Category Archives: Freedom of Speech

When James Madison wrote in the First Amendment that Congress shall make nolaw abridging the freedom of speech, surely he knewthat one day the owner of a video-game store would cite his wordsin a lawsuit challenging the governments right to ban agiant inflatable Super Mario.

Scott Fisher says the town of Orange Park, Florida, threatened to fine him $100 perday last summer if he kept the promotional Mario outside of Gone Broke Gaming,according toWJXT.

Fisher complied, butsaid that not having Mario out front has hurt businessandviolated his free-speech rights. So, on Thursday, with the help of a conservative legal organization named Institute for Justice, Fisher sued Orange Park, arguing that the towns ban on inflatables such asMario is unconstitutional because it allows some inflatablesthose erected for the holidays, for examplebut not those that are intended to promote abusiness.

The best idea wins, Fisher told WJXT.There could be three or four video game stores in the local area, but if I happen to have the idea to put a Mario in front of mine and it draws more business, thats exactly what the First Amendment is there to protect.

Madison would probably have to agree. Censored political speech isnothing compared with the right to display a 9-foot Nintendo icon thats full of hot air.

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An Inflatable Mario and a Free-Speech Lawsuit - Atlas Obscura

By Robert Safian 04.11.17 | 6:00 am

When Fast Company first wrote about Mark Zuckerberg, in the spring of 2007, he was just 22 years old and his young company, Facebook, had just 19 million users. Our magazine cover line, The Kid Who Turned Down $1 Billion, seems almost quaint in hindsight, given Facebooks $400 billion market cap today and its 2 billion global users. But it was Zuckerbergs first cover, and a lot has transpired since then.

I recently sat down with Zuckerberg at Facebook HQa sprawling campus thats only a few miles from the companys original Palo Alto offices but a world apart in scale and sophistication. Our meeting was not a nostalgic revisiting of the past, but part of an examination into what continues to drive Facebook in the present and what role it wants to play in the future.

Fast Companys newest cover story highlights Zuckerberg again, a decade later, under the headline Put Your Values To Work. In recent months, many companies and company leaders have struggled to align their social, political, and business priorities. Zuckerberg himself has been forced to grapple with controversies around fake news and filter bubblesone of many topics we touched on.

What follows is an edited transcript of our dialogue. While our cover story presents several different models for aligning a companys values with its business, Zuckerberg explains here how and why Facebooks core operations are mission-driven, what critics misunderstand about the companys motivations, and why being a work-in-progress is part of the plan.

Fast Company: In mid-February you posted a long letter on your Facebook timeline entitled Building Global Community. What prompted you to address this topic?

Mark Zuckerberg: When we were getting started with Facebook in 2004, the idea of connecting the world was not really controversial. The default was that this was happening, and people were generally positive about it. But in the last few years, that has shifted, right? And its not just the U.S. Its also across Europe and across Asia, a lot of places where folks who have been left behind by globalization are making their voices louder. That goes to the heart of what we at Facebook stand for as an organization, where our mission is to make the world more open and connected. I feel like someone needs to be making the case for why connecting people is good, and we are one of the organizations that I think should be doing that. You know, we talk about connecting everyone in the world and that is far from complete. We are almost at two billion people [at Facebook], out of more than seven billion in the world, so from our perspective we are earlier on in this than later. If you look at the arc of human history, hundreds of thousands of years, it is a story of how people have learned to come together in bigger numbers to do things that we couldnt do separately. Whether thats coming together from tribes to building villages, or building cities into nations, it has required social infrastructure and moral infrastructure, things like governments or media or religion, to enable people to work together. I think today we need more global infrastructure in order to unlock a lot of the biggest opportunities and solve some of the biggest challenges. So when youre talking about spreading freedom or trade, or youre talking about fighting terrorism, where a civil war in one country leads to refugee crises across multiple continents, these are not typically problems any one country has the tools by itself to go solve. I think we have a responsibility as a technology company at a pretty big scale to see what we can do to push on that.

FC: One view of business, epitomized by Wall Street, says that the purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder value and generate as much profitability as possible. Another view says that businesses and business leaders have a responsibility to take care of their communities. How do you think about that spectrum?

MZ: I think Facebook has always been a mission-driven company. I didnt start Facebook as a business. I wanted this thing to exist in my community, and over some number of years I came to the realization that the only way to build it out was if it had a good economic engine behind it. I think that increasingly, especially with folks who are millennials, that [view] is going to be the default. You know, when I started Facebook, there were a lot of questions around is this a reasonable way to build a company. And then when more millennials started graduating from college and we went to recruit them it became very clear that they wanted to work somewhere that wasnt just about building a business but that was about doing something bigger in the world.

FC: Just before Facebook went public, you posted another long letter, titled Founders Letter. You wrote there that we dont wake up in the morning with the goal of making more money, right?

MZ: Yes.

FC: You didnt repeat that sentiment in the new letter. Why not?

MZ: Well, this wasnt exactly a follow up to the founders letter. The founders letter was written for shareholders who are buying into the IPO to understand how the company operated. So it was much heavier on values and internal operation and principles of how we work, whereas [the new letter] was much more focused on mission. Less about how we work and more about what were going to do. I dont think how we work has fundamentally changed very much.

FC: You didnt feel like that needed to be repeated, because it hadnt changed?

MZ: Yes. But you know, when you ask it like that, I do think these things always need to be repeated.

FC: Companies demonstrate their values in different ways. Howard Schultz at Starbucks might use his platform to pursue social agenda issues. You havent chosen to do that. At Salesforce, 80%of the employees volunteer time at nonprofits. You havent pushed to do that. Is there a Zuckerberg philosophy about how the business expresses its values?

MZ: I think the core operation of what you do should be aimed at making the change that you want. A lot of companies do nice things with small parts of their resources. I would hope that our core mission is the main thing we want to accomplish, in that almost all of our resources go toward that. When I want to do stuff like invest in education and science and immigration reform and criminal-justice reform, I do that through the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative [a nonprofit foundation that he started with his wife, Priscilla Chan]. Its not that people [at Facebook] dont believe in that, I just think what we are doing in making the world more open and connected, and now hopefully building some of the social infrastructure for a global communityI view that as the mission of Facebook.

FC: Are there areas where Facebook sacrificed or risked dollars in order to stay true to that mission?

MZ: My experience is that people often shy away from hard decisions for longer than they should because they are worried about some bad effect. People talk about, oh this is going to hurt in the short term but help in the long run, right? And my experience is that the long run always happens sooner than you think. For example, when we didnt sell the company early on, we had the opportunity to make a lot of money. All these people inside the company were trying to make this case, you dont know that [Facebook] is going to be as big as you hope. But the reality was after we turned down those offers, it wasnt some 10-year slog. Within a year it was obvious that that was the right decision. There were a lot of cases in our history where weve made hard decisions, and it has ended up maybe hurting us a little in the very near term but generally ends up being pretty positive over time. I think even when you take stances on social issues, it might frustrate people who dont agree with you, but in general people appreciate that you believe in something. People want business leaders to be authentic and stand for things. One of the most frustrating things I read is when people assume that we dont do something because it will cost us money. If you take, for example, some of the debates that are going on now around the news industry and misinformation. Theres definitely a strain of criticism that Facebook [allows] misinformation because it will make them more money. And that really is just not true at all. I mean, we know that people in the community want real information. Whenever we give them tools to get access to higher quality content, theyll always go for that. But at the same time, we also believe in freedom of speech. People should have the ability to say what they think, even if someone else disagrees with that. And freedom of speech is a funny thing because people always want freedom of speech unless people disagree with them. So I dont know, I think often when you make decisions that arent exactly what people want they think youre doing it for some underhanded business reason, but actually a lot of these things are more values backed.

FC: When you saw the spread of information or news that wasnt true, was that a surprise? Or did you think that it might happen, but the positive benefit of being more open outweighed any negatives?

MZ: I still believe more strongly than ever that giving the most voice to the most people will be this positive force in society. But the thing is, its a work in progress. We talk about wanting to give everyone a voice, but then most people in the world dont have access to the internet. So if you dont have the tools to actually share your ideas with everyone, thats not going to get you very far. We talk about giving people free speech but if they dont actually, even in a country like the U.S., have the tools to be able to capture a video and share that easily, then there are limits in practice to what you can do. I just view this as a continual thing that every day we can come in and push the line further back on how many people have a voice and how much voice each person has, and were going to keep pushing on all of that. It just is this constant work. And at each point, you uncover new issues that you need to solve to get to the next level. Some people will say, oh you tolerate those issues. But the simpler explanation is that the community is evolving. We build new things, that surfaces new issues, we then go deal with those issues, and we keep going. Go back a few years, for example, and we were getting a lot of complaints about click bait. No one wants click bait. But our algorithms at that time were not specifically trained to be able to detect what click bait was. The key was to make tools so the community could tell us what was click bait, and we could factor that into the product. Now its not gone a hundred percent but its a much smaller problem than it used to be. Today, whether its information diversity or misinformation or building common ground, these are the next things that need to get worked on. Its not like they are problems that exist because theres some kind of underlying, nefarious motivation. I mean, certainly giving people a voice leads to more diversity of opinions, which if you dont manage that can lead to more fragmentation, but I think this is kind of the right order of operations. You know, you give people a voice and then you figure out what the implications of that are, and then you work on those things. Its just this constant work in progress. Giving the most voice to the most people can lead you to controversial things as well. There are laws in some countries that youre not allowed to say certain things, and as a general principle we try to follow local laws. Do we agree with all of those? Not necessarily. There was a case in Pakistan a handful of years ago where someone tried to get me sentenced to death because someone created a [Facebook] group about encouraging people to depict the Prophet Muhammad. That was illegal in Pakistan but not around the rest of the world. We didnt show it in Pakistan, but we didnt take it down everywhere. Some people thought, hey thats bad that youre not taking it down. Some people thought, hey why are you taking it down in Pakistan? Our view is, were trying to give people as much of a voice as we can around the world, realizing that its not perfect at any given point in time but if we do our jobs then day after day we will be increasing the breadth of what people can do and fast forward 20or 30years and the world will be in a much better place.

FC: So flaws are always going to exist because theres no perfection?

MZ: Yeah. And I think its fair to call them flaws because every system is imperfect. But I also think having this frameworkthat it is a work in progressis probably a more realistic framing than, oh what youre doing has all these flaws. I mean, its not wrong to say that it has flaws but I just wonder if thats an overly negative framing, not just of Facebook but of any business or any system. You got here by doing certain things, and the world is a changing around you, and you need to adapt.

FC: The advent of technology through global culture has been terrific for folks in communities like yours and mine. But there are other communities that look at these changesthe rise of tech and AI and robotics and so onand feel left out of it, scared by it. For those who are disproportionate beneficiaries of this technological ascent, do they have a disproportionate responsibility to take care of those who are being left behind?

MZ: I think yes but theres a lot in what you just said. A lot of the current discussion and anti-globalization movement is because for many years and decades, people only talked about the good of connecting the world and didnt acknowledge that some people would get left behind. I think it is this massively positive thing over all, but it may have been oversold. Which doesnt mean its badit can still be massively positivebut I think that you need to acknowledge the issues and work through them so it works for everyone. Or else there is not going to be sustainable progress. I think in general in society the people who are the luckiest and most fortunate and have a position where they can help other people have a responsibility to do so. But even that aside, if you believe that this is a good direction, you have a responsibility to make sure it works for everyone because thats the only way for it to actually work. Now there is a separate point in what you were saying around taking care of other people. I believe that a lot of the issues were currently seeing around the world are social questions of meaning and purpose and dignity and being a part of something bigger than yourself and are not only economic questions. Certainly the economic part is very big. But regardless of how well youre doing economically, youre going to have issues in your life, and youre going to need a social support structure and community around you to keep you going. It may be that when things economically are going better some of those issues get papered over. It may be that when people are economically struggling they need a stronger social support structure. But it is always an important need, and I think we are overlooking the extent to which over the last 30or 40years some of the infrastructure for that social community has declined.

FC: And you dont necessarily see technology as being an instigator of that decline?

MZ: Well, it predates the internet. It may be because of industrialization or things like that. But its hard to draw a line with the internet. When you ask the question of, do you have a responsibility to take care of other people, I think on the one hand, if youre fortunate, yes, you absolutely have the responsibility. And if you believe that this is the direction that things should go in, you have a responsibility to make sure it works for everyone. But I actually think making it work for everyone means making it so that everyone has a sense of purpose and meaning and dignity, which you need to enable people to build for themselves. Its not like someone can come in and provide that for someone else. You need to create the structures to enable that.

FC: At the very end of your letter you mention building a global voting system. Youre not talking about political voting. What is that about?

MZ: I was talking about collective decision making. One of the things that we have struggled with recently is how do we have a set of community standards that can apply across a community of almost two billion people. One example that has been quite controversial has been nudity. There are very different cultural norms ranging from country to country. In some places, the idea that showing a womans breasts would be controversial feels backwards. But there are other places where images that are at all sexually suggestive, even if they dont show nudity, just because of a pose, thats over the line. The question is, in a larger community, how do you build mechanisms so that the community can decide for itself and individuals can decide for themselves where they want the lines to be? This is a tricky part of running this company. In setting the nudity policy, for example, we are not trying to impose our values on folks, were trying to reflect what the community thinks. We have come to this realization that a bunch of people sitting in a room in California is not going to be the best way to reflect all the local values that people have around the world. So we need to evolve the systems for collective decision making. Its an interesting problem. There are certainly going to be a lot more global infrastructure and global enterprises going forward, there just hasnt been anything at this scale yet.

FC: And if a part of the global community says, for instance, Jews are not human and they should be put to death, its appropriate for that to be reflected on Facebook?

MZ: Oh, I think there are always going to be lines.

FC: How do you determine where those lines are? Those lines are being drawn by a bunch of people in California also, right?

MZ: This stuff is never perfect, but I think right now there is a lot of opportunity to improve a lot of peoples experience by creating more of a range. On nudity, for example, child pornography is never going to be allowed. Its illegal, its wrong. So there is not going to be an option for that. But there are different ranges of what someone might think is reasonable to share, and might actually want as part of their experience, and we can open up a broader range of discourse. I dont think having everyone conform to one line is necessarily ideal, but you are right that there are going to be other forces here.

FC: Is this job tougher than you thought it was going to be?

MZ: It is hard, and you never make everyone a hundred percent happy. But I think these are not zero-sum things. Often these decisions can get framed as youre going to make one set of people happy and the other not, and I just think the most positive thing about technology is the ability to expand the pie, right? We might be able to have different policies for different places and even different individuals. There is no system around the world that can work like that today. And the thing that will enable that is technology. Depending on how controversial of a cycle were in, people might focus more on the positive or the negative, but in running a company like this you want to be a little more steady. Youre never going to get everything perfect, but every day you can come in and make progress and make peoples lives, on balance, better. And if you repeat that process for a very long period of time, the value compounds and you can make a very big impact.

Robert Safian is editor and managing director of the award-winning monthly business magazine Fast Company. He oversees all editorial operations, in print and online, and plays a key role in guiding the magazine's advertising, marketing, and circulation efforts.

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Mark Zuckerberg On Fake News, Free Speech, And What Drives ... - Fast Company

In March 1964, the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, one of the most important 20th-century rulings involving freedom of the press. The decision affirmed the right of the media and the public to criticize public officials even if some of the information they published is false.

Today, when the news media are under attack for publishing fake news and the president of the United States refers to The New York Times, CNN and other news outlets as the enemy of the people, it is useful to consider the circumstances surrounding that Supreme Court case.

The decision was made at a time when African-Americans in the South were demonstrating for voting rights and for equal access to schools and public accommodations. Southern public officials had begun to use defamation suits against the press as a way to limit criticism and coverage of their actions against the demonstrators. The New York Times had already lost two such suits, had been fined $500,000 in each case, and was facing 11 more suits that could result in an additional $5.6 million in fines.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the newspapers appeal of the first lawsuit. The case grew out of an advertisement titled Heed Their Rising Voices that appeared in the Times on March 30, 1960. The ad cataloged a number of attempts by activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., to protest inequality in the South and ended with an appeal for financial support.

At the time, the media had only a few ways to defend against a defamation lawsuit, and while truth was a defense, any error, no matter how small, would preclude its use.

Unfortunately for the Times, the ad included several errors. Some were small (the ad said students who were demonstrating at the state Capitol sang My Country Tis of Thee when in fact they sang the national anthem), while others were more substantial. The ad cited several actions that had supposedly been taken by public officials, including padlocking the dining hall at Alabama State College, ringing the campus with police officers armed with shotguns and tear gas, and arresting King several times for minor offenses. Now, the ad alleged, King was facing a perjury charge that could lead to his imprisonment for up to 10 years. In each instance, the information in the ad was almost but not quite accurate.

L.B. Sullivan, one of three city commissioners in Montgomery, Alabama, sued, arguing that because he was the commissioner responsible for the police, the ad accused him of taking possibly illegal actions against both the students and King. Under Alabama law, criticism of the public conduct of a public official was automatically considered libelous if the plaintiff convinced the jury that the remarks were of and concerning him and that the words could injure him in his public office or impute misconduct to him in his office, or want of official integrity

Because some of the statements in the ad were false, The New York Times essentially had no defenses available. As a result, Sullivan won easily at the trial court level, and the Alabama Supreme Court rejected the papers appeal of the decision and the $500,000 fine.

The New York Times then appealed to the nations highest court. In March 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the newspapers favor. The majority opinion written by Justice William Brennan, and concurring opinions written by Justices Hugo Black and Arthur Goldberg, offered a full-throated defense of the right of the media and the public to criticize government officials and government actions even if the criticism included errors and false statements. Together, the opinions made it clear that the days of the Sedition Act of 1798 were long over and that elected officials could no longer stifle criticism of their public actions by means of a defamation lawsuit.

Quoting Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and previous court decisions in their opinions, the justices asserted that the media and the public have the right, and perhaps even the duty, under the First Amendment, to criticize, protest and report on public affairs. At the same time, they recognized that those critical remarks may include some errors.

Citing NAACP v. Button in the majority opinion, Justice Brennan wrote that erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate, and ... must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the breathing space that they need to survive. Anything else, he wrote, might lead the media to self-censorship for fear that they would not be able to prove the truth of the statements they published.

To counter that concern, Justice Brennan turned defamation law on its head, setting up the actual malice standard. Under this new standard, Brennan shifted the burden of proof to the public official who sued the media. Officials now had to prove with convincing clarity that the media published the statement with actual malice that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.

For a statement to reach the level of actual malice, the public official must prove that the media knowingly published a lie or went out of its way to avoid learning the truth. And, the official must prove that the false statement caused real harm to his or her reputation.

During his campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump regularly railed against the media, and threatened to open up libel laws to make it easier for public officials to sue. Since his inauguration, the relationship between him, his administration and some media outlets has been rocky at best. The president has been critical of what he calls fake news, which in many cases seems to be news that he simply doesnt like. His chief political strategist has referred to the media as the opposition party, and his press secretary barred selected media outlets from a press briefing.

In his majority opinion in the New York Times cases, Justice Brennan wrote that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials. Justice Black, in a concurring opinion, wrote that, at the least, the First Amendment leaves the people and the press free to criticize officials and discuss public affairs with impunity. ... I doubt that a country can live in freedom where its people can be made to suffer physically or financially for criticizing their government, its actions or its officials.

The First Amendment protects all of us. It gives all of us Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Pastaferians the right to freely worship or not. It gives all of us immigrants, Native Americans, naturalized citizens and descendants of the Mayflower settlers the right to speak out and either support or criticize the policies of the government. It gives all of us women, men, members of the LGBTQ community, anti-abortion and Black Lives Matter supporters the right to assemble freely, to protest and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

And it gives all members of the media from The New York Times and The Washington Post to The Frederick News-Post, WHAG-TV and even local bloggersthe right to cover and, if they choose, to criticize the president, members of his administration, members of Congress and other elected officials throughout government. It doesnt matter if the officials dont like what is being reported. Nor does it matter if the criticism is, as Justice Goldberg wrote, unwise or unfair.

We have the right to be informed about the workings of our government and the right to respond to that information with praise or with criticism. If the media are muzzled, our right to make an informed and educated decision about who we select to lead us and whether to support their policies is severely diminished.

At a time when people are gravitating toward only those news sources they agree with, attempts by the president and his administration to undercut the credibility of the media could have serious consequences. The First Amendment is one of the shining lights of our American democracy. We have to fight the notion that information we disagree with is automatically fake news. No matter what our political leanings, we dont want to live in a country where information is controlled by the government, where protesters are threatened and where protections for free speech and a free press are reduced to empty platitudes.

Excerpt from:
Freedom of Speech - Frederick News Post (subscription)

Twitter is often criticizedand rightfully sofor some of the decisions it has made in the past, including the fact that it moved too slowly to try and stop abuse of the service by trolls and bots.

But there is one thing the company routinely does right, and that is to fight back against government attempts to force it to reveal user information.

It did so again on Thursday by filing a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in San Francisco. In the suit, Twitter has asked a judge to block the government's order to divulge the personal details of the user behind a so-called "rogue" account, which claims to be run by employees of the Citizenship and Immigration Services department.

According to the company's filing, the @ALT_uscis Twitter account "has often criticized immigration policies" introduced by Trump, including the travel ban imposed on a number of Muslim countries. The account, which was created right after the first Executive Order that introduced the ban, is one of a number of accounts that purport to be run by either current or former government employees.

"Defendants may not compel Twitter to disclose information regarding the real identities of these users without first demonstrating that some criminal or civil offense has been committed," Twitter argues in its complaint . "Defendants have not come close to making any of these showings."

This is not the first time Twitter has used the courts to fight such demands by the U.S. government. One of the first was in 2011, when the Justice Department ordered it to produce information about several of the people associated with the WikiLeaks account, including founder Julian Assange, hacker activist Jacob Appelbaum, and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir.

As it has in the current case, Twitter rejected the order and also defied the government's demand that it not inform the individuals in question about the agency's request for information.

Ultimately, Twitter lost that case, which was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But it at least tried to resist the government's demands, and it tried to force the incident out into the public eye as much as possible. Many other tech companiesincluding Facebookcomply with such requests but say very little about them.

Get Data Sheet , Fortune s technology newsletter.

Twitter fought a government order in 2012 that tried to get it to reveal information about an account associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests. And it has also fought in court to block demands by other governments, including those from the Turkish authorities, which have tried to force it to shut down accounts critical of those in power.

It appears from the evidence introduced by Twitter in the current case that the government has been trying to identify the users behind the rogue account since early March, when the Customs and Border Protection agency sent the company a court order demanding the personal information of whoever created it. The order also forbid Twitter from informing those users of the government's request.

Instead of complying, however, Twitter told the users behind the @ALT_uscis account about the agency's demands, and filed suit to try and have the order struck down.

In its legal argument, the company makes the case that the CBP order goes beyond the scope of what is normally permitted by subpoenas of that kind, and it also argues that submitting to the agency's demand would have a chilling effect on the users' freedom of speech and therefore is in contravention of the First Amendment's protections for such speech.

"The CBP Summons is unlawful and unenforceable because it violates the First Amendment rights of both Twitter and its users by seeking to unmask the identity of one or more anonymous Twitter users voicing criticism of the government on matters of public concern," the filing states.

The company's submission to the court goes on to point out that a "time-honored tradition of pseudonymous free speech on matters of public moment runs deep in the political life of America," and that these First Amendment rights are "at their zenith when, as here, the speech at issue touches on matters of public political life." The Supreme Court has written about the necessity for anonymity to allow for criticism of the government, the filing says.

Whether Twitter is ultimately successful or not in its latest attempt to resist the attacks on free speech, it deserves a lot of credit for at least trying to do so. That's more than many companies do.

Read the rest here:
Why Twitter Should Be Applauded for Challenging Trump's Attack on Free Speech - Fortune

America has a long tradition of demonstrations to oppose unAmerican policies dating back to March 5, 1770, when a group of Boston citizens gathered to protest the British in Boston.

The protest deteriorated into a riot and when the British shot 11 Boston protesters, it became the Boston Massacre.

A few years later, the Sons of Liberty protested the British governments tax on tea. They gathered at Boston Harbor and, disguised as Native Americans, destroyed an entire shipment of tea in Boston Harbor.

The American tradition of publicly protesting their governments action continues today.

My first experience as a protester began in Kentucky in the 1960s. I was a college student in Richmond. The town had one movie theater, and black Americans were limited to sitting in the balcony, the colored section. We protested and picketed the theater until they changed the rules. By the time I left college, the town no longer required black kids to sit upstairs. The demonstrations and boycott forced the theater to allow us all to sit wherever we wanted to sit, as it should be.

Still, the 1960s were turbulent times. Hundreds of marches were held across the nation protesting Americas discriminatory laws. We persevered and eventually laws protecting the rights of all Americans were passed. The demonstrations had a great deal to do with America coming to its senses and changing race-related laws.

Protesting and petitioning government continues today, and it is not limited to progressives.

In 2009, self-proclaimed tea party groups resorted to demonstrations to protest all things Barack Obama. I can recall watching the events on TV. Washington, D.C., protesters had the support of some members of Congress as they demonstrated against the administration of President Obama. I remember listening to Minnesotas crazy acting Rep. Michele Bachmann urging her followers to be louder and even more disruptive as she lied about Obamacare and expressed her disdain for the president.

Therefore, when Trump supporters in Citrus County lament the recent demonstrations at U.S. Rep. Daniel Websters open house, I am not sure how seriously I should take it. We heard thats not who Citrus County is, and this was supposed to be a welcome to our congressman.

This is what America is. It is free citizens petitioning their representatives to listen to them and tell him why they voted as they did. The people at Websters open house were there to ask him important questions.

We know there are numerous problems concerning Russian influence in our elections. Some of Trumps staff lied about their contacts with the Russians. One lied to Congress during his confirmation hearing. One was fired by Trump after revelations he lied about his contact with Russia.

Webster has voted to sweep those concerns under the rug. Why? Why has he consistently voted to keep an investigation partisan and not independent?

We wanted to ask him about the wall and health care, but he left and didnt answer any questions.

Now, according to ABC News, the Trump administration is considering cuts to the Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration, Secret Service and FEMA including cuts to several notable national security and emergency response initiatives to help fund the presidents border wall.

Trump lied about the thousands of Muslims celebrating the fall of the New York towers. He lied about Obama bugging Trump Tower. He lied about his inauguration having largest audience ever. In spite of what he said, Mexico is not going to pay for his wall; we are.

We gathered in the Inverness City Hall to petition our congressional representative as allowed under the First Amendment. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Florida Congressional District 11 Indivisible had people attending the meeting, and some of them held signs. The signs said such things as Rubber Stamp Webster or Bannon is not my President, or some were like Andrea Reas of Floral City. She sported a sign saying Get $ out of politics.

Even the Trump supporters held signs saying God Bless Trump.

It was, as Inverness Mayor Bob Plaisted observed, a marvelous demonstration of freedom in America and it was a spectacular demonstration of liberty until it was unilaterally decided signs were not allowed because of building decorum, infringing on our freedoms.

If Rep. Webster keeps his word and has a town hall meeting, Florida Congressional District 11 Indivisible will be there, and we will have signs. Get used to us Citrus County. We want to be heard.

Bob Messersmith is a member of the Indivisible Steering Committee, Florida Congressional District 11.

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Freedom of speech protected by Constitution | ChronicleOnline.com - Citrus County Chronicle

The First Amendment of the Constitution states, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Our forefathers gave us the freedom of speech and the right to expiration.

Universities havefree speech zones so students can express their political opinions without the risk of punishment or government involvement. Taking away a students free speechzone will only cause students to rebel. Its so students can have the necessary protection from the public.

According to GOPUSA, student Kevin Shaw is suing his community college in California for violating his First Amendment rights. Shawwas barred from passing out copies of the U.S. Constitution because he wasnt in the free speech zone, which is onlyabout the size of three parking spaces. Also, calls to the school district about the situationwere not immediately returned.

According to the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education, 10 percent of the 450 colleges it monitors have similar free speech zones. In 1960, this became a way to control campus protests. Campuses wanted to givestudents the ability to practice protest rights as long as it was on school grounds.

This year, student protesting has increased since the election of President Donald Trump. Before, it was harmless but as Trump climbed the political ladder, protesting went to the extreme. In some cases, itbecamevery violentamongst our fellow Americans.

Other schools want to influence students to express their opinions in any part of the campus without the risk of academicpunishment. According to The Denver Post, Colorado campuses will eliminaterestrictions on free speech zones soon. On March 20 the Colorado House of Representatives voted to ban so-called free speech zones'as they have beenused to confine public demonstrations to designated areas.

According to The Red & Black, the University of Georgia at Athens wants to expand their free speech zones. Kenton Law is a freshman at Lilburn University, and he believes free speech is more than a political theory, and its personal. The laws main goal was the removal of a campus priestafter he constantlylabeled students sinners and whores.'

Since we have the freedom of speech, should we try to use it wisely? I understand some schools concerns with allowing students to speak their minds in public. Sometimes, it may take a turn for the worst. But this is what we all need to watch out for. Being able to speak up is a privilege, but taking advantage ofit is what gets people in trouble. I cannot speak for the people who may try to provoke you to act out, and you are the only one responsible for your actions. I do recommend speaking with your voice, not with violence.

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Kevin Shaw with a copy of the U.S. Constitution. (Photo courtesy of Dawn Bowery/FIRE)

When Kevin Shaw tried to distribute copies of the U.S. Constitution in Spanish on his college campus, he was reprimanded by an administrator.

The administrator told him he would need to distribute the Constitution in a designated area, and only after obtaining a permit to do so. If he didnt comply, he would be removed from campus.

Shaw attends Pierce College, which is part of the Los Angeles Community College District. According to Pierces free speech policy, students can only distribute materials in a prescribed location on campus a 616-square-foot area comprising .003% of Pierces total campus and only after receiving permission to do so.

Shaw is now suing LACCD, claiming that his First Amendment rights were violated.

Were passing out copies of our founding document, he said. What could be more innocuous?

The lawsuit was filed by Arthur Willner, a partner at Leader & Berkon LLP, in partnership with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, an organization that advocates for freedom of speech on college campuses.

The effect of such free speech zones is to prevent students from interacting with their peers and having the opportunity to be exposed to new ideas, Brynne Madway, an associate attorney at FIRE, said in an email. We should be encouraging students to speak with their peers and learn from them. We shouldnt confine students to tiny boxes.

Free speech zones date back to the 1960s and 1970s, whenon-campus protests, mainly against the Vietnam War, became popular. The zones are typically located in areas that wont disrupt classes, and require students togive the administration advance notice of activities.

Kevin Shaw standing at the zone designed as the free speech area on his college campus in California. (Photo courtesy of Dawn Bowery/FIRE)

In recent years, free speech zones have come under fire four states even have laws that ban public colleges and universities from establishing them. Butaccording to a survey FIRE recently conducted of 450 top universities, Madway said, 1 in 10 had restrictive policies similar to LACCDs.

This particular lawsuit comes as free speech itself on college campuses becomes an increasingly heated topic. Recently, events at University of California-Berkeley and Middlebury College have brought controversial conservative speakers into conflict with largely liberal college students, sparking protests and questions about whether students rights to feel safe outweighs speakers rights to free expression.

Willner said hes seen an increase in restrictions on free expression over the past couple of decades, a phenomenon he attributes to peoples perceived rights to not be offended, or group rights that take precedence over individual rights.

What makes this particular situation even more pernicious is the fact that even to utilize the free speech area, a student has to first submit an application for a permit, he said. It sort of defeats the entire purpose of the First Amendment and freedom of speech.

Yusef Robb, a consultant for LACCD, said in a statement that the Los Angeles Community College District firmly stands behind every students right to free expression.

Shaw hopes the lawsuit will force LACCD to change its policies so that future students will be able to exercise their First Amendment rights without limitation.

I want to leave my school nicer than I found it, he said. My hope is that this policy wont affect students in the future.

Caroline Simon is a University of Pennsylvania student and a USA TODAY College correspondent.

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How a college student in California is fighting for his free speech rights - USA TODAY

Free speech is important. It guards against governments dangerous tendency to repress certain kinds of communication, including protest, journalism, whistleblowing, academic research, and critical work in the arts. On the other hand, think of a doctor dispensing bogus medical advice, or someone making a contract that she plans to breach, or a defendant lying under oath in court. These all involve written or spoken statements, but they dont seem to fall within the domain of free speech. They are what the legal theorist Frederick Schauer at the University of Virginia calls patently uncovered speech: communication that warrants no special protection against government regulation.

However, once we extrapolate beyond the clear-cut cases, the question of what counts as free speech gets rather tricky. A business whose website gets buried in pages of search results might argue that Googles algorithm is anti-competitivethat it impedes fair competition between sellers in a marketplace. But Google has dodged liability by likening itself to a newspaper, and arguing that free speech protects it from having to modify its results. Is this a case of free speech doing its proper work, or an instance of free speech running amok, serving as cover for a libertarian agenda that unduly empowers major corporations?

To answer this question, we need a principled account of the types of communication covered by free speech. But attempts to provide such an account havent really succeeded. We can pick out cases on either side of the divideProtections for journalism and protest? Yes! For perjury and contracts? No!but there arent any obvious or natural criteria that separate bona fide speech from mere verbal conduct. On the contrary, as theorists have told us since the mid-20th century, all verbal communication should be understood as both speech and conduct.

Some authors see these definitional difficulties as a fatal problem for the very idea of free speech. In Theres No Such Thing as Free Speech: And Its a Good Thing Too (1994), the American literary critic and legal scholar Stanley Fish argued that free speech is really just a rhetorically expedient label that people assign to their favored forms of communication. Theres a grain of truth in this; but it doesnt change the fact that governments still have a tendency to repress things such as protest and whistleblowing, and that we have good reasons to impose institutional safeguards against such repression if possible.

Instead of throwing out free speech entirely, a better response might be to keep the safeguards but make their sphere of application very broad. This is roughly what happens in Canadian law, where nearly any type of conduct can fall within the constitutional ideal of free expression, provided that it is trying to convey some kind of meaning. The downside is that if nearly anything can qualify as expressive in the relevant sense, then we cannot categorically privilege expression itself as an inviolable norm. All we can ask lawmakers to do is factor in the interests that such expression serves, and try to strike a balance with all the other competing interests (such as equality, for example, or national security). While such trade-offs are standard in Commonwealth legal systems, they have the unwelcome effect of making it easier for governments to justify their repressive tendencies.

Id propose a third way: put free speech as such to one side, and replace it with a series of more narrowly targeted expressive liberties. Rather than locating actions such as protest and whistleblowing under the umbrella of free speech, we could formulate specially-tailored norms, such as a principle of free public protest, or a principle of protected whistleblowing. The idea would be to explicitly nominate the particular species of communication that we want to defend, instead of just pointing to the overarching genus of free speech. This way the battle wouldnt be fought out over the boundaries of what qualifies as speech, but instead, more directly, over the kinds of communicative activities we think need special protection.

Take the idea of public protest. Standard free-speech theory, concerned as it is with what counts as speech, tends to draw a line between interference based on the content of the speech, such as the speakers viewpoint (generally not allowed), and interference that merely affects the time, place, and manner in which the speech takes place (generally allowed). But this distinction runs into trouble when it comes to protest. Clearly governments should be blocked from shutting down demonstrations whose messages they oppose. But equally they shouldnt be able to multiply the rules about the time, place, and manner in which demonstrations must take place, such that protests become prohibitively difficult to organize. One reason to have a dedicated principle of free public protest, then, is to help us properly capture and encode these concerns. Instead of seeing demonstrations as merely one application of a generic free-speech principle, we can use a narrower notion of expressive liberty to focus our attention on the distinctive hazards faced by different types of socially important communication.

If this all seems a bit optimistic, its worth noting that we already approach some types of communication in this waysuch as academic freedom. Universities frequently come under pressure from political or commercial lobby groupssuch as big oil, or the Israel lobbyto defund research that runs counter to their interests. This kind of threat has a distinctive underlying causal mechanism. In light of this problem, universities safeguard academic freedom via laws and regulations, including guidelines that specify the grounds for which academics can be fired or denied promotion. These moves are not just a specific implementation of a general free-speech principle. Theyre grounded in notions of academic freedom that are narrower than and distinct from freedom of speech. My suggestion is that all our expressive liberties could be handled in this way.

The subdivision of expressive liberties isnt going to magically fix all the genuinely controversial issues around free speech, such as what to do about search engines. However, we dont need to resolve these debates in order to see, with clarity and confidence, that protest, journalism, whistleblowing, academic research, and the arts need special protection. The parceled-out view of expressive liberties captures the importance of these activities, while sidestepping the definitional problems that plague standard free-speech theory. These are not merely theoretical advantages. Any time a country is creating or revising a bill of rights, the question of how to protect communicative practices must be considered afresh. Multiple expressive liberties is an approach worth taking seriously.

This piece originally appeared at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Free speech is too broad a categorylet's break it up in order to save it - Quartz

In Europe, Donald Trump could have been arrested for some of the comments he made about Muslims and Mexicans while campaigning for president, legal scholar Floyd Abrams LAW 59 pointed out during a campus visit on April 5.

But thats not the case in America, which has been more dedicated to the protection of free speech than anywhere else in the world, said Abrams, and hes grateful that it is.

Considered one of the nations top constitutional lawyers and staunchest defenders of the First Amendment, Abrams took part in a conversation with Adam Liptak LAW 88, the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times. The public event took place in a Yale Law School classroom, with lawyers and law students joining remotely from the New York and Washington, D.C. offices of the firm Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz. Abrams new book, The Soul of the First Amendment, was just published by Yale University Press.

Abrams told his audience that the starting point for his book and the core principle at heart in his own legal work is his belief that the First Amendment is meant to be a protection against government over-control and censorship, even though it hasnt always been interpreted in that way. As he notes in his book, the First Amendment is a mere 45 words: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof: or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Even in Canada, Abrams said, a religious zealot who passed out pamphlets condemning homosexuals and homosexuality, for example, could be convicted of a hate crime. Asked by Liptak why Americas approach to freedom of speech is better, Abrams answered: I think its better for all of us because we have shown through our history tendencies to limit speech and move into highly anti-free expression modes. Weve made enormous progress and moved in the right direction by sort of gulping and saying, Were going to protect this sort of speech even though we understand that its going to inflict pain, and inflict pain on people already suffering pain from their stigmatization in American society.

Americas constitutional commitment to free expression even of the sort that denigrates groups of people, as Trump did is bred most of all from the fear that if we start banning politicians from saying things, or the rest of us from saying things even if theyre deeply offensive and antisocial the effect as a whole would be a significant deprivation of freedom of a sort that all of us would recognize.

The legal scholar defended his own decision to represent (on behalf of Senator Mitch McConnell) the conservative nonprofit organization Citizens United in the controversial 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That decision reflected his devotion to the cause of free speech, regardless of politics, he said. In a broadly sweeping decision, a majority of the justices (5 to 4) voted that freedom of speech prohibited the government from restricting a corporations independent political expenditures.

Commercial speech, I think, is an interesting area in which there will be a lot of development, sooner rather than later, predicted Abrams.

He called the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts a spectacularly protective one for First Amendment rights, but warned that college campuses have most recently been the place where First Amendment values have been the most challenged in American life. He cited the shouting-down of campus speakers because of their views as one campus danger, and called Fordham University administrators decision to forbid conservative commentator Ann Coulter from speaking there unless she was part of a panel an absolute disgrace.

In the older days, university administrations objected to liberal and left-wing speakers appearing, said Abrams. Today, he added, college professors sometimes warn students in advance that class content will include something that may offend or upset them.

Its a difficult area because it is important for students to feel some level of comfort, he continued. On the other side, education isnt always comfortable, and it shouldnt always be comfortable. The non-negotiable part of that is that there should be absolute freedom of ideas and presentations of ideas, no matter how offensive they may seem.

During a question-and-answer session, Abrams who represented The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case said that despite its protectiveness of free speech, the current Supreme Court isnt likely to be as protective of the press, particularly in cases involving leaked classified information.

Journalists are at very great risk in front of the Roberts court, Abrams said. I think thats one of the softest spots in term of potential for great harm [to press freedom].

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Islamic extremism results in less freedom of speech Washington Times But the biggest news is this: Canada is now considering criminalizing free speech where Islam is concerned. Last month, Iqra Khalid, a Pakistani-born Liberal member of Parliament, introduced into the House of Commons Motion 103. It calls for a study ... and more »

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Islamic extremism results in less freedom of speech - Washington Times