Category Archives: Free Speech

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

Visit link:
Hidden dangers in the proposed free speech law - The Guardian

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

View post:
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.

Originally posted here:
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.

See more here:
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

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

Freedom of speech is under increasing attack from various quarters, including, shockingly, much of the media. The consequences of nonconformity are ugly, such as potential loss of ones job and public shaming.

This is poison for democracy.

Moreover, what isnt so well appreciated is that freedom of expression goes hand-in-hand with economic progress, as this episode of Whats Ahead makes clear.

Free speech is essential to our well-being and for a more prosperous future.

Steve Forbes is Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media.Steves newest project is the podcast Whats Ahead, where he engages the worlds top newsmakers,

Steve Forbes is Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media.Steves newest project is the podcast Whats Ahead, where he engages the worlds top newsmakers, politicians and pioneers in business and economics in honest conversations meant to challenge traditional conventions as well as featuring Steves signature views on the intersection of society, economic and policy. Steve helped create the recently released and highly acclaimed public television documentary, In Money We Trust?, which was produced under the auspices of Maryland Public television. The film was inspired by the book he co-authored, Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy and What We Can Do About It. Steves latest book is Reviving America: How Repealing Obamacare, Replacing the Tax Code and Reforming The Fed will Restore Hope and Prosperity co-authored by Elizabeth Ames (McGraw-Hill Professional).Steve writes editorials for each issue of Forbes under the heading of Fact and Comment. A widely respected economic prognosticator, he is the only writer to have won the highly prestigious Crystal Owl Award four times. The prize was formerly given by U.S. Steel Corporation to the financial journalist whose economic forecasts for the coming year proved most accurate.In both 1996 and 2000, Steve campaigned vigorously for the Republican nomination for the Presidency. Key to his platform were a flat tax, medical savings accounts, a new Social Security system for working Americans, parental choice of schools for their children, term limits and a strong national defense. Steve continues to energetically promote this agenda.

Read the original here:
Why Suppressing Free Speech Will Hurt The Economy - Forbes

The January 6 attack on the Capitol has transformed politics in the United States in ways that journalists, lawyers and politicians are still struggling to understand. It was at once the chaotic culmination of a right-wing movement before and during the Trump administration and a stunning symbol of a possible future. Like so many other political events in the past decade, it again revealed how social media has made once unthinkable political events possible. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, among other sites, amplified marginal conspiracy theories and far-right militia organizations, allowed a sitting president to delegitimize the election he lost, and permitted open planning for a violent attack on the seat of government.

Social media companies have faced sustained criticism for years about the negative impacts of speech on their platforms. These have ranged from national political conflicts such as the organization of genocide in Myanmar, to worldwide endemic personal harassment like the Gamergate scandal or revenge porn. But the attack on the Capitol appears to have crossed a line. Social media sites have responded accordingly by widely banning Donald Trump and many other right-wing activists and organizations.

Deplatforming on this scale would have been unimaginable just weeks earlier. It has provoked predictable complaints from the right. But the American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech organizations have also expressed concerns about a new standard for censorship without transparency or accountability for private companies. Others have noted that left-wing social media accounts have been getting banned for some time, and are also current targets of arbitrary shutdowns. There is already a national security-oriented response underway to investigate and surveil right wing movements as domestic terrorism. But this alone will not solve the social conditions that encourage fascist thought and activity, or prevent right wing activists from finding new ways to organize online.

Protecting democracy from the power of free speech seems like a paradox. However, free speech on the internet has never truly been free. The regulation of speech online is in fact framed by laws that allow private sites to censor content at will. Moreover, many factors affect the impact of online speech besides its mere existence or deletion. User algorithms and advertising demand can promote speech to different audiences, while metadata can inform users about the sources or reliability of that speech. Until this point, promoting right-wing propaganda and accompanying advertising with little metadata has been wildly profitable.

But with the Capitol attack, it seems as if the wild west era of monetized political speech online is reaching its end. There are two plausible futures for the industry. Either the tech monopolies will keep the power to arbitrarily restrict speech to prevent controversy and protect their bottom lines, or the government will better regulate the internet to mitigate the power of tech companies to profit from negative speech and political extremism. This is already provoking deeper questions about the meaning of the First Amendment and the publics rights and interests in the internet itself.

Establishment opinion about the role of online speech in society and politics has evolved rapidly over the past decade. Prior to 2000, the internet represented a forum that was alternative and even countercultural to mainstream political parties, business and media. In the following decade, the spread of social media seemed to affirm the eras neoliberal values of promoting Democracy in the world, culminating most obviously in the Arab Spring protests 10 years ago this month. When internet companies were smaller and fragmented, protecting them and their users against the censorship of governments worldwide seemed not just to defend free speech, but to transform the world for the better.

This is certainly the tone of Columbia University President and First Amendment scholar Lee Bollingers piece in Foriegn Policys 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2012, Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age. The issues of the day motivating Bollingers argument were China blocking access to The New York Times and the suppression of the right-wing anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims. Despite the gratuitous insult of the latter to more than a billion people and the political and social backlash Middle Eastern governments faced, Bollinger blithely expresses that the overall arc of freedom of speech on the internet was toward progress. When the number of people around the world who are engaged in the marketplace of ideas increases, we can expect a corresponding rise in the flow of innovation in both the academy and the economy, Bollinger writes. He argues that globalization thus directly fuels conflict between governments and internet publishers and social media sites.

The objects of Bollingers concern in 2012 were appropriate, but the economic and political dynamics around it have turned out to be rather the inverse of how he and many others saw them a decade ago. Rather than the United States First Amendment becoming a guiding principal for speech around the world, internet companies are in fact accepting a huge array of sovereign controls on speech, different in each country. This is leading more toward collaboration between the tech giants and governments to protect their profits rather than outright conflict. And of course, the marketplace of ideas has turned out to become as useful for the innovation of illiberal ideas and organizations, from ISIS to QAnon, as for science or education.

The social media business model is founded upon a legal collaboration between the industry and the US federal government. In the early days of the internet, corporations sued chat boards for the libel of individuals who had posted complaints about them, arguing they were publishers of the posts. With inconsistent judicial interpretations over whether internet hosts were moderating their content and thus counted as such, Congress stepped in with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

The law states no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Moreover, it expressly allowed internet providers, as private companies, the discretion to ban content that they did not wish to carry. This extends to internet service providers or server farms banning entire platforms from using their services, as a judge has just ruled Amazon Web Services could do to Parler, a social media network heavily used by right wing activists.

Benjamin Cramer argues this creates a moral hazard in which the absence of future liability encourages ethical lapses and unaccountable behavior in the present. Rather than more frequently intervening in user content, social media sites until the present have chosen to leave all but the most egregious fraud or harassment alone in order to avoid accusations of infringing users free speech rights. As partisan politics has become more heated in recent years, the sites are often attacked for their perceived biases from both sides, further encouraging them not to intervene.

This would not be quite so bad, writes Jack Balkin, if the social media industry were not monopolized by Twitter, Facebook, and Google. At present, those companies have so much political and economic power, they effectively represent practically a new, private state that has subsumed the U.S. Constitutions protection of free speech to make a profit for themselves while providing their users no accountability. Governance by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has many aspects of a nineteenth-century autocratic state, Balkin writes, one that protects basic civil freedoms but responds to public opinion only in limited ways.

Indeed, pressure for better governance have made social media companies establish independent tribunals to adjudicate managements decisions to ban content or block users. These include Facebooks Oversight Board, composed of famous politicians and journalists, which began meeting last month. In its first decision on January 27, it actually overturned Facebook executives decisions to block content based on hate speech, nudity and COVID misinformation. It will soon meet to review the decision to ban Donald Trump.

With public scrutiny now so heavily focused on the politicization of speech online, social media companies will not be able to plead inaction in the name of free speech any longer. Yet potential government regulators are still reluctant to intervene, both fearful of the power of the industry and of actually infringing the First Amendment. Who in the future will both determine the red lines on speech, or otherwise try to protect users from the long term negative externalities of unregulated content algorithms?

Past research available on JSTOR reflects less urgency than the present crisis demands. Cramer believes that a more rigorous application of Corporate Social Responsibility, in part to maintain public goodwill, would gradually move social media companies toward more ethical treatment of their users and the targets of their speech. Balkin believes the current Section 230 framework could be reformed by better enforcing companies user agreements and by treating a companys relationship to its users as an information fiduciary. In short, this means borrowing legal ideas from the financial, medical, and legal industries to force social media companies to be more transparent with their users and allow users to (genuinely) opt out of data surveillance and targeting.

Since January 6, however, there are increased calls to abolish Section 230 altogether, which would transform the internet as we know it. As anti-monopoly activist Matt Stoller points out, Congress is now reluctant to attack powerful corporations like Amazon because it has stood as a monolith, willing to keep right-wing and violent content off their platforms since the attack. Taking away the protections of Section 230 and demonopolization thus go hand-in-hand. If platforms shared at least some of the liability for the content they spreador the way they exponentially amplify and profit from itit would be possible to dismantle the vertical integration that now exists between internet service providers, server farms, and social media platforms. Facing true competition, the majority of new entities would seek responsible ways of selecting out or diminishing the impact of negative content as it passes between these stages of the internet infrastructure.

This is the turning point between continuing to allow the tech titans to treat the worlds communication networks as their private fiefdoms, or restoring democracy and transparency to what we have long considered the public sphere.

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.

See original here:
After the Capitol Riot, Who Will Govern Speech Online? - JSTOR Daily

There is an old, hoary saying among lawyers: Hard cases make bad law. This maxim has been drilled into the heads of law students for generations.

The pursuit of Donald Trump, reminiscent of the mob carrying pitchforks and torches while chasing the monster in Frankenstein, readily comes to mind while following the efforts by virtually all Democratic federal officeholders, a few Republicans, and the major politically liberal news outlets to impeach-and-convict Donald Trump for a second time.

This current impeachment effort is exceedingly unwise, even if Trumps conduct during and after the recent presidential election rightly horrifies all Americans devoted to the tenets of our democracy and to our assumptions about the peaceful transfer of power. One needs to recall that Joseph Biden was decidedly lukewarm, if not outright opposed, to a second impeachment, even though he was the one most directly affected by Trumps effort to reverse Bidens electoral victory. Biden will turn out to be viewed by history as wise, in contrast to House Speaker Nancy Pelosis and now-Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumers pitchfork-and-torch-laden pursuit of the Trump monster.

The story needs no detailed retelling. Anyone who was not comatose during the weeks between the election, the meeting of the electoral college, and the aftermath, knows the tale.

But the profoundly important question remains whether Trump, who stands impeached for a second time by the House vote taken on January 13, 2021, should be convicted when the Senate tries him on the impeachment. (Trumps trial in the Senate is scheduled to begin the week of February 8.)

The Democrats goal in this second impeachment-and-trial is quite clear: To prevent Donald Trump from occupying the White House again. The goal is not, of course, the usual goal of an impeachment to remove an errant public official from office since the American electorate accomplished that this past November. Put more bluntly, those who wish to impeach-and-convict Trump this time around are looking not only to punish our sociopathic ex-president for his conduct while in office, but to prevent the American electorate from ever putting him back into the White House, even if a majority of them would like to see him re-take the presidency.

They are also seeking to punish him for his speech that some claim incited the crowd to attack the Capitol building. These critics are simply wrong. Trumps speech lies within the definition of free speech, rather than unlawful incitement, as the Supreme Court has drawn the distinction in the famous 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio.

The bottom line is that this second impeachment attempt is fundamentally anti-democratic. It is also very foolish, which is likely why President Biden has tried to discourage the move. Biden has stated that, if we were six months out, we should be doing everything to get him out of office. Impeaching him again, trying to invoke the 25th Amendment, whatever it took. But I am focused now on us taking control as president and vice president on the 20th and to get our agenda moving as quickly as we can."

As if the Democrats attack upon democracy were not bad enough, the social media gurus in the private sector are acting in an equally worrisome fashion. While the Democrats seek to weaken the electoral system by barring Trump from subjecting his candidacy to democratic choice, the major actors in the social media world Facebook and Twitter have kept Trump from communicating to the American people on the two social networks with the broadest reach.

Due to Trumps inaccurate posts on election fraud and the sympathetic posts he shared for those who attended the Capitol riots, Facebook and Twitter decided to ban him from their platforms. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg contended that, "the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. While Facebook and Twitter have the right to do what they are doing they are, after all, private companies, even though each arguably has a near-monopoly it is doubtful that they are exercising their near-monopolistic power wisely. (In fact, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed anti-trust lawsuits against Facebook previously for engaging in anti-competitive practices where Facebook acquired, or attempted to, weaker companies before they became serious competitors.)

It is one thing to have defeated Trump at the polls via democratic means, and thereby to force him into luxurious self-exile at his Florida estate. But it is quite another to cut him off from the major avenues of mass communication, through which he otherwise would be expected to make his case for re-election. Trump has often used Twitter to make posts about policy changes, his support and disapproval of certain officials, election fraud, the Capitol riots, and any other events that influenced his presidency. In short, Trump relied on social media to spread his views and maintain his connection with his supporters.

The life of our republic has relied upon the fundamental belief that the Supreme Court has dubbed the free marketplace of ideas - the most trusted, and surely the most peaceful, way of determining truth and of making political decisions via democratic rather than autocratic methods. The current move aiming to remove Donald Trump from this marketplace is not only anti-democratic, but verges on being authoritarian if not totalitarian. At the very least, it is incompatible with liberal democracy and the ban deprives us of knowing what is on the autocrats mind.

It would be healthier for American democracy, and for our political system, as well as for avoiding dangerous social and political unrest, for cooler heads to prevail. Trump should be acquitted at his upcoming impeachment trial, and Twitter and Facebook should re-think the burdens that their censorship of Donald Trump casts upon the concept of democratic engagement in the free marketplace of ideas.

More:
Bad Precedents: Impeachment For The Exercise Of Free Speech, And Censorship By Social Media - wgbh.org

Jack Dorsey, Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, testifies remotely as Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., looks at his iPad during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Photo By Bill Clark/Pool/Sipa USA via Reuters

In the aftermath of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, crackdowns on certain social-media accounts and apps involved in the violence have further fueled a debate over reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which largely protects online platforms from liability for their users content, and other policy options. The conversation about the role of private companies in regulating speech has quickly become a transatlantic oneas well as a test for how free and open societies should best approach a free and open internet. So how exactly can Europes experiences with regulating online speech and content inform the debate in the United States? And what should solutions look like in the United States? Were offering a series of perspectives. Below, the Europe Centers Distinguished Fellow Frances Burwell offers her perspective. Read Europe Center Nonresident Senior Fellow Kenneth Propps perspective here.

The decisions by Facebook and Twitter to suspend former US President Donald Trump and thousands of other accounts following the riots at the US Capitol have been criticized by some as trampling on free speech and by others as too little too late. But the real question is why two private companies have been the key decision-makers in this situation. Rather than relying on CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the US governmentespecially Congress and the courtsshould make clear what type of speech is acceptable online and what type of speech is not.

After the events of January 6, Congress will certainly take on reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Actthe 1996 law that allows online platforms, including social-media companies, to escape liability for content posted by their users. When Congress does look at the act, it should not just focus on the companies and their responsibilities. Legislators should take a good, hard look in the mirror. They must provide the guidelines that are central to reducing violent extremist content online: rules on acceptable versus forbidden online speech.

For all Americans, free speech is a sacred right. But social media has demonstrated a tendency to proliferate and magnify the most hate-filled and conspiracy-based speech at breathtaking speed, with serious consequences for the countrys democratic future. Companies have responded by establishing their own user guidelines and policing content as they each see fit. Legally, they are free to do this, since the First Amendment applies to government restrictions on speech. But many users regard Facebook and Twitter as essential avenues of communication in the digital age that should not be censored. Should we continue to rely on such an ad-hoc system, based on private-sector interests, to restrain especially violent speech? Or is it time to have a serious debate about how the United States as a nation should define and police the most egregious speech online?

As US lawmakers take on this issue, they might usefully draw some lessons from the experience of European governments in regulating content online. The European Union (EU) is without doubt the regulatory superpower of the digital world. Germany and other EU member states have imposed significant obligations on online platforms in terms of monitoring and removing certain content. In some cases, platforms must remove content within twenty-four hours of notification, sometimes less, or face significant fines. For several years, the major social-media companies (including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) have participated in a voluntary EU Code of Conduct, pledging to remove content deemed illegal hate speech after being notified of its existence on their platforms. A 2019 review showed that 90 percent of the notifications were reviewed within twenty-four hours and 71 percent of the material was removed.

This system is about to get even tougher: A proposed EU Digital Services Act will impose significant reporting requirements on companies regarding content removal and, for some platforms, intrusive inspections designed to change how algorithms recommend certain content. In the wake of the Capitol riots, some European politicians urged the United States to adopt similar rules constraining social media.

Such a content-moderation system is only possible, however, if based on a clear definition of unlawful speechand establishing that definition is not a job for corporations, but for elected representatives. Today in the United States, only a few categories of online speech are prohibited, among them terrorist content and child pornography. Other illegal speech includes incitement of imminent lawless and violent action and threats to the US president or vice presidentboth of which Trump may have violated during his speech to supporters before they headed to the Capitol. For the most part, decisions about what is not protected as free speech have been made in the court system, and thus each exemption applies in very specific and limited circumstances. Incitement to lawless and violent action may be protected, for example, if the action is not imminent.

In contrast, many European governments have long defined certain categories of illegal speech, many of which pre-date the online world. In Germany, for example, it is illegal to deny that the Holocaust happened. As in the United States, terrorist content and child pornography are illegal, although European attitudes vary widely toward what is considered obscenity in the United States. Central to European regulation is the idea of illegal hate speech, defined in EU law as the public incitement to violence or hatred directed to groups or individuals on the basis of certain characteristics, including race, color, religion, descent, and national or ethnic origin. While this rule does not prohibit racist caricatures of specific groups or individuals, it does ban calls for violence or other injury. Prohibitions on such hate speech have been enforced not only online, but in magazines, on television, and even in nightclub acts.

If Congress seeks to reduce the liability protections of platforms for user-generated content, it will need to be specific about the nature of proscribed content. Unless that content is clearly defined, companies will simply seek to protect themselves by establishing guidelines that allow only the safest, most mundane material. Any restrictions on online speech should be very limitedperhaps adopting a concept similar to Europes public incitement to violence or hatred or dropping the requirement that the dangerous incitement in question be imminent. Aside from the constitutional considerations, authoritarian governments around the world will see anything but modest limitations as an opportunity to legitimize their own moves to restrict online speech.

While the EU experience offers some useful lessons, even very strict content-moderation rules will not solve the entire problem. The EUs definition of illegal hate speech does not address the spread of conspiracy theories and fake news, for example, both of which are detrimental to US and European democracies and which can be found not only online but also in traditional media outlets. And the regulation of larger platforms often pushes hate speech to the wilder reaches of the internet and smaller, more ephemeral platforms.

US President Joe Biden has called for a Summit of Democracies during 2021, with disinformation on the agenda. The United States and Europe should use this meeting to compare their approaches to the dangers some online content presents to our democracies and to work with other democracies to find a common way forward. As a first step, Congress and the Biden administration must consider how best to safeguard US democracy from incitements to violence and hate.

Frances G. Burwell is a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council and a senior director at McLarty Associates.

Tue, Dec 15, 2020

A hearing on the consequences of the European Court of Justices invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield illuminated the deepening transatlantic divide over data transfers, and it highlighted the early challenge the subject looks to pose for President-elect Joe Bidens administration, which is eager to repair US-EU relations.

New AtlanticistbyKenneth Propp

More:
Free speech and online content: What can the US learn from Europe? - Atlantic Council