Category Archives: Free Speech

In 40 years of following the Colorado legislature as a journalist, Ive seen many attempts occasionally successful to curtail free speech in the name of an alleged greater good.

There have been bills to restrict the rights of certain protesters; to obstruct citizens from spending their own money to leaflet neighborhoods on behalf of a political cause; to protect fruits and vegetables from disparagement; to sabotage our right to collect signatures for ballot initiatives, and so forth.

Suffice it to say, however, I dont recall ever seeing such a bold, comprehensive attempt at government speech control as the project outlined in Senate Bill 132 by Democratic Sen. Kerry Donovan of Vail to regulate digital communications.

It is stunningly broad, probably in part unconstitutional and ominously ambitious. It creates a division of state government and a commission devoted to regulation of speech, with the duty to register digital communications platforms such as social media and to fine those who resist $5,000 a day. The new bureaucracy would investigate practices that promote hate speech; undermine election integrity; disseminate intentional disinformation, conspiracy theories, or fake news; or authorize, encourage, or carry out violations of users privacy.

Although the bill makes no attempt to define hate speech, fake news or disinformation, it explicitly foresees government suppressing speech it doesnt like. Upon detecting an unfair or discriminatory digital communications practice, the commission would issue an order requiring the respondent to cease and desist from the practice and to take action that the commission orders.

It is tempting to dismiss Donovans bill as a fringe anomaly that will be killed thanks to the good sense of colleagues, but that would miss its larger context. Concern over false, misleading or hateful speech on social media has been growing for years, but spiked to near hysteria with the violent riot at the Capitol two months ago.

Now, everyone from leftists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to establishment figures like columnist and former Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan has concluded something must be done. Ocasio-Cortez wants to rein in the media environment so that you cant just spew disinformation and misinformation while Noonan waxes nostalgic for the days when government imposed the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters. Many other opinion leaders voice similar desires.

The irony is that the Capitol riot was inspired by falsehoods largely invented by President Donald Trump himself an official with the largest megaphone in the world even without social media. Whatever digital medias culpability in empowering obscure cranks, presidential lies are nothing new. Trump was simply more brazen and inflammatory with his falsehoods.

Nor is there a regulatory solution for misinformation and disinformation, which has always been rampant in society and too often fanned by the dominant media of the day. Concern over sensationalism in the 1940s, for example, spurred a national commission of intellectuals led by University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins to breathlessly lament how the press can spread lies faster and farther than our forefathers dreamed a complaint with distinct echoes in todays indictment of social media.

There is of course some truth in the worry that lies spread faster and farther today than ever before, but then so does their rebuttal. And before we go too far in regretting the digital age, lets at least acknowledge its democratizing benefits, a few of which UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh itemized in a draft article for a law review he posted online.

Thanks to digital communications, Volokh reminds us, its easier than ever for ordinary people to speak to large groups. Its easier than ever for them to create audio and visual works, as well as text. Its easier than ever for a few of them to get mass individual followings without the need for an imprimatur from the mainstream media. Its easier than ever for groups of ordinary people, whether formally organized or just loose sets of social media connections, to spread ideas that they find worth spreading.

But there are downsides, Volokh admits. Cheap speech also allows people to forward hoaxes, false conspiracy theories, and generally fake news at the click of a button.

I dont have a solution, and maybe there isnt one. Libel law is mainly a threat to people or institutions with assets. And Big Tech has flubbed attempts to weed out dangerous speech by allowing progressive fact-checkers to impose a blatant political filter on the process.

So should we remove Section 230 liability protections for Internet platforms as Trump and right-wing populists advise? Thats a baby-with-the-bathwater approach that will also kneecap Internet sites like Wikipedia (according to its founder) that almost everyone admires.

The worst possible solution, meanwhile, is one that relies, as Donovans does, on the government to determine what qualifies as fake news and unfair practices. The whole point of free speech is to empower an individual right that historically has been most often opposed and suppressed by the government itself.

False speech, the king and queen inevitably conclude, is speech that criticizes them.

Contact Vincent Carroll at vincentc_carroll@comcast.net.

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Carroll: Its tempting to dismiss Colorado Sen. Kerry Donovans bill attacking free speech as fringe. But its bigger than that. - The Denver Post

LONDON In the fall of 2019, an undergraduate student in a midwifery program at a British university was barred from placement in a hospital. The reason? Her pro-life beliefs.

It was clearly linked to my involvement in the pro-life movement. I was so confused by how they were able to use that against me, Julia Rynkiewicz told the Register this month.

The 24-year-old student at the University of Nottingham was blocked from entering her midwifery programs hospital placement phase after the university learned of her pro-life beliefs and that she was prominent in the universitys pro-life student group, Nottingham Students for Life (NSFL).

When I heard that I had been suspended from my placements you have to do something quite bad to be suspended immediately, she said, and I couldn't work out what I had done to justify such a response! She went on to discuss the four-month-long investigation that followed, which she described as very stressful.

Eventually, in January 2020, the decision to suspend her was overturned by the university. Thereafter, Rynkiewicz was allowed to continue as a midwife student; but the investigation and placement ban set her studies back a whole year.

Later, in November 2020, Rynkiewicz was awarded a financial settlement and an official apology from the university for the treatment she had received. A spokesperson for the University of Nottingham said: While all universities take fitness-to-practice considerations extremely seriously, the university has offered an apology and settlement to Ms. Rynkiewicz and is considering how we might approach such cases differently in future.

However, the same spokesperson went on to state: The university and Students Union supports the rights of all students to bodily autonomy and access to safe, legal abortion services, which is the position in law. The spokesperson added, Universities should be spaces to debate, discuss and disagree points of view, and with more than 200 student societies, covering the full range of beliefs and perspectives, we are confident this is the case at Nottingham.

Established this February, the Free Speech Union (FSU) is a United Kingdom-based organization that advocates for freedom of speech. Toby Young, general secretary of FSU, told the Register this month: The free-speech crisis at Britains universities is very real. In the past year, he says, the FSU has received 100-plus requests for help from students and academics who are being subjected to a disciplinary process at their universities for saying something lawful that other members of their university have complained about. He points to the findings from 2017, when Britains largest academic trade union commissioned research on the subject of freedom of speech at universities. He says this research concluded that free speech was less well protected in Britains universities than it is in every any other country in the European Union bar one. Since then, he added, things have got worse by an order of magnitude."

Given the treatment of Rynkiewicz, and other students who hold unfashionable beliefs, how free are British universities when it comes to freedom of expression for the students who study there?

Grace Deignan is president of Glasgow Universitys Students for Life. She says she could not have imagined the difficulties trying to start a pro-life group at Glasgow University, but, upon submitting our affiliation form to the university, we were told we couldnt become a group on campus because the university didnt take a stance on abortion. But after discovering there were already three pro-abortion societies active on campus, we knew we were being silenced. So she wrote back to the student body stating that she and the others in Students for Life were a group of students who deserved representation like any other group on campus. Yet, she says, time and time again, we had staff ignoring us until we had to physically pursue any leads we could on campus to get anyone to respond to us.

Ironically, Deignan decided to attend Glasgow University because, it boasted, she says, an inclusive, friendly environment for all students. The experience of trying to do so, however, left her feeling completely betrayed by how unprofessional and unpleasant the study body were to students who were asking to form a group about promoting the dignity of all human beings.

Georgia Clarke, co-president of Oxford Students for Life (OSFL) from 2016 to 2017, recalls that during her time at Oxford University, OSFL members were told repeatedly that abortion was not up for debate, because womens rights were not up for debate. As a result, OSFL was labeled as inherently sexist and religiously extremist. It was hard for OSFL to book events and the group was even asked to pay for its own security, something she says other more controversial societies were not asked to provide. Inevitably, OSFL events met with loud protests. Police were called to one event because one of the protesters became aggressive with a security guard, she recounted. With such a closing down of debate among students, Clarke wonders how these same students will ever learn to engage, persuade, negotiate or even listen in the real world.

Vincent Elvin is a member of Oxford Students for Life (OSFL). He cites a specific example of the suppression of debate. The OSFL had hoped to facilitate a Zoom event with pro-life speakers, but with the floor open to anyone, whether they supported, questioned or were critical of the pro-life view. The group advertised the event via various student Facebook groups, including that of his colleges Junior Common Room (JCR). But within a few hours, the advertisement was removed by the JCR president with the following explanation: The comments underneath it have raised welfare concerns for a lot of people [in accordance with our guidelines,] posts which include sexism are not to be tolerated.

Baffled by this, Elvin points out there was nothing in the Facebook event advertising that actually gave an opinion on abortion. When I asked to see the guidelines (which were not publicly available), I could not find where my post lay at fault, he says. I was further informed that the JCR president was compelled to take it down not only because of welfare concerns for the students, but because the post displayed sexism. The only possible interpretation is that the words pro-life were considered sexist or triggering by the colleges JCR.

Despite subsequently formulating a new post with a trigger warning approved by the president, the second version of the advertisement was again removed by the same president only 30 minutes later with the following message: To ensure the Facebook page does not become a toxic environment for any members of [the college] the admin are removing your post.

At this point, OSFL took the matter to the dean, citing the colleges freedom of speech policy, which makes clear that students should expect to be exposed to views with which they disagree, and also noting the Education Act 1996 and the Equalities Act 2010, both of which guarantee the right of freedom of speech. The dean passed the matter to the principal (the head official, above the dean). Elvin says, At the next meeting of the Governing Body the matter was decided in our favor, and the de facto advertising ban against the society was lifted.

Although on this occasion, the Oxford pro-life students were vindicated, Elvin feels they also were given a message: While our right to have a voice has been recognized by higher levels of university governance, our peers and student representatives will do all they can to suppress and eliminate pro-life views.

Peri Dalkic, president of the Aberdeen Life Ethics Society (ALES) at Aberdeen University, has a similar depressing tale to tell. When news spread that ALES had been affiliated [to the student body], our opponents began to use bullying tactics to intimidate us to be quiet about our beliefs. She tells of how this bullying of its members soon got worse. On a Facebook page, a student posted that he was going to assault members of ALES. Another stated on the same page that all the girls in ALES were fat mutants, which received many likes. Following some of our on-campus activism, a picture was posted to the ALES Facebook page of myself and two fellow committee members outside the library. On this, one student commented, We didnt know you were there, else youd be covered in milkshakes. She goes on to say that this ongoing intimidation was not confined to the virtual world. Whilst a few other members and I were handing out pro-life literature on campus, a male student filmed us while jeering and laughing in an intimidating manner. We also had condoms thrown at us. All these incidents were reported to the university, but she says little was done about it, with some of her complaints receiving absolutely no response, and all resulted in no consequences for the students involved.

Of all places, university is where students should be free to debate and explore ideas especially those with which they disagree, said Ryan Christopher, director of ADF International (UK). His organization has been assisting many of these student groups and individual students at British universities in what has become an increasingly hostile environment for those with pro-life views.

While Christopher is pleased with the settlement and apology from Nottingham University given to Julia Rynkiewicz, polling carried out recently for ADF International (UK) shows that Julias treatment is not an isolated incident. From this, he concludes that a discriminatory silencing of those who hold similar views is likely to happen again: 1 in 3 students fear that their [pro-life] views would be considered unacceptable. He went on to add: Todays censorial culture on campus can easily become cancel culture in the public square.

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Is There Free Speech on the UK University Campus? - National Catholic Register

Members of the Undergraduate Student Government at the University of Connecticut will now be required to have a faculty advisor present at events and must attend weekly check-up meetings and additional trainings after the free speech bill chaos and resignation of incoming chief diversity officer B Diaz engulfed the organization last week, according to advisor Krista OBrien.

The bill in question, which caused heightened controversy and led to insults and threats from both sides, was pulled last week. Diaz resigned from their position prior to the bills removal, citing mental health concerns and continued onlineharassment.

Internal activities in the organization will be closely monitored through the end of the 2021-2022 academic year, and USG will be required to satisfy a selection of terms and conditions as determined by theAssistantDirector of Trustee Student Organization Support in order to avoid further disciplinary action.

It is clear to me, as advisor, that the organization is not currently in a place to be productive, is causing significant harm to its membership, and is in need of immediate assistance to address serious, unproductive, unhealthyand harmful internal actions that could threaten the ability of the organization to fulfill its mission for the foreseeable future, OBrien said.

All formal USG meetings, including governing board, committees, caucus and senate, will be required to have an assigned advisor present. Additionally, governing board members must attend weekly advising meetings during the academic year and must make arrangements to follow up during the summer months and calendar breaks.

Advisors will also meet with executive board members to plan and lead a required USG orientation for the fall 2021 and spring 2022 semesters, which will be mandatory for all active members to attend. USG will also be required to send four members to triad biweeklies for the 2021-2022 school year.

It is my belief that these measures reflect the seriousness of the situation in USG and offers the organization and its members an opportunity to learn from this experience and improve the organizations culture, OBrien said.

Finally, those specifically involved in the issues pertaining to the bill are slated to receive separate invitations from advisors to have an open conversation with other members about how to restore faith and positivity in the organization.

Our intentions are not to impact your advocacy or initiatives which remain fully under your control and authority, but to step in to help shift the culture in USG and to allow the organization to be a positive, learning and growth opportunity for all involved, OBrien said.

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Sanctions imposed on USG following free speech bill controversy, CDO-elect resignation - UConn Daily Campus

Two hundred professors launched the nonpartisan Academic Freedom Alliance this week to advocate for free speech in academe and, in some cases, legally defend professors academic freedom. Members include Cornel West, Robert P. George, Jeannie Suk Gersen, Jay Parini and Claire Potter. Membership is currently by invitation only, but the group plans on opening up to all academics.

The AFA will provide strength in numbers for its members, physicist Shivaji Sondhi of Princeton University said in a statement. As membership continues to expand, administrators will have to think twice before baselessly censuring or terminating an employee.

Lawyer Lisa Blatt, a member of the AFAs Legal Advisory Council, said, Academic freedom should be synonymous with higher education. Celebration of diversity of thought in academia would go a long way toward reducing polarization in society and perceived elitism in American colleges. If we cant celebrate it, I guess we have to litigate it.

Keith E. Whittington, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton, and chair of the AFAs Academic Committee, in an interview said that the groups makeup -- which spans the ideological spectrum -- is key to promoting free speech and academic freedom.

There are people on university campuses as well as off university campuses who are not very committed to those principles and would like to see them significantly modified or changed, Whittington said. I think it's important that we be able to talk across some of these divides in order to convey the real sense that there's a sense of shared threat here. I do think it's true that those on the right and those on the left can easily imagine that they're the only ones being threatened.

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New Nonpartisan Faculty Group Will Promote and Defend Free Speech, Academic Freedom - Inside Higher Ed

CNNs Jake Tapper drew quite a reaction with a recent tweet about a British regulatory agency investigating comments made by television personality Piers Morgan.

This is what happens when you live in a country where there is no First Amendment, he wrote. Insanity.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy, a journalist on Britains Channel 4 News, took exception.

Not insanity, he wrote. A democratic choice to have broadcast media regulated with a duty to be fair and duly impartial. It stops TV from taking sides to support or oppose things the way you do in America and upholds a code of standards.

Morgans remarks came in response to Oprah Winfreys interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. Morgan said he was skeptical of Markles claim that she had been turned down by people in the royal institution when she asked for help in dealing with thoughts of suicide.

Who did you go to? Morgan demanded. What did they say to you? Im sorry, I dont believe a word she said, Meghan Markle. I wouldnt believe it if she read me a weather report.

Tappers tweet included a link to a Variety story reporting that Britains Office of Communication, better known as Ofcom, had received more than 40,000 complaints about Morgans comments by 2 p.m. the next day.

We have launched an investigation into Mondays episode of Good Morning Britain under our harm and offence rules, an agency spokesperson told the publication.

Like any good champion of free speech, Tapper was beside himself.

Governments should have no role in policing news broadcasts, he wrote. You can tweet Piers what you think of his comments. Thats not what this is about.

Iesha Mae Thomas, social media producer for a country radio station in London, had a different take.

Jake, honey, do your research, she tweeted. Were perfectly fine without a First Amendment. (And Ofcom isnt the government.)

Part of the problem, Tapper later acknowledged, could be summed up by the old saw that the United States and Britain are two countries separated by a common language. We use the same words, but those words dont necessarily have the same meaning.

Take the word government.

For Tapper, it seemed obvious that a public agency would be considered an arm of the government. For the British, though, a government is more tied to politics. Its what a prime minister forms after putting together a majority in Parliament. The word is used in a way similar to the way Americans use the word administration.

On its website, Ofcom describes itself as an independent agency funded through fees paid by the companies it regulates. The agency has broad responsibility. It oversees all types of communication, including not just radio and television, but also broadband, telephone services and even mail delivery.

British citizens responding to Tapper suggested that the real insanity was in an American system where news operations broadcast lies with near impunity.

OAN wouldnt last five minutes here, one said, referring to the Donald Trump allies at One America News Network.

Neither would MSNBC, another shot back.

For Guru-Murthy, putting oversight of broadcast news outlets into the hands of a nonpartisan agency only makes sense.

The alternative is TV news that can mislead, manipulate and lie without consequence acting as cheerleaders for politicians, helping grow division and conspiracy theories with the only regulator being the commercial market, he tweeted. To many Brits, thats dangerous and undesirable.

Hyunsu Yim, business reporter for the Korea Herald, said its not just the British who look askance at the American model.

Its really hard to emphasize and get it through to Americans sometimes, he tweeted, but most countries are NOT envious of Americas no-holds-barred approach to freedom which seems like pure chaos to the rest of the world.

To be honest, it sometimes seems that way to Americans.

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Kelly Hawes column: Is it free speech or a free-for-all? - The Herald Bulletin

Otabek Sattoriy crossed a line. That much is plain.

Something that the 41-year-old self-styled citizen journalist and blight of local officials in Uzbekistans southern region of Surkhandaryo did was enough to land him in jail.

Sattoriys family say it was his unflinching reporting on local problems.

He brings social shortcomings to public attention, his father, Abdumannon, told Eurasianet in an interview at the family home in Termez, capital of Surkhandaryo.

Prosecutors say Sattoriy, who was arrested outside his house on January 30, is a fraudster and a blackmailer. That he was exploiting his activist journalism to pump officials and businesses for cash.

On March 11, Surkhandaryo regional court is due to begin considering which version is true. Given how criminal trials tend to play out in Uzbekistan, Sattoriys prospects are not good.

Another more complicated question is unlikely to be resolved in court.

The putatively reform-minded president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, has explicitly encouraged anybody with a social media account to criticize those ruling over them. Many have taken up the challenge, often with obstreperous zeal, dubbing themselves bloggers.

But one persons truth-teller is another persons troublemaker. Those viewed as overreaching, in either the tone of their commentary or the nature of their allegations, still risk sanctions or threats. And the criminal code remains the authorities tool of choice in reminding the public about what they are permitted to say.

Ahead of Sattoriys trial, it has not been easy to understand what precise offense he is supposed to have committed.

Uzbek officials are far more open to the press and their queries than they were in the days of Mirziyoyevs tyrannical predecessor, Islam Karimov, who died in 2016. In criminal investigations, though, the culture of obfuscation has persisted.

All that is known for certain about the charges levied against the citizen journalist are the scant crumbs offered by police and prosecutors. Nearly two weeks after Sattoriys arrest, policewarnedsocial media users to refrain from speculating on the case, hinting darkly that disobedience could trigger prosecutions.

But investigators were not able to cover their tracks altogether. There is Sattoriys work as a fitter of close-circuit surveillance systems to thank for that.

A camera affixed to a tree outside the home in which he lives with his parents, wife and two small children captured the scene that unfolded about half an hour before sunset on January 30.

In the footage, Sattoriy is seen emerging from a white sedan with a plastic bag under his left arm and saying some final words to the driver before taking the few steps to his front gate. The contents of that bag are at the heart of the states case. Before Sattoriy can reach the door, his way is barred by a plainclothes officer on foot. Another two cars then pull up behind him, disgorging more men. After three minutes, the whole operation is completed and Sattoriy is driven away.

Later that same night, an even larger group of plainclothes men arrived. After one read a warrant issued by the prosecutors office, they all piled into the home.

Abdumannon Sattoriy said they stayed for three hours and turned the house upside down.

They confiscated two computers, two flash drives that were lying on his desk, and all his papers, he said. They even took away a tablet the children use to watch cartoons and five jackets.

Most of what the Interior Ministry has had to say on this case wasincludedin a press release posted on February 1, two days after the arrest. The statement claims that a man called Lochin Turayev, the director of a privately owned bazaar in the city of Sherobod, about one hours drive from Termez, on January 29 complained to the police that he was being blackmailed by Sattoriy. The alleged price for bowing to Sattoriys demands was a new Vivo X50 mobile phone worth around $500.

Eurasianet submitted a written query to the Interior Ministrys regional headquarters in Termez for clarification as to how a relatively paltry offense occasioned such a disproportionate response.

By all appearances, dozens of officers were deployed to arrest Sattoriy and then search his home. Sattoriy has been in jail and denied the right to see his family for more than five weeks.

Eurasianets request was ignored. An in-person visit to the Interior Ministrys regional headquarters yielded an initial pledge that an investigator would be made available to answer questions, but this offer was later retracted.

Sherobod farmers bazaar, which lies slap on the towns main thoroughfare, is standard fare.

Porters pushing carts barge through tight spaces, somehow narrowly missing shoppers. The entrance is dominated by household wares. Most of the vegetable, fruit, meat and pickled-goods sellers ply their trade under the covered section, which is in turn lined with shops selling much the same items.

The spacious indoor bazaar caf surges with custom at midday and then mostly empties after that. Smoke from a shashlik stand wafts over the huddle formed around a crude six-number roulette-style game that may or may not be a scam.

Lochin Turayev, the man whose complaint landed Sattoriy in jail, runs the covered section, which is separated from the government-owned part by an invisible line. It was people like him that were the objects of President Mirziyoyevs populistexhortationsin December to ensure that prices for food were kept affordable in advance of the holiday season.

Considering the growing demand ahead of the New Year, it has been noted that it is important to saturate the market with food, to organize fairs at farmers bazaars and at major shopping complexes, the presidential websitestated, summarizing a December 16 government meeting presided over by Mirziyoyev.

These edicts typically come with a tinge of menace. Crafty speculators defying instructions to keep prices low know they do so at their own risk. Uzbek citizen reporters the bloggers live for the chance to expose such opportunists.

That is what Sattoriy, together with fellow Termez blogger Farhod Ismailov, was doing on December 18, according to his family.

They went to Sherobod market to capture on video how the fair was being organized for the people, Abdumannon Sattoriy told Eurasianet. When they began to film, two or three bazaar overseers accosted [Sattoriy] and asked why he was filming.

Sattoriys father says, citing his sons account, that a physical altercation then ensued. The phone and selfie stick that Sattoriy was using to film was knocked out of his hand by bazaar security guards, damaging both in the process, he said. Some of Sattoriys clothes were ripped during the struggle, Abdumannon Sattoriy said.

Sattoriys defense will be that he was not taking receipt of a new phone through extortion when he was detained. He was just receiving a replacement for the one that was broken.

Some bazaar traders interviewed by Eurasianet offered different accounts.

One of them, Lola Samadova, said that she herself protested when Sattoriy began to film her stall.

I told him not to do it because my husband wouldnt like it, she told Eurasianet.

Samadova says it was she that summoned the overseers to force Sattoriy to stop filming. She denied there had been any use of physical violence. Even as she was telling her story, though, beefy bazaar guards sidled up to glare and listen intently.

Another trader who spoke to Eurasianet on condition of anonymity scoffed at Samadovas version of events, saying that she was only parroting the managements line because she had a coveted spot in the bazaar.

Turayev, the bazaar director, declined to meet with Eurasianet, saying he was forbidden from speaking about the case before the trial.

The head of the Sherobod district, Ziyodulla Davlatov, volunteered an account tallying with that of the bazaar, but he added some important details. He said that Sattoriy went to his office after the run-in with the market guards to complain that his phone had been confiscated. Davlatov said he then followed Sattoriy back to the bazaar, and that by the time he had caught up with him, the phone had been returned.

Davlatov professed to be bemused by the whole episode, which occurred only a couple of weeks after he was installed in his post. He complained that Sattoriy had purportedly come to film his report on food prices two days before the Mirziyoyev-mandated fair was due to start and that he was intent on producing misleading content, but he expressed generally positive sentiments about bloggers.

There are bloggers who look at things from both sides. I regard them positively, he told Eurasianet through a mask, between bouts of coughing caused by an allergy to raw cotton. As long as Ive been here, Ive always spoken with them.

Fact-checking is not bloggers strong suit, as some of them will freely admit.

Like the time Dastagul Ravshanovna, 50, announced on her Facebook account that Surkhandaryo governor Tura Bobolov had died. It was fake news.

Although it is true that Bobolov had at one stage contracted COVID-19 and needed treatment in the capital, Tashkent, he eventuallyreturnedto work.

It was late summer when Ravshanovna committed her fateful error. The coronavirus was tearing through the country.

Officials were radically undercounting the number of infected people and, almost certainly, the death tally too. Even as of this month, the government acknowledges only around 80,000 total cases and a little more than 620 deaths. Meanwhile, research hasindicatedthat Uzbekistan experienced 14 percent excess mortality last year when compared with available figures from the previous five years.

This chasm between official narrative and reality is an ideal ecosystem for loosely sourced rumormongering.

Ravshanovna lives in Shargun, a small town close to the border with Tajikistan and a long, bumpy trek from Termez.

By day, she is a medic at a local hospital. In her free time, she updates herFacebook pagewith assorted fodder, including a fair amount of mild criticism of local authorities. She occasionally initiates fund-raising drives for down-on-their-luck cases.

Ravshanovna published her first post about three years ago, after tragedy struck.

I wrote that my daughter had died with an illness. That was all, she said, fighting back tears. I needed to tell somebody. You cant live alone.

Mushtarihon was 20 when she died and had for many years battled severe cognitive and physical conditions. Ravshanovna remains bitter her daughter did not get the help she needed.

After her death, I became a blogger, so that other sick people would not suffer too, she told Eurasianet.

Now that she has gained some following, Ravshanovna receives requests for help from all over the country. Her correspondents want their stories amplified.

I get messages from people in Ferghana, from Khorezm, from Kashkadarya, from the regions, she said. They tell me about how they are suffering with illnesses or how they are stuck in poverty. Some have troubles with the law. And they all want one thing: justice.

The appeal of social media for Ravshanovna is its immediacy.

Bloggers are people who see real life, she said. Journalists, when they get an interview, for example, they go back to their studios and offices, and then they have to think about whom this material might harm, whom it might benefit.While theyre thinking it over, a blogger has already published their material.

That lack of mediation undid Ravshanovna, however. One day, she got a call from an acquaintance who works in the Surkhandaryo regional healthcare department. Her caller had shocking news: Governor Bobolov had died with COVID-19. Ravshanovna says she was skeptical at first.

I said to her: Hand the phone over to the doctor who works with you. Is there a doctor there? She said there was, Ravshanovna recalled.

A man identifying himself as a senior doctor at the hospital repeated the claim. Ravshanovna is eager to stress that the message she then posted on Facebook was not meant to be sensationalist. She merely wrote to express her condolences.

A call from Bobolovs office arrived within minutes. And then the police rang. The next day she was summoned to the offices of the Interior Ministry in the nearby town of Sariyoso. The price of Ravshanovnas mistake was the confiscation of her beloved phone and a $270 fine.

The authorities still readily wield the whip, if only in monetary terms in most cases, against untutored social media users who blunder or engage in anything perceived to be offensive or insulting.

Sirojiddin Salomov, head of the Surkhandaryo department of the state media regulator, said that ignorance of statutes relating to insults, libel and the dissemination of false information was not tantamount to exemption.

We can accept criticism. But bloggers should not view the idea of freedom of speech as a shield, Salomov told Eurasianet in an interview at his office.

In countries with more evolved media systems and livelier democratic marketplaces, politicians must resign themselves to being verbally pilloried day and night. Uzbekistan is not there yet, Salomov said. Reputations there are far more delicate things.

In our region, if somebody writes something [negative] about you, it can be really harmful for your career, Salomov said.

Sattoriys predilection for incendiary accusations and a sharp turn of phrase landed him in a separate spot of bother at almost exactly the same time as his arrest.

At the start of January, he posted a message on his Telegram account accusing employees at the local zoo of stealing animal feed. Two weakened deerdied of hunger as a result, he claimed, citing alleged evidence from other unnamed zoo workers. Sattoriy does appear to have had genuine sources, since he posted a photo of the deceased deer that only an insider could have snapped.

Zoo director Shukhrat Ulashev rejected Sattoriys charges and said that an investigation by government scientists confirmed that the deer had succumbed to a pulmonary condition brought on by cold weather.

The zoo managements first instinct was to handle the matter as a public relations exercise.

We issued a statement saying that what he said was not true. That it was not fair to spread such lies, Ulashev said. He should have just come here, studied the situation for himself, and then he could have written whatever he liked.

Sattoriy did not do himself any favors by doubling down and taking to Telegram once more to describe zoo employees as rats.

Rats? Whos a rat? Were all people here. And we should respect one another like people, Ulashev said.

The zoo then took the case to the authorities. It was not alone. Another complainant was a coal depot company that also felt it had been defamed by Sattoriy.

Sattoriy would be charged on three counts defamation, insulting a public official and dissemination of false information and was fined around $1,000 by Termez city court. As of March 9, that fine had been suspended provisionally by a higher court pending further investigations.

The director of Sherobod bazaar is only one of eight known plaintiffs in Sattoriys upcoming trial.

In a March 1statementannouncing the end to its investigation, the Surkhandaryo Interior Ministry offered only a little more detail on the states case. The bloggers extortion spree had, it said, spanned over a period starting from June 2020 and ran up to the day before his arrest. One of the other plaintiffs is the mayor of Termez.

No further specifics have been offered and the Interior Ministry turned down Eurasianets requests to elucidate this and other matters.

Salomov, the state media regulator, declined to comment specifically on Sattoriys case, citing the need to allow the judicial process to play out. He nonetheless dwelled at length on how certain citizen journalists have made corrupt use of their new-found influence.

There are some bloggers who have turned this line of work into a way of gaining financial remuneration. There are cases of extortion that we hear about on TV. Somebody takes nude photos of a person and then blackmails them by threatening to post the images on social networks, Salomov said.

But are such analogies valid for Sattoriy? The ultimate question is whether his true offense was extortion, as the police claim, or simply embarrassing and irritating officials.

Shortly after his arrest, the bloggers family received a letter from the residents of a Termez neighborhood called Guliston. The signatories were among many families that had had their homes in the center of the city seized undereminent domainand were compensated with new buildings on the edge of Termez.

For four years they complained fruitlessly that the roads outside their new houses were unpaved and that their homes had not been attached to the gas grid. This was just the kind of story that the irascible gadflySattoriy could sink his teeth into. One time, he upbraided the governor, Bobolov, during a public assembly, accusing him of failing to provide citizens with basic amenities. In time, the badgering produced results and the neighborhoods demands were met.

But that was not what the letter was about.

The 31 signatories claim in a petition addressed to regional and national prosecutors that they were approached by a police officer on February 2 and asked to put their name to a letter accusing Sattoriy of demanding money from them.

We responded that we would not get involved in this slander against Otabek. We request that you adopt measures against this precinct inspector for this false accusation against the blogger, the petition concludes.

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Uzbekistan and the red lines of free speech: A citizen journalist goes on trial - Eurasianet

Demonstrators in New Delhi shout slogans during a protest against the arrest of climate change activist Disha Ravi for allegedly helping to create a guide for anti-government farmers protests. Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Demonstrators in New Delhi shout slogans during a protest against the arrest of climate change activist Disha Ravi for allegedly helping to create a guide for anti-government farmers protests.

On Feb. 1, the editor of an award-winning Indian magazine got a call from his social media manager: The magazine's Twitter account was down.

"I said, 'Are you sure? Can you just refresh, and check again?' " recalled Vinod K. Jose, executive editor of The Caravan, which covers politics and culture. "But she said, 'No, no, it's real.' "

Jose went online, and instead of The Caravan's tweets, he saw a message: "withheld in India in response to a legal demand."

It was one of more than 500 accounts belonging to Indian activists, opposition politicians and media that Twitter blocked that week, on orders from the Indian government.

Days earlier, farmers who'd been rallying for months against the deregulation of Indian agriculture clashed with police in the capital New Delhi. The mayhem overshadowed a military parade on India's Jan. 26 Republic Day holiday. Twitter was flooded with angry posts from both sides. The rhetoric was intense. People were using hashtags accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of genocide against farmers.

Indian law prohibits the publication online of any material authorities deem as defamatory, or that could incite violence. It allows the government to issue emergency blocking orders against tech platforms. In the wake of the Jan. 26 violence, Modi's government asked Twitter to block hundreds of accounts. At first, Twitter complied.

But after an outcry over press freedom, the tech company reinstated The Caravan's account and several others. The government then retaliated and slapped Twitter with a non-compliance notice.

Now Twitter is caught between complying with Indian law and defending free speech, in what could eventually be its biggest market a tech-savvy country with nearly 1.4 billion people.

"It depends on how you read the law, but I think that's a pretty difficult position to be in," said Radhika Jhalani, a lawyer who volunteers with the Software Freedom Law Center in New Delhi.

"What happens to your stated policies and values?"

Jose was never told why his magazine's account was suspended.

"The Caravan did not use any of those hashtags the government was taking objection to," Jose told NPR. "I can imagine some activists using it, but no respectable media outlet would."

He knew, however, that the Indian government had not been pleased with The Caravan's recent reporting. Days earlier, Jose, his publisher and other prominent Indian journalists had sedition cases filed against them, over their reporting about the farmer protests. A Caravan contributor was arrested in Delhi while covering the story.

Still, Jose was surprised that Twitter complied with the government's order. The tech company says it "exists to empower voices to be heard," and that it values an "open internet" and "free expression." In January, Twitter banned then U.S. President Donald Trump, after the Capitol insurrection, for repeatedly breaking its rules against incitement of violence and false claims of election fraud.

"We just saw Twitter getting a lot of appreciation for the way it handled former President Trump's way of using Twitter to lie, to use disinformation and so forth," Jose says. "But when it came to India, it was a surprise as well as a shock to see such an important social media company actually getting bullied here."

"What happens to your stated policies and values and what you stand for?" Jose asked.

In a blog post about the situation, Twitter said it will "continue to advocate for the right of free expression on behalf of the people we serve."

"We remain committed to safeguarding the health of the conversation occurring on Twitter, and strongly believe that the Tweets should flow," it said.

The social network reinstated the Caravan's account in less than a day. It kept some others blocked though, and it took what it called "a range of actions" against more than 500 accounts "for clear violations of Twitter's rules." It reduced the visibility of some hashtags. It suspended some accounts only inside India, allowing them to remain visible from other locations. None of the accounts that continue to be suspended belong to activists or media, Twitter said.

"Because we do not believe that the actions we have been directed to take are consistent with Indian law, and, in keeping with our principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression, we have not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians," the company said. "To do so, we believe, would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law."

But how do you define an activist, or a journalist? And what happens when Twitter's definitions are different from the government's?

"How do we make sense of companies that have such enormous power?"

The standoff in India shows the difficult balance Twitter is trying to strike between its professed values, its business interests in a fast-growing market, and increasing pressure to remove speech that governments don't like, not just in India but in other countries around the world.

"Turkey is a good example where you have a nominally democratic country with some severe pressures on the fundamentals of democracy, basic human rights protections," said David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who previously served as the United Nation's special rapporteur on freedom of expression. "The government of Turkey will quite regularly make demands that Twitter take take down content of journalists, of activists, of Kurdish reporters."

India and Turkey both rank in the top five countries that requested Twitter remove content in the first half of 2020, along with Japan, Russia and South Korea, according to the company's latest transparency report. The Indian government sent nearly 2,800 removal requests in that period, more than twice as many as it sent in all of 2019. Twitter says it complied with 14% of those requests.

Social media has given people who traditionally have not had much power a voice and a way to organize, from the Arab Spring protests a decade ago to the Black Lives Matter movement today.

But Twitter, Facebook and other platforms have also become a potent megaphone for people in power including India's Modi, who is now the most followed world leader on Twitter, since Trump was banned.

The uproar that accompanies any decision social media companies make about what gets posted to their platforms and who gets to post it reflects the role they now play as de facto gatekeepers of public conversation, Kaye said.

"Fundamentally, what we're talking about is, how do we make sense of companies that have such enormous power that they can stand up to governments and serve as a kind of protector of rights?" he said. "But at the same time, they have this massive impact that can undermine democratic institutions. And we see that in disinformation, we see that in how they deal with hate speech."

Twitter and other social media platforms have grown large enough that they can appear to be acting at the scale of governments but without the accountability of democratically elected leaders or true transparency into their decisions, Kaye said.

"As a matter of democratic principle, we don't want government to be saying what views are legitimate and what views aren't," he said. "Why should we want a company to do that?"

Threat of jail time hovers over Twitter employees

After a virtual meeting between Indian diplomats and Twitter executives, the Indian government issued a statement Feb. 10 defending its actions. It said the problem was not only hashtags about "farmer genocide," but support for certain Twitter accounts from Sikh separatists and India's archrival, Pakistan. It offered no proof publicly. (Many of the protesting farmers are from the Indian state of Punjab, where a majority of residents follow the Sikh faith.)

"Freedom of expression is not absolute and it is subject to reasonable restrictions," the statement said.

Twitter says it has complied with Indian law and is exploring its options. But the Indian government is probably the ultimate arbiter of whether the government's order is legal, says lawyer Jhalani.

"Basically, if the government of India sends Twitter a notice that says this is defamatory content, or this is inciteful speech, the platform is bound to take it down," she explains.

Platforms don't have much choice. India can jail their employees for up to seven years, levy fines or shut them down altogether. Last year, India banned the Chinese video app TikTok, amid a border dispute with Beijing. India was TikTok's biggest market.

"Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn you're all welcome to make money here," India's IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, told parliament last week. "But you have to follow Indian law."

There have been cases, however, of Indian law being applied unevenly. Last year, Facebook was accused of failing to censor illegal hate speech by politicians from Modi's ruling party, in order to preserve relations with his government.

India's Supreme Court is weighing a petition, filed last May, seeking to clarify the Indian government's powers to regulate content on social media platforms. Clarity from India's legal system could help resolve this latest matter with Twitter too, says Kaye, the law professor.

"It's a real opportunity for Twitter's challenge and basically the challenge that all platforms face in India right now to have that resolved by courts rather than by government ministries that are just making demands that are not subject to the same kind of rule of law requirements," he said.

But, he warned, that outcome is not assured. "You could imagine the court saying, 'Look, we're not in a position to judge whether the government was correct here. And so we'll defer to the government.'"

Wariness of foreign interference complicates situation

Modi's Hindu nationalist government in India is particularly touchy about criticism from foreign companies, and even celebrities. It lashed out when climate activist Greta Thunberg, pop star Rihanna, and the U.S. vice president's niece, Meena Harris, all tweeted support for farmer protests.

"The temptation of sensationalist social media hashtags and comments, especially when resorted to by celebrities and others, is neither accurate nor responsible," a government spokesman told reporters Feb. 3.

Last weekend, Indian police arrested a 22-year-old local leader of Thunberg's climate movement, for allegedly sharing a social media toolkit with tips on how to drum up support for the farmer protests.

In parliament, Modi himself railed against "foreign destructive ideology" last week.

"To protect the country, we all must be more aware of this," he told lawmakers. In a speech to tea-growers in northeast India, he warned, somewhat cryptically, of a foreign conspiracy to malign the image of Indian tea.

That's the mood among India's leaders, as Twitter challenges the Indian government over its own laws.

India has slipped in global rankings of tolerance and pluralism. The question is whether tech companies like Twitter are willing to look past that.

At stake, Jhalani says, are a host of values that Twitter and India the world's biggest democracy both purport to want to uphold.

"Your right to dissent, right to freedom of speech and expression, your right to access content," she says. "Basically, all the rights that make you a democracy."

Link:
Twitter In Standoff With India's Government Over Free Speech And Local Law - NPR

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

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