content. But free speech, in common parlance, is more than just a legal principle. It is an important principle of an open society. The idea that everyone should be able to have a say no matter their opinion is central to the functioning of a liberal democracy, and most Americans agree.

When it comes to hateful speech in particular, though, opinions are more split. Philosopher Karl Popper popularized the paradox of tolerance, the idea that a society that is limitlessly tolerant would be eventually destroyed by the intolerant, and therefore that intolerance should not be protected. But this idea is far from universally accepted. John Rawls wrote in A Theory of Justice that any intolerance, even towards intolerance itself, is unjust, except when it materially limits the liberty of others; for Rawls, the right to equal liberty of speech superseded the harms of intolerance.

Of course, as weve already established, none of this takes away the right of corporations like Facebook or Twitter to restrict speech as much as they like on their own platforms. But in the 21st century, when fewer and fewer companies have oligopolies over avenues of user-submitted speech, these restrictions have shifted from a free-speech issue to one of corporate control. It isnt a new phenomenon for speech to be controlled by corporations the average person has a far greater likelihood of getting a message out to people today than they did before the Internet but now the same handful of companies control speech everywhere in the country. This includes platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube, but weve also seen drastic actions taken by web hosting companies like Amazon (as with Parler), or payment service companies like Mastercard and Visa.

In a pre-Internet world, it was clearly reasonable that the local newspaper or a journal of amateur fiction could restrict what users could submit to their pages. But what if youre a long-form video creator, and theres only one platform that most Americans view videos on? Social media platforms, which now serve as leading forms of entertainment, news, interpersonal interaction, and activism, are increasingly becoming a public square for our collective expression. It should then be concerning that we could count on two hands the number of companies it would take to effectively wipe content off the Internet.

Unfortunately, the defense of social media speech is a hard line to walk in Washington, since it requires defending the people you despise most across political lines. (Even as I write this article, its difficult to defend controversial social media posts when the ones that precipitated post-Jan. 6 social media takedowns were mostly conspiratorial, anti-democratic nonsense.) Theres a reason that social media CEOs keep getting hauled into congressional hearings, and its because theyre the few unlucky people in America that both Democrats and Republicans agree to dislike. Both Trump and President Joe Biden have expressed interest in repealing Section 230 protections, which would make social media companies legally liable for content posted on their platforms.

Yet while many Democrats see Section 230 as protecting social media companies from having to remove objectionable content, and Republicans see it as protecting social media bans of conservatives, a repeal of Section 230 is a misguided move that would get neither side what they want. To the GOPs point, repealing the bill would make platforms legally liable for user-submitted statements on their platforms, which is patently ridiculous when there are billions of posts made every day and no feasible way to screen them effectively. Platforms would effectively be forced to prevent any speech that could legally damage them, leading to speech restrictions far outstripping what we see today. (Its also ironic that the pro-business Republicans would endorse a Section 230 repeal that would be far more threatening to corporate independence than any law the Democrats could even dream of passing.)

To the Democrats objections, though Section 230 does keep social media companies from being legally responsible for hateful or violent user posts, a repeal of Section 230 would remove the law that gives those platforms the right to safely remove that content without expecting a costly First Amendment suit. In summary, no matter how bad the Internet might seem now, a regime that makes Internet companies legally responsible for the content they do not create and cannot feasibly review is not just unjust, but also unwise.

One of the reasons that this issue is so difficult to solve is that our interests in freedom of speech usually do not extend to speech by the other side. While liberals and leftists have had a tendency to rejoice when social media platforms take down the accounts of prominent conservatives, they have reason for concern as well. Not only do bans of conservatives help fuel the sorts of alt-right platforms that have radicalized so many, but left-wing groups have also been the target of mass social media bans. Its not hard to see that escalating, especially as Amazon battles against efforts to unionize. Even if many on the left might agree with social media companies bans of conservative figures, they would be wise to doubt whether international megacorporations are the best actors to be handing them out.

Of course, that selective attention to speech rights isnt restricted to liberals. Take Parler, for example, which touts itself as a bastion of free speech and intellectual openness. Meanwhile, in its actual policy, Parler is actually a far more restrictive social media network than its competitors: it has forbidden content such as fecal matter, obscene usernames, unrelated comments like f you, and the promotion of marijuana, all of which are allowed on Twitter. Furthermore, Parler has banned parody accounts and accounts critical of Parler, and the platform has conducted mass purges of left-wing accounts and of those supporting Antifa. For all the cries of social media censorship from the right, the network they promote to counter this is far more restrictive, except for the sorts of content that Parler has actually become the new home for far-right conspiracy theories, conservative echo chambers, and a collective dissociation from reality.

If not Section 230 or alternative platforms, what are the actual answers to free-speech issues on social media? Unfortunately, there arent any easy ones. Its not legally reasonable to mandate platforms to host content they do not want to, nor is it reasonable to repeal Section 230 and hold them responsible for the content they do host. The former would be a massive overreach into companies rights, and the latter would, as discussed, end up changing the Internet for the worse. At the end of the day, this is a constitutional dilemma that requires us to weigh our societys value for free speech and expression with the right to deny service. Both these rights are stretched to their limits, as mainstream political speech has increasingly radicalized, and that denial of service has ever-greater consequences due to corporate centralization.

So even if they cannot solve our legal issues, it would help us all if we returned to the aforementioned dialogue on the paradox of tolerance. Is it indeed the case that we as a society cannot tolerate intolerance, lest that very intolerance destroy us? Or should we only restrict speech when it violates others liberties and did Trump violate our liberties by attacking democracy? The answers to these questions are not legal, or even rational, but moral. But it is only with these answers that we can come up with consistent guidelines around speech and, one way or another, save the Internet.

Art by Andrew Diep for the UC San Diego Guardian.

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Social Media Bans Are About More Than Just Free Speech - The UCSD Guardian Online

I read with alarm about the proposed free speech law and the governments plans for a university free speech champion (Proposed free speech law will make English universities liable for breaches, 16 February).

I want to highlight the significant work of students to promote free speech, including hosting speakers drawn from a broad political spectrum and facilitating debates about the most controversial issues of the day, such as interpretations of feminism, Islam, and gender identity.

I encourage the government to engage with our work before passing legislation that replaces it. This is not the first attempt of its kind Toby Youngs bid to co-opt students for his Free Speech Union ended in failure when students realised the agenda: the claiming of free speech as property of the political right.

Indeed, it was after a recommendation from Prof Eric Kaufmann, an adviser to the Free Speech Union, that the free speech champion policy was proposed. I fear this means a carefully chosen arbitrator, to preside over free speech on campus, serving to further a free-speech land grab. Benjamin Mulready-Carroll Vice-president, Bristol Free Speech Society

Last autumn, Gavin Williamson threatened universities with cuts to funding if they did not adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, the expanded definition of which includes accusing Israel of being a racist endeavour. Now he proposes that universities allow people to sue for alleged breaches of free speech. If I have this right, the governments position is that if I say in a lecture that I believe Israel to be an apartheid state, then my university should sanction me. However, I will then be able to sue my university for infringing on my right to express my political opinions.

Also, the policy would appear to prevent questioning the existence of the state of Israel among academics and students, but also enforce the right of fascists to be invited to speak on campus. These inconsistencies suggest, perhaps, that none of this is about actually protecting free speech or combating antisemitism, but is instead a cynical exercise in weaponising both for political gain. As a Jew and an academic, these government proposals send a chill down my spine. Dr Simon Behrman Associate professor of law, University of Warwick

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Hidden dangers in the proposed free speech law - The Guardian

EFF has been tracking the Turkish governments crackdown on tech platforms and its continuing efforts to force them to comply with draconian rules on content control and access to users data. As of now, the Turkish government has now managed to coerce Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok into appointing a legal representative to comply with the legislation via threats to their bottom line: prohibiting Turkish taxpayers from placing ads and making payments to them if they fail to appoint a legal representative. According to local news, Google has appointed a legal representative through a shell company in Turkey.

Out of the major foreign social media platforms used in Turkey, only Twitter has not appointed a local representative and subject itself to Turkish jurisdiction over its content and users policies. Coincidentally, Twitter has been drawn into a series of moderation decisions that push the company into direct conflict with Turkish politicians. On February 2nd, Twitter decided that three tweets by the Turkish Interior Minister Sleyman Soylu violated its rules about hateful conduct and abusive behavior policy. Access to these tweets was restricted rather than removed as Twitter considered them still in the public interest. Similarly, Twitter decided to remove and delete a tweet by the AKP coalition MHP leader Devlet Bahel, where he tweeted that student protestors were terrorists and "poisonous snakes" whose heads needed to be crushed, as the tweet violated Twitters violent threats policy.

Yaman Akdeniz, a founder of the Turkish Freedom of Expression Association, told EFF

This is the first time Twitter deployed its policy on Turkish politicians while the company is yet to decide whether to have a legal representative in Turkey as required by Internet Social Media Law since October 2020.

As in many other countries, politicians in Turkey are now angry at Twitter both for failing to sufficiently censor criticism of Turkish policies, and for sanctioning senior domestic political figures for their violations of the platforms terms of service.

By attempting to avoid both forms of political pressure by declining to elect a local representative, Twitter is already paying a price. The Turkish regulator BTK has already imposed the first set of sanctions by forbidding Turkish taxpayers from paying for ads on Twitter. In principle, BTK can go further later this spring. It will be permitted to apply for sanctions against Twitter starting in April 2021, including ordering ISPs to throttle the speed of Turkish users connections to Twitter, at first by 50% and subsequently by up to 90%. Throttling can make sites practically inaccessible within Turkey, fortifying Turkeys censorship machine and silencing speech--a disproportionate measure that profoundly limits users ability to access online content within Turkey.

The Turkish Constitutional Court has overturned previous complete bans on Wikipedia in 2019 and Twitter and YouTube back in 2014. Even though the recent legislation only foresees throttling sites access speeds by 50% or 90%, this sanction aims to make sites unusable in practice and should be viewed by the Court the same way as an outright ban. Research on website usability has already found that huge numbers of users will lose patience with only slightly slower sites than they expect; Delays of just 1 second are enough to interrupt a persons conscious thought process; making users wait five or ten times as long would be catastrophic.

But if the Turkish authorities think that throttling away major platforms that refuse to comply with its orders, they may have another problem. The new Internet Social Media law covers any social network provider that exceeds a daily access of one million. While the law is unclear as to what that figure means in practice, it wasnt intended to cover smaller alternatives -- like Clubhouse, the new invitation-only audio-chat social networking, iOS-only app. Inevitably, with Twitter throttled and other services suspected of being required to comply with Turkish government demands, thats exactly where political conversations have shifted.

During the recent crackdown, Clubhouse has hosted Turkish groups every night until after midnight, where students, academics, journalists, and sometimes politicians join the conversations. For now, Turkish speech enforcement is falling back to other forms of intimidation. At least four students were recently taken into custody. Although the government said the arrests related to the students use of other social media platforms, the students believe that their Clubhouse activity was the only thing that distinguished them from thousands of others.

Clubhouse, as with many other fledglings, general-purpose social media networks, has not accounted for its use as a platform by endangered voices. It has a loosely-enforced real names policy -- one of the reasons why the students were able to be targeted by law enforcement. And as the Stanford Internet Observatory discovered, its design potentially allowed government actors or other network spies to collect private data on its users, en masse.

Ultimately, while its the major tech companies who face legal sanctions and service interruptions under Turkeys Social Media Law, its ordinary Turkish citizens who are really paying the price: whether its slower Internet services, navigated cowed social platforms, or, physical arrest for simply speaking out online on platforms that cannot yet adequately protect them from their own government.

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Turkey's Free Speech Clampdown Hits Twitter, Clubhouse -- But Most of All, The Turkish People - EFF

The Tories war on woke is a hypocritical attack on an exaggerated enemy, and riddled with contradictions or hypocrisy (The Tories want a war on the woke as if theres nothing better to do, 15 February).

For example, the professed concern about no-platforming on university campuses is raised yet again, with the pledge of a free speech champion to prevent the banning of controversial speakers. So how would the Tories react if a student union or university department invited a former member of the IRA or al-Qaida to give a talk titled Why terrorism is justified in order to achieve our goals? The Tories and their allies in the press would probably demand that the university be closed down entirely. Besides, the government recently warned schools against teaching anti-capitalist views. So much for promoting free speech and encouraging an exchange of ideas.

The fact is that the Tories are doing what they always do when they cant provide an intelligent response to the actual issues raised, or want to divert attention from their (many) other policy failings: apply purportedly pejorative labels to their critics and opponents woke, do-gooders, militants, loony lefties, etc. In so doing, the Conservative aim is always to discredit critics, deny the legitimacy of their concerns or views, and thereby close down debate. In other words, the Tories pursue their very own cancel culture to ensure the dominance of rightwing views and values. Pete Dorey Bath, Somerset

There seems to be some confusion between freedom of speech and the right to be heard. The former is widely accepted as a fundamental right; the latter is subject to many caveats.

We do not have a fundamental right to be heard wherever and whenever we wish. I doubt that the academics, students and visiting speakers your article refers to (Proposed free speech law will make English universities liable for breaches, 16 February) have had any serious problems getting their views expressed freely in any number of ways. Their problem is that they are not being heard in a particular place, at a particular venue, and a particular time. This is an issue not directly related to free speech.

There is a profound irony hovering at the edge of this debate. The growth of the internet means that no one in this country need go voiceless. Indeed, most political and social groups look first and foremost to the web to express their ideas to a wide audience. The issue we face with the web is how to control its excesses.

Against this background, all British universities must have the right to oversee and determine the activities that take place on their campuses according to their circumstances and have a duty to do so. Peter Martindale Castle Bytham, Lincolnshire

Plans by the government to appoint a free speech champion for universities and tell cultural institutions that they must not airbrush British history is part of a Tory culture war. It has little to do with history and a lot to do with the Tories striking stances on things they think will win them votes.

At the same time, the ignorance that ministers like Oliver Dowden have about history and what historians do cannot go unchallenged. British history is not some static, unchanging thing. How each generation understands events and which bits of British history are discussed and remembered is subject to change. At least some of that relates to work that historians do to better understand British history.

I would suggest that Dowden reads Sheila Rowbothams Hidden from History and Peter Fryers Staying Power. Without those foundation texts, the history of women and ethnic minorities would have stayed airbrushed out of the historical record. Dr Keith Flett London Socialist Historians Group

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A free speech champion will only impose Tory values - The Guardian

We learnt this week that Boris Johnsons government will be introducing new measures to strengthen free speech at universities, even creating a role called the Free Speech and Academic Freedom Champion. And we all know why, of course. How could we not notice that right-wing views are being silenced? Our right-wing government has been screaming about how much their views have been silenced on... every media platform in the country.

Now, I agree with the parts of the governments proposals, which state that free speech and the ability to put forward controversial ideas that challenge established thinking are essential in universities. The proposals also rightly state that there is a balance to be struck between protecting free speech and preventing hate speech. The problem is, this is the absolute last government which should be deciding how that balance is struck.

But first lets look at the plans themselves. They include effectively banning student unions from no-platforming certain external speakers based on their political views. Student unions have elected presidents with policy platforms which may not include inviting racists to use the food hall for rallies. Again, thats a balance issue.

The proposals mention that some students who voted for Brexit felt uncomfortable admitting so in class, and suggest that universities should take measures when staff and students face criticism for expressing lawful views. Its weird that a Free Speech Champion would be tasked with protecting against academic criticism. Im sure its a total coincidence that the governments flagship policy Brexit is the one they wish to protect. Although, if Id forced Brexit on a generation that overwhelmingly opposes it, I might be tempted to try to silence criticism, too. Doing it in the name of free speech, however thats a stroke of genius far beyond me.

The proposals also suggest mandating that student unions Codes of Practice formally oppose boycotts. Given that boycotts are a form of protest that was critical during the Civil Rights Movement, the idea that student unions would be formally mandated to oppose them is very worrying.

The proposal also specifically says a head of faculty should not force or pressure academics into decolonising the curriculum. This is troubling given that decolonising the curriculum is about ensuring that academia includes a more global perspective, rather than just the view from the UK. So the Free Speech Champion would be tasked with restricting universities to a strictly anglocentric viewpoint.

As a final bit of hypocrisy, the proposal cites the Human Rights Act, as a basis for the initiative. Thats funny because Boris Johnson was trying to opt out of parts of it six months ago. Added to this, the Act simply mirrors the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) an odd source of guidance for a government that doesnt need European laws anymore.

They cited the ECHRs Freedom of Expression but failed to mention that the ECHR simply bans public authorities from interfering with that right. It does not mandate that student associations have to create platforms for groups that go against the principles they were elected on. The ECHR even allows restriction in the interest of the protection of health and morals, which is what allows governments to criminalise hate speech and incitement.

Again, free speech is vital. I chose the Twitter handle @Femi_Sorry because I know I say controversial things and my sense of humour is dark as night. But heres the problem: this is the government under which Greenpeacewas placed on a terrorism watch list. This is the government whichbanned schoolsfrom using material from groups it considered anti-capitalist.

This is the government whose equalities minister said it was illegal to teach about white privilege as a fact, despite their own government website stating that black people are stopped and searched 10 times more than white people. This is the party that wouldnt let 16-17 year olds vote in the last election and when asked why, MP Tobias Ellwood said it was because we know it will favour one particular party.

This is the party which appointed former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre as head of Ofcom, with MP Steve Baker admitting that it was to make our media regulation a bit more conservative and pragmatic in what is reported. This is the government whose prime minister got fired from two newspapers for lying.

This is the government whose Brexit campaign both lied and broke the law. This is the government whose prime minister caused a 375 per cent spikein hate crime by saying Muslim women looked like bank robbers.

This is the government whichimpersonated a fact-checkingwebsite during an election campaign. This is the government that was elected on 44 per cent of the vote, wields a majority of 80 MPs despite the majority voting for parties much further to the left of them, and yet somehow claims right-wing views are the ones being silenced in the UK.

How can a government that censors the facts in schools, got elected on a four year campaign of disinformation, treats environmentalists as enemies of the state, denies voting rights to young people because they would vote against them, seeks to deliberately restrict the media to conservative reporting, and whose rhetoric leads to racist attacks, be trusted to find the right balance between free speech, misinformation, and hate speech? The fact that theyre trying, should make us all very worried about the path were heading down.

The fact is there is a reason why academic institutions are more socially left leaning. They are the places with access to all of the data which shows systemic inequality in society, and human beings naturally think something should be done about inequality. So its not surprising that this government feels threatened by universities. Being aware of the injustices in the world, and being willing to challenge them, is the definition of woke.

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The Conservative Partys free speech reforms are staggeringly hypocritical - The Independent

Protesting at Israeli minister Mark Regev at Soas university in 2017. This is the kind of protest that the Tories have a problem with (Pic: Guy Smallman)

It takes some brass neck to try and impose laws on universities defending free speech while shutting down the right to criticise Israel on campus. But thats what Tory education minister Gavin Williamson is doing

Included in proposals Williamson outlined last week are measures to protectand even promotebigoted views, while severely curtailing protest.

Free speech has never meant the right to speak unopposed or unchallenged. Its never even meant the right to be heard in respectful debate or to not be shouted down.

In fact, at its most radical, its meant the opposite.

The rich, the powerful and the right have never lacked space or opportunity to spread their ideas or spew their bile. They own the media outlets that give them a platformand set the boundaries of what is considered acceptable discussion.

Ordinary people have had to fight for their right to be heard.

Throughout history and across the globe, campaigns for free speech have been tied up with the right to organise and resist.

One of the best known examples is the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were deported for forming a union in 1832. Another is the protesters who were killed in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 demanding the vote and democratic rights.

The 19th century Chartist movement, the Suffragettes of the 20th century and the US Civil Rights Movement all tied in the right to organise and protest.

Radical

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement in California in 196465 fought for the right of students to organise politically and for academics to research and teach radical ideas.

There are genuine fights for free speech today. Palestinian societies fight for the right to organise in universities. There are campaigns against the Prevent legislation that silences Muslims. And LGBT+ activists are battling those who aim to keep trans people marginalised.

Today Williamson uses the language of free speech and academic freedom to push our rights back. He cited the case of Felix Ngole, a student expelled from a social work course after calling gay sex a wicked act, to justify his measures.

Williamsons policy paper complains that academics have been pressured to adjust their reading lists for ideological reasons.

Thats a reference to campaigns to decolonise the curriculumto change what is taught to reflect racism and oppression.

Students having a say over what they are taught is the kind of free speech Williamson doesnt like. So is their right to take action over it.

Williamson is forced to accept that the right to free speech includes the right to challenge or protest. But universities must not allow protest to prevent speech from being heard (for instance, by drowning it out).

More vaguely, protesters shouldnt intimidate speakers or audience members. The biggest threat to free speech on campus is Williamson and the Tories.

Muslims have borne the brunt of attacks on free speech. The force driving these attacks arent woke studentsits the state.

In universities, Muslims who want to organise politically, hold events, or invite outside speakers have to do so under the surveillance of the Prevent duty.

This requires universities to monitor students for signs of extremism or that they are being drawn into terrorismand report them to the authorities.

Universities are asked to vet speakers and events before deciding if they can go ahead.

Often theyll impose conditions on events, such as having them monitored by university officers, or even the cops. The governments Prevent strategy describes extremism as the active opposition to fundamental British values.

The main targets under this loaded definition are Muslims, and in particular Prevent aims to silence them from criticising Britain and its wars.

The most recently released statistics from the governments Office for Students cover the 2017-18 academic year. More than 62,000 events and speakers were subjected to scrutiny by their universities under the Prevent duty that year.

Of those more than 2,100 were only allowed to go ahead with conditions attached.

The National Union of Students surveyed Muslim students about how they felt about Prevent that same year. More than one third said theyd felt negatively affected by Prevent.

Safe

Respondents who reported having been affected by Prevent are significantly more likely than others to believe there is no safe space or forum on campus to discuss issues that affect them, the report said.

These students are also significantly more likely to note they would not be comfortable involving themselves in student debates around racism, Islamophobia, Muslim student provision, terrorism, Palestine or Prevent.

It also meant Muslims felt less comfortable running for elected positions in their student unions.

Even Gavin Williamsons policy document had to admit that parliaments Joint Committee on Human Rights found Prevent had a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

But it doesnt think anything should change, only saying that Prevent should not be used to shut down or discourage lawful speech.

Yet the Tories are determined to ensure that it does. They last month appointed William Shawcross to chair a review of Prevent.

Shawcross is a former chair of the Henry Jackson Society, a right wing think tank that blames Muslims for extremism.

He once said that, Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future.

His book, Justice and the Enemy, is sympathetic to the use of torture in Guantanamo Bay.

And now hell set the limits of free speech for Muslims.

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Gavin Williamson's 'free speech' is an attack on our rights to organise - Socialist Worker

Early last year, I found myself at dinner with someone influential in the Government, and lost no time in presuming to tell this person how important it was to fight and win the culture war.

On my high horse after a glass or three, I opined on how the culture war is a real war, with real consequences for peoples freedom and happiness, as well as their safety, and insisted that the major battleground was freedom of speech in institutions. Infractions of the right to legal free speech, I said, should be punished with fines, and there should be a body that watched universities in particular including their so-called diversity and inclusion policies like a hawk.

The Government bigwig nodded distractedly, and was soon engaged by someone more important than me. I felt a bit silly, forgot Id ever had the conversation, and went back to fuming inwardly about the state of free speech, cancel culture and the rise of woke both on and off campus.

I dont flatter myself that my wine-fuelled lecture to this senior figure a year ago had any impact. But that doesnt lessen my happiness at new evidence that the Government is taking the grim fallout from woke ideology seriously.

Last week, it announced proposed measures that would see universities forced to adhere to a free speech condition in order to receive funding. Under the rules, the Office for Students would be endowed with the power to impose sanctions, including financial penalties, for breaches of the condition. And the new measures would also make it easier for those punished no-platformed, prevented from speaking, or bullied or sacked for pursuing politically inexpedient research agendas to seek legal redress. In other words: bullying, censoring and cancelling people for having divergent opinions or asking unorthodox (read: conservative) research questions will no longer be the entirely consequence-free joyride it has so far been.

The announcement didnt come without a sting in the tail. There was the immediate adverse and totally predictable reaction from the woke Kool-Aid drinkers of the Left-wing press and beyond. It is hard to understand quite what makes so many supposedly progressive people come out in public against the defence of free speech, but thats the world we live in.

The Guardian immediately supposed that a free-speech champion would do the opposite of championing it, while the New Statesman proclaimed the proposals a half-baked mess. Even former education secretary Justine Greening took umbrage, as did David Blunkett, who (ironically) accused the Government of playing identity politics. It all made me rather want to crawl under the bed.

The politicians have their own axes to grind, but the whining of the Lefties was telling. It was, of course, entirely lost on them that the reason the Government needs to intervene at all is because they have so remorselessly and successfully pushed through their ideological agenda. It is they who have formalised horizon-squashing policies forbidding offence and exclusion and creating intimidating environments that appear to disallow certain thoughts, let alone certain questions to be asked or texts to be set.

Indeed, this has been possible because their own freedom has been untrammelled. Cambridge dons, including the woke-possessed Priyamvada Gopal and other professor-activists recently gathered at Gopals own college, Churchill, for a debate on the wartime prime ministers legacy on race. Apparently part of a year-long inclusivity review, the debate saw the man who saved Britain from the Nazis and won the war rebranded as backward, racist and a keen collaborator in a British Empire far worse than the Nazis.

Indeed, some might wonder at the total freedom with which these educators have gone around comparing Churchill to Hitler, as Professor Kehinde Andrews of Birmingham University has been blithely doing for some time, and to great acclaim. The woke-agogues have heartily availed themselves of the privileges of free speech for years; they just dont think the same freedom should be extended to anyone else.

The fight for free speech is going to be long, precarious and complex. These measures are a nice burst of artillery, but will not, alas, be nearly enough on their own. For cancel culture has spread right through to the very air the students breathe; students who are encouraged to call out peers and friends when they make an offensive slip of the tongue both in and out of class. Asking questions has already become too hard; none but the bravest students now risk querying, say, blanket condemnation of the Empire, or the integrity of concepts such as white fragility or white supremacy.

Meanwhile, academic staff are also under huge social and peer pressure to fall into line. The new laws will help when they are publicly shamed and rendered professionally untouchable, but will be scant help for all the private social punishment they face.

The rule of intimidation that has been eroding free speech on a grand scale is now at its most dangerous on a far more micro, atmospheric level than the Government can hope to control. Who wants to speak their mind, even among friends, when those very friends might turn on you for a wrong word?

At the end of the day, no legislation in the world can stop someone from losing their friends.

See the article here:
Free speech on campus is to be protected, but the war against cancel culture rages on - Telegraph.co.uk

A UI law professor and state representative argues that Iowa Republicans are perpetrators of free speech.

Kate Heston

Christina Bohannan, Representative-Elect for the Iowa House of Representatives in District 85, holds a Biden-Harris sign in the air. Patrons celebrate the Biden Harris presidential victory in Mercer Park on Sunday. The event was hosted by Johnston County Supervisor RoyceAnn Porter. Patrons celebrate the Biden Harris presidential victory in Mercer Park on Sunday. The event was hosted by Johnston County Supervisor RoyceAnn Porter.

As a law professor, I am a strong defender of free speech. Defending free speech as a constitutional principle means defending the right of people to speak even when I disagree with their message.

As a Democratic state representative from Iowa City, I recently heard a lot about how Iowa Republicans believe they are victims of First Amendment violations. The Iowa House Government Oversight Committee held hearings to review complaints that the regent universities had infringed on conservative students free speech rights. In the University of Iowa case, the College of Dentistry dean admitted the college was wrong to schedule an inquiry for a student who criticized the colleges statement opposing an Executive Order issued by then-President Trump.

I readily concede that the UI made a mistake. Under the First Amendment, a state university should not punish anyone for commenting on a matter of public concern. It is antithetical to the universitys educational mission to foster debate. I was glad to see that university officials immediately recognized their mistake and reversed course.

But there is another side to this story. Iowa Republicans claim they are victims of free speech violations, but they are also perpetrators. Several of them introduced bills that blatantly violate principles of free speech and association.

Here are just a few of the egregious examples from the first five weeks of the legislative session:

Iowa House and Senate leadership should have pronounced these bills dead on arrival. Instead, they breathed life into them by assigning them to committees and allowing them perhaps to advance to the floor. Even if these bills dont ultimately pass, they damage our educational system every time they are publicly debated.

When conservatives believe their free speech rights have been violated, they are right to call it out. But our Republican state legislators also need to clean up around their own doorstep. And they should certainly stop playing the victim when they hold all the political power in the state and are wielding it to suppress the free speech of thousands of Iowans.

Christina Bohannan, Democratic state representative, Iowa House District 85; University of Iowa Law Professor

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Guest Opinion | Both sides now: free speech and politics in Iowa - UI The Daily Iowan