Tag: free speech

Thought Police: Germany Conducts Mass Raids over Online ‘Insults’ Against Politicians

Federal police in Germany have conducted mass raids across 13 states on Tuesday over online ‘insults’ levied against politicians.

A large number of apartments and houses were raided in Germany on Tuesday as Federal police in the country look to prosecute those who made allegedly hateful remarks against elected officials online.

In total, federal authorities have said that they have checked over 600 statements for so-called “criminal content”, with 100 people being “searched and questioned” across 13 different German states.

According to a report by Der Spiegel, a significant number of raids have also been conducted, with the houses and apartments of those suspected of posting illegal online messages being searched by law enforcement for incriminating evidence.

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The New York Times Admits That ‘America Has a Free Speech Problem’

The New York Times published a terrific editorial on Friday that takes note of “America’s free speech problem” and points to both right-wing legislation and cancel culture—enforced by an uncompromising strain of progressivism—as culprits.

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” wrote The Times.

The editorial includes a predictable (and mostly well-deserved) condemnation of conservative attempts to legislate away uncomfortable discussions about sex and race in schools. But it stands out for directly attacking the left’s censorship impulse.

“Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech,” wrote The Times. “Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.”

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This Is the End of Free Speech Online

The internet has changed radically in the past decade or so. Where social-media giants once boasted about being ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’, in recent years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms have become increasingly censorious, cracking down on dissenting views and offensive speech. Big Tech has relished this role as the unofficial arbiter of acceptable thought. But while the likes of Facebook may have severely wounded free speech online, it could be the UK government that deals the killer blow.

This week the long-awaited Online Safety Bill was published, which aims to make the UK the ‘safest place to be online in the world’ – in other words, the country with the most strictly regulated and censored internet of any liberal democracy. This mammoth piece of legislation was five years in the making, and those five years show. The bill is vast in scope, and terrifying in its implications for free speech.

Most significant is the ‘duty of care’ the bill imposes on social-media firms. Tech platforms will be legally required to prevent users from seeing both illegal content and ‘legal but harmful content’.

What actually constitutes ‘harmful content’ has yet to be revealed. If the Online Harms White Paper (published in 2020) is any guide, then this is likely to include content which might cause psychological harm, disinformation and trolling or harassment. Of course, all of these ‘harms’ are subjective. ‘Trolling’ can extend from playful banter to persistent harassment. Which views tech firms consider to be ‘disinformation’ has less to do with lies and truth than political expediency.

Once this list of harms is approved by parliament, the culture secretary will have the power to add more categories of harm, and firms will be required to report new ‘emerging harms’ to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. So we should expect the bill’s censorious remit to expand over time.

Firms which fail to comply with the new duty-of-care requirements, or are obstructive or provide false information to Ofcom, can be fined up to 10 per cent of their annual worldwide revenue, and platform executives can be sentenced to up to two years in jail. These severe penalties have allowed UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries to claim that she is taking on Big Tech, and that she is holding Silicon Valley firms ‘accountable’. But it is not Big Tech firms that suffer when free speech is curtailed online. Indeed, they have already demonstrated their indifference to free speech.

After all, it is not Facebook, Twitter or Google that produce the ‘harmful’ content the government wants to eliminate. It is us, the users of social media, the deplorable, unruly citizens, who are saying things that our political masters would rather we did not say. It is our ability to express ourselves that will be curtailed by this legislation, not theirs. And this is why this bill is so troubling.

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Another Tech Company Attacks “Health Misinformation”

Discord recently announced an update to its terms of service that prohibits “false or misleading health information that is likely to result in harm.” Through clouds of corporate-speak, the new rules go on to imply that criticism of the COVID-19 vaccines, disputing the guidance of health authorities, and advocating for unapproved treatments will be banned on the platform.

This is disappointing in part because Discord has largely remained decentralized, allowing users to form and regulate private servers, and has stayed out of meddling in what users can and cannot say except for broad, less-intrusive rules.

I’m in charge of moderating Out of Frame’s Discord server, and these rules put us in an awkward position. To comply and keep Discord from banning our server, we must play the role of justices of the Supreme Court, interpreting passages such as:

​​​​​”Discord users also may not post or promote content that attempts to sway opinion through the use of sensationalized, alarmist, or hyperbolic language, or any content that repeats widely-debunked health claims, unsubstantiated rumors, or conspiratorial narratives.”

and

“We allow the sharing of personal health experiences; opinions and commentary (so long as such views are based in fact and will not lead to harm); good-faith discussions about medical science and research […]”

Not only do these rules include numerous terms that are subject to interpretation (conspiratorial, good-faith, alarmist) and that would be ambiguous enough to enforce fairly if they didn’t require moderators to be experts in the current scientific consensus regarding any particular medical issue, but they also require us to know the unknowable. No one can be galaxy-brained enough to predict the future and calculate all the possible consequences of a piece of information being distributed. Not users, not moderators, not algorithms, or anything else can know for a fact whether a concept will “cause harm.”

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Millionaire Book-Writer And Professional Board-Sitter Chelsea Clinton Attacks Substack Authors As “Grifters”

Chelsea Clinton wants to talk about grifting. That’s just great.

The fruit, apparently, doesn’t fall that far from the global elitist narrative tree.

Perhaps looking to ride the coattails of those ganging up on “controversial anti-vaxx misinformation” (read: any uttered thought not handed down by Dr. Anthony Fauci from the heavens above) or perhaps looking to drum up support by her Twitter sycophants, Chelsea Clinton took to her Twitter account last week to lash out at Substack for providing a platform for free speech and for people to voluntarily subscribe to newsletters they’re interested in and willing to pay for.

Wow, sounds nefarious, Chelsea! Glad you stepped in.

The first daughter took exception with the “anti-vaxx grift” that is supposedly taking place on here on Substack, citing a Guardian article written last week as her source.

“A group of vaccine-sceptic writers are generating revenues of at least $2.5m (£1.85m) a year from publishing newsletters for tens of thousands of followers on the online publishing platform Substack, according to new research,” the Guardian wrote last week.

“Why is Substack facilitating science denialists’ ability to profit from destructive lies (and comfortable profiting themselves)?” Clinton asked.

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Let’s Back Up A Sec And Ask Why Free Speech Actually Matters

The Joe Rogan/Spotify controversy is still going on and has only gotten more vitriolic and intense. Claims that Spotify must walk away from its $200 million contract with the world’s most popular podcaster for promoting vaccine misinformation have sparked a lot of debates about freedom of speech, online censorship, what exactly those terms mean, and whether they can be correctly applied to the practice of Silicon Valley deplatforming.

When confronted with accusations of quashing free speech and promoting censorship, those who support online deplatforming in this or that situation will often respond with lines like “It’s not censorship, it’s just a private company enforcing its terms of service,” or “Nobody is obligated to give you a platform,” or “Freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach,” or by posting the famous XKCD comic which says “If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole, and they’re showing you the door.”

And of course it’s true that nobody is legally guaranteed the right to speak on an independent online platform. But even if we ignore the fact that this censorship behavior is not being driven solely by the wishes of independent corporations and is in fact happening in increasingly close coordination with the US government whose officials openly threaten Silicon Valley platforms with repercussions if they don’t regulate speech, the fact that it is technically legal for those companies to silence voices they don’t like is not a sound argument. It doesn’t prove that censorship isn’t happening or that the deplatforming is okay, it just proves that it is technically legal for those giant monopolistic platforms to do those things. A casual glance at history shows that plenty of terrible things have been done which were perfectly legal at the time.

To really answer the question of whether the increasingly widespread practice of Silicon Valley censorship via algorithm and deplatforming is a major problem and whether an increase in speech restriction is desirable, we need to take a step back and ask ourselves why free speech even matters in the first place. Why is it something that’s written into constitutions and upheld as sacrosanct in so many nations? Why is it a value we’re told has supreme importance all our lives?

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Law student government rejects free speech group because debate can cause ‘real harm’

For the second time recently, Emory Law School in Atlanta is dealing with a controversy involving a student-run organization seeking to squelch debate in the name of preventing harmful speech.

Its Student Bar Association, the law school equivalent of student government, denied a charter to the Emory Free Speech Forum (EFSF) in part based on the “lack of mechanisms in place to ensure respectful discourse and engagement” at its events, such as a moderator.

This could cause a “precarious environment” and “potential and real harm” on fraught topics such as race and gender, “when these issues directly affect and harm your peers’ lives in demonstrable and quantitative ways,” the rejection letter said.

A charter comes with eligibility for university funding and the use of university resources. Given Emory Law’s “well-established promotion of free speech values” and EFSF’s “overlap” with other chartered groups, the letter said, “we fail to see a need” to fund it.

A week earlier, three law professors pulled their essays from a forthcoming issue of the Emory Law Journal in response to student editors ordering one of them to remove “insensitive language” from a “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive” critique of the concept of systemic racism.

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