Tag: free speech

Elon Musk’s Free Speech Stance Is “Dangerous”, Columbia Journalism Fellow Warns

A Columbia University journalism fellow said Elon Musk’s support for free speech on X, formerly known as Twitter, is both “immoral” and “dangerous.”

Anika Navaroli used to work on Twitter’s “Trust and Safety Team,” the unit within the company that censored information, oftentimes true. Musk eliminated the team. She now is a senior fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

“What has now become clear is that Musk’s vision of speech on X is one of the greatest dangers to democracy, especially leading into the 2024 elections,” Navaroli (pictured) wrote on Thursday in The Hill.

She praised workers like herself for “thanklessly” working behind the scenes to defend “institutions.”

Navoli and her co-workers, in her telling, “were one of the last defenses to American democracy leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 mob attack on Congress” which “led ultimately to our deplatforming former President Donald Trump.”

She wrote:

Much like poll workers, social media trust and safety workers toil thanklessly and behind the scenes for years to protect the safety and integrity of our most vital democratic institutions. Rather than invest in that crucial work, Musk took a page out of Trump’s playbook, repeatedly and publicly attacking trust and safety workers. He unleashed the Twitter Files, which revealed the names, images, and contact information of former Twitter trust and safety employees.

The journalism fellow said speech is “evolving,” “complicated,” and “sticky.”

“It requires tradeoffs, flexibility, and tough decisions. It shouldn’t be dictated by an autocratic CEO with absolutist ideologies,” Navoli wrote, repeating prior statements she has made on the subject.

“Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom,” she previously said during a Congressional hearing.

“So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”

She is correct in that our conceptions of speech are complicated – I do not think there is some broad First Amendment right for the authors of pornographic books targeting kids to have their works in libraries.

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‘It Feels Like the New McCarthyism’: How the Israel-Hamas War Is Redefining the Limits of Free Speech

War between Israel and Hamas has sparked extensive (mostly) online activism about the conflict — and led to a rash of firings or other workplace discipline from employers concerned about their employees’ views of the conflict.

Artforum’s top editor David Velasco was fired by his publisher, Penske Media, after posting an open letter on the site calling for a cease-fire and suggesting Israel is responsible for the beginning of a genocide; Michael Eisen was removed as editor-in-chief of the science journal eLife after retweeting a satirical article critical of Israel; and Maha Dakhil, a top executive at the Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency, stepped back from leadership roles after reposting an Instagram story that implied Israel was committing genocide. That’s in addition to multiple law students who had job offers revoked after publicly criticizing Israeli actions. The statements range from expressions of sympathy for Palestinians to strident anti-Israel criticisms that seem to minimize Israeli loss of life.

The situation is making Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago whose work is focused on the changing meaning of freedom of speech in the United States, very nervous.

“It feels like the new McCarthyism,” said Lakier, who’s one of the leading legal scholars on matters of free speech.

So far, most of the firings appear to have been for expressing pro-Palestinian views — the U.S.-based advocacy organization Palestine Legal reports that they’ve responded to over 260 cases of people’s “livelihoods or careers” being targeted. But the fact that these firings have been due in large part to social media posts and the widespread broadcasting of personal political beliefs means that the trend may not stay on one issue or one side of a dispute for long; Lakier says that we are watching the relationship between free expression and employment shift in real time.

Currently, regulations concerning speech and private employment oscillate wildly from state to state — about half of states have no protections for private employees who express political beliefs, while others have laws that vary in terms of scope. Many of the employment laws that do exist find their roots in the 19th century and are little use in navigating the 21st century workplace. Meanwhile, ideas about protected speech are constantly shifting in the culture: After 9/11, for example, the war on terror brought with it new examinations into what kind of speech promulgates terrorism. More recently, debates over “cancel culture” on campuses and in the workplace have brought up similar questions of what speech is permissible — and when consequences are justified.

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UK Police Arrest Women Who Attended Gaza Protest Wearing Paraglider-Print Shirts

London police have made the latest in a series of arrests related to the repeated Gaza and Hamas protests in recent weeks, now arresting two women on suspicion of terrorism offences for wearing prints of paragliders stuck to their clothing at a rally.

Two women, aged 29 and 44 years old surrendered themselves to police and were arrested “on suspicion of inviting support for a proscribed organisation” under the Terrorism Act after the Metropolitan Police published their images in an appeal for information. The pair are being held at a police station, the force said.

Images of four people had been published by police on the 27th relating to “Pro-Palestine” protests on October 14th and 21st, with three of those being women wearing print-outs of paragliders taped to their clothes. The fourth was a man carrying a “I fully support Hamas” placard.

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ACLU: Trump’s gag order in federal case is unconstitutional

For four years during former President Donald Trump’s presidency, the American Civil Liberties Union was one of his biggest courtroom adversaries. Now, the group is taking his side in a high-profile fight over what Trump can say as a criminal defendant.

The ACLU on Wednesday stepped into the battle over Trump’s federal gag order, arguing that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan violated Trump’s First Amendment rights as well as the public’s right to hear him when she issued the order earlier this month. Chutkan is presiding over the criminal case special counsel Jack Smith is pursuing against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

“The obvious and unprecedented public interest in this prosecution, as well as the widespread political speech that it has generated and will continue to generate, only underscores the need to apply the most stringent First Amendment standard to a restraint on Defendant’s speech rights,” ACLU attorneys wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief.

The group urged Chutkan to reevaluate her order, calling it both vague and overbroad, with aspects of its meaning “unknown and perhaps unknowable.” One particular uncertainty the ACLU seized on was the meaning of Chutkan’s prohibition on statements that “target” Smith, his prosecutors, court personnel, defense attorneys or witnesses.

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How To Yell ‘Fire’ in a Crowded Theater

At a July hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Republican members focused on social media companies’ moderation of largely conservative viewpoints and accused the Biden administration of working hand-in-hand with tech companies to censor critics.

The First Amendment generally restricts the actions of the government and not purely private decisions of companies. A spirited, and unsettled, debate is emerging nationwide as to the extent of government pressure on platforms that should render a moderation decision a First Amendment violation.

But some members of the Weaponization Subcommittee sought to minimize the concerns about moderation without engaging in a nuanced discussion about government pressure, or “jawboning.”

“I’m an attorney by training, and one of the things I learned very early on in constitutional law is that no right given to the people of the United States is absolute,” Rep. Linda Sánchez (D–Calif.) said when asking a witness about the harms of health misinformation. “And that includes the right to free speech because you do not have the right to shout fire in a crowded theater, because it could produce harm and death of people by being false.”

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Meme Artist Douglass Mackey is Sentenced To Seven Months in Prison For Hillary Clinton Voting Meme

Douglass Mackey, a once well-known creator of memes on Twitter, has been sentenced to seven months in prison.

The conviction marks a dramatic escalation in how free speech is being handled in the United States. Rendered in the New York criminal court, Mackey was declared guilty of perpetrating a “conspiracy against rights”—the right to an unobstructed election being the one in focus here.

Mackey, who operated under the alias Ricky Vaughn, had made and shared memes critical of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Presidential race. His memes humorously suggested that Clinton supporters cast their ballots through text messages – a patently invalid method of voting.

Although such an improper method was clearly ineffective, Mackey was still convicted over the notion of election interference.

Quite interestingly, many have noted, other internet users who shared similar content regarding the option of text voting for Donald Trump were neither charged nor convicted.

The absence of evidence showing any voting attempt made following Mackey’s meme did not deter the US Department of Justice from declaring it an interference. Despite Mackey professing his mere intent of creating a viral meme, similar to those which his fellow Clinton detractors had created; he was singled out and penalized.

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Israel-Hamas ‘War’ – Another Excuse To Shutdown Free Speech

The headlines have been filled with nothing but Israel and Hamas since the “surprise attack” on Saturday, with the predictable back and forth of historical grievances and accusations of racism, punctuated by unsubstantiated claims of atrocities.

“Atrocity Propaganda” is nothing new. It is the opening salvo of every war as state combatants try to win the public to their side.

For example, the totally unsubstantiated claim that Hamas “threw forty Jewish babies out of their cribs and beheaded them”, which was doing the rounds yesterday. As far as atrocity propaganda goes the claim is startling in its unoriginality (Nayirah anyone?)

There’s a lot of that right now, lurid claims of graphic and pointless violence directed against the innocent, most of which survives just long enough to cause some outrage before being “debunked” or walked-back.

Part of that is the general “fog of war”, heightened by the advent of social media. When a lot of people can talk a lot more is said (good and bad).

But there’s another interpretation: That fake war stories are being intentionally seeded onto social media and then “debunked” to discredit platforms and appear to justify digital censorship.

Within the past twenty-four hours Reuters, NBC, YahooNews, The Guardian and the AP have run stories criticising the proliferation of “fake war news” on social media. Al Jazeera joined in too.

Almost all of those accusations have been directed solely at Twitter/X – increasingly the media’s anti-free speech strawman.

Governments have not been quiet on the issue either, with the European Union reportedly “warning” Elon Musk there would be “penalties” for the spread of war-related “misinformation” on his platform.

It’s not just “misinformation” either, but also “hate”. In an unusually subtle headline, NBCNews warns of the “increasingly fraught nature of online speech”. USA Today is more on the nose, claiming “online hate” is “surging”.

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Swiss Writer Sentenced to 60 Days in Jail for Calling Journalist a ‘Fat Lesbian’

LGBTQ+ groups hailed the 60-day jail sentence a court in Switzerland gave to a writer and commentator for deriding a journalist as a “fat lesbian” and other critical remarks.

The Lausanne court sentenced French-Swiss polemicist Alain Bonnet, who goes by Alain Soral, for the crimes of defamation, discrimination and incitement to hatred on Monday. He was ordered to pay legal fees and fines totaling thousands of Swiss francs (dollars) in addition to the time behind bars.

Soral lashed out at Catherine Macherel, a journalist for Swiss newspapers Tribune de Geneve and 24 Heures, in a Facebook video two years ago. He called her a “fat lesbian” and said Macherel’s work as a “queer activist” meant she was “unhinged,” according to Swiss public broadcaster RTS.

“This court decision is an important moment for justice and rights of LGBTQI people in Switzerland,” said Murial Waeger, co-director of the lesbian activist group LOS, in a statement. “The conviction of Alain Soral is a strong signal that homophobic hatred cannot be tolerated in our society.”

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Canada Issues Further Blow To Free Speech, Forces Even Podcast Platforms To Register With The Government

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has just revealed new draconian regulations, requiring all digital platforms that transmit audio or visual content and meet a certain earnings benchmark to register with the government agency before the end of November.

This new set of rules symbolizes a further restriction on free speech and an encroachment on the principle of internet openness, turning the digital world into an area under government watch.

Under these newly released regulations, a myriad of online platforms – from streaming services to social media and even subscription-based television – will be brought under governmental umbrella if they meet a revenue threshold in Canada.

Traditional radio stations and podcast services that live-stream online will not escape from the regulatory requirement either. However, platforms generating “less than $10 million in annual broadcasting revenues in Canada,” along with video games and audiobook services, will not be subjected to this rule.

This new policy unveiled by CRTC is a part of the agency’s implementation of the controversial Online Streaming Act that also forces private online media companies such as Netflix to financially contribute to Canadian content.

The legislation, also known as Bill C-11, sparked a heated debate when it suggested that user-generated content would come under the control of CRTC. Although the authorities reassured that content managed primarily by social media creators would be spared, the remaining part of the digital world is beginning to feel a heavy governmental hand.

To fulfill the new obligation, the platforms are required to provide the CRTC with their personal information, including their name, address, and contact details. Online broadcasting services offered by these organizations should be exposed to the regulator for inspection as well.

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