Recently Michelle Donelan, minister of state for universities, went on BBC Radio 4 to discuss the governments new and much vaunted higher education (freedom of speech) bill.

According to the accompanying press release, the bill would bring in new measures that will require universities and colleges registered with the Office for Students to defend free speech and help stamp out unlawful silencing.

If passed, the bill would entail fines for universities and compensation for speakers if events were cancelled, thereby essentially bringing an end to the no platform tactic.

When questioned about how this would apply to an issue like denying the Holocaust, Donelan responded: A lot of the things we would be standing up for would be hugely offensive, would be hugely hurtful, and seemed to confirm that the proposed law would indeed protect Holocaust deniers.

This has raised the shocking prospect that antisemites and notorious Holocaust deniers, such as disgraced historian David Irving and former British National Party leader Nick Griffin, could receive compensation if they were invited to speak at a university campus and the event was subsequently cancelled.

Since Donelans interview, reassurances have been offered and there has been talk of some sort of exemption in the policy for Holocaust denial. In a later tweet thread, Donelan clarified that antisemitism is abhorrent and will not be tolerated at our universities and that the bill would only protect and promote lawful free speech.

This is not helpful, as Holocaust denial remains legal in the UK. Her comments failed to clarify the seeming contradiction between the governments stated aim of cracking down on antisemitism on campuses, while also introducing a bill which could force universities to platform Holocaust deniers.

This row exemplifies the sort of lazy thinking that is so prevalent in the ongoing free-speech debate. If an exemption for denial is forthcoming, it actually raises more questions than it answers. Would there also be exemptions that allow for the no-platforming of race pseudo-scientists or pro-eugenics speakers? What about far-right or Islamist extremists whose speech does not reach the criminal threshold?

You cannot exempt one form of legal hate speech and not others otherwise what is the point of this bill? The government needs to either take an absolutist position on free speech, or accept that this is an extremely complex issue that requires much more rigorous thinking than has gone into this bill so far.

Similarly muddled thinking has gone into this issue in relation to the long-delayed, but very welcome, newdraft online safety bill, which was published by the government recently.

Oliver Dowden, secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said inThe Telegraph: The last thing we want is for users or journalists to be silenced on the whims of a tech CEO or woke campaigners. This sounds all well and good, but what is a woke campaigner and who is classed as a journalist?

The crux of the issue is that free speech has become a battleground in an ongoing culture war. The result of this lazy opportunism is that the governments attempts to score points could unintentionally result in a defence of Holocaust deniers and far-right extremists.

The most recognisable far-right figure in the UK, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon [aka Tommy Robinson], has long self-defined as a journalist, as does a far-right collective of so-called migrant hunters that film asylum seekers and migrants on the south coast. Will they be protected in a bill designed to reduce online harms?

The debate around the borders of free speech is an extremely complex one, with possibly huge ramifications if handled badly. The governments sloppy missteps of late are part of a wider laziness that pollutes this whole debate. It is extremely worrying that the politicised and reductionist arguments that have long been maliciously used by the far right to try to renormalise their prejudiced opinions are now being echoed by government ministers and legislation.

One of the major issues that many fail to grasp is the difference between our right to say what we want (a right we have) with the desire to say this wherever we choose. These are not the same thing and should not be confused. Nonetheless, the two continue to be conflated by those who oppose de-platforming online or no-platforming at universities.

Even more important is the myopic understanding of free speech that is so prevalent in these discussions. This current debate has no relationship to the quality or value of the speech people demand should be heard, when and where they demand. So many, including the government it seems, wrongly assume that diversity of opinion always leads to attainment of truth and that the correct argument will always win if debated.

It would be wonderful if true, but this optimism ignores the possibility that ill-informed opinions, or outright lies like Holocaust denial and race science, will flood the debate and that he who shouts the loudest will end up drowning out others. At worst, debates can become inundated with proven falsities, which risk legitimising topics that objectively are not legitimate. Just debating the Holocaust makes it a debate when it is not.

In addition, those condemning the supposed clampdown on free speech fundamentally underestimate the potential for social inequalities to be reflected in public debate, seemingly ignorant to the nature and extent of these inequalities in the marketplace of ideas.

As such, the position of these free speech advocates is paradoxical. They claim to be committed to valuing free speech above other values, while propagating an unequal debate that further undermines the free speech of those who are already harmed by social inequalities. What about the rights and free speech of Jewish students if their universities are forced to platform Holocaust deniers?

So much of this is based on the incorrect notion that sunlight is the best disinfectant and the truth will out. The Holocaust ended 76 years ago. It is one of the most documented historical events ever recorded, yet people still deny it. How will inviting deniers onto campuses help?

Those who argue for this position have yet to explain how nearly a century of sunlight on fascism and Holocaust denial has yet to disinfect them, and it begs the question how many more people have to die in terrorist attacks and genocides until someone finally manages to comprehensively debate them out of existence.

Free speech is a hugely important right that we must protect, but it is also a complex issue that demands serious thinking and nuance, not point scoring and slogans. The government needs to remember that before it introduces legislation that could seriously benefit far-right extremists.

Originally posted here:

Lazy Thinking in the Free Speech Debate Could Be Exploited by Extremists - Politics.co.uk

On Memorial Day thousands of Greenwich residents woke up to find American Flags in front of their houses. Attached to the flags were 9 x 6 postcards explaining the flag was a gift from the Metalios Group, part of Houlihan Lawrence.

Instructions on the card said those who wanted the flag picked up the following weekend could scan the QR code on the card and either either email or call the Metalios Group to schedule a pickup.

A good many people were happy for the gift and didnt give it a second thought, but the towns Zoning Enforcement Officer Jodi Couture saw more than a free flag.

I would not consider a flag to be a sign, but once they put the flyer on it I would. I would say that these were a violation of the sign regulations.

The Town has strict rules about commercial signs, most notably house for sale signs. Mr. Couture has said that although many people are under the impression that real estate for sale signs are not allowed, it is permissible to post a three-ft square sign that simply says For Sale and a phone number.

However, once logos or company names are added, that is considered an advertisement and therefore a violation.

The Re-Imagine Greenwich committee has discussed hanging informational banners from the lamp posts on Greenwich Avenue, but stopped short of including sponsor names on the banners. Previously, there was some controversy in 2019 when the Think Greenwich PR campaign sold banners to businesses.

They noted that as soon as a sponsor name goes on the informational banner it is considered a commercial sign and not allowed. Instead that committee is considering distributing stickers to businesses to put in their store windows to indicate their sponsorship.

In the past few weeks there have been conversations and newspaper headlines about signs and free speech.

Signs saying Stand up Greenwich and Ban Critical Race Theory were installed anonymously and allowed by the Town to stay in place, though many have vanished.

It is worth noting that campaign signs are protected. The Town does not regulate election signage.

Also, non profit lawn signs are sometimes approved by the First Selectmans office. In those instances, the signs must be up no more than 15 days before an event, and be removed within 24 hours afterward. The Highway department has taken signs down in the past if they impede sight lines.

Mr. Couture has said that commercial signs are not permitted and will be removed if seen or reported.

Joy Metalios responded to a request for comment saying she had had received an overwhelming positive response to the American flags.

She pointed to a thread on Next Door about the flags that got 600 Likes and many messages of gratitude.

Metalios said that 2021 was the fifth year she has distributed flags, though she skipped 2020 due to the pandemic.

She said that over the years she had increased the flag distribution from 1,500 flags to 4,000 in response to positive feedback.

She added that every year her team gives a sizable donation to the non profit organization Homes for our Troops,' though she did not indicate the amount. According to their website, the mission of Homes for Our Troops is to build and donate specially adapted custom homes for severely injured post-9/11 Veterans.

While there were many messages of appreciation, others were offended.

Anne Eddy said, The flag was appreciated; the oversized postcard was not. Like many of us, I have a father, grandfather, aunts, uncles, and friends who fought or lost their lives in battle. They gave honorably, humbly and anonymously.

Tom McGarrity said he could absolutely see how people would appreciate the gesture of a gifted flag on Memorial Day.

Thats not the issue, he said. The issue is using Memorial Day to grow your business.

McGarrity said if the Metalios Group was truly being altruistic, they should not have attached their name to the flags and donated all proceeds they might make through home sales commissions to an appropriate cause for veterans.

It stretches credulity to think that the Metalios Group was not thinking about growing their business through this initiative, he said.

McGarrity said he complained to The Metalios Group after he spotted a flag and postcard in front of his house, writing to them, saying, I think it is completely inappropriate to use Memorial Daya day to commemorate our fallen soldiersas an advertising gimmick for your business. If you really wanted to be generous on this holiday, you would have made a donation without any recognition. Please come and remove the flag you put at our mailbox.

Metalios explained the reason the cards with the Metalios Group contact information was attached to the flags. She said two years ago she met withthe Riverside Association to discuss picking up the flags for those who did not know how to dispose of them.

There was also discussion about the flags starting to touch the ground over time, she said. We went around and picked up the flags, but then residents were displeased as theywanted to keep their flag. This is why this year we printed thecard to say out of respect for the flag, we would have a volunteer pick it up for them the following weekend if they wanted us to. It is not to get the homeowners information. We understand the significance of a fallen flag, so next year we will be sure to also add an additional note on the card: We ask that you please bring your flag inside so it does not fall on the ground, to ensure we honor and respect our American flag, soldiers, and country.'

Indeed, the US Dept of Veterans Affairs notes that Public Law 94-344, known as the Federal Flag Code, says, One should never let the flag touch anything beneath it: ground, floor, water, merchandise. Never fasten or display it in a way that will permit it to be damaged or soiled. Never use the flag for advertising or promotion purposes or print it on paper napkins, boxes or anything else intended for temporary use and discard.

Ms Metalios said she had added a logo to the post cards at the request of the Board of Realtors.

A few years back, we were notified by the Greenwich Board of Realtors that the card needed to have not only the name of my team but the name of my brokerage, which is why it is all on the card I preferred to keep it more low key.

On Friday, Mr. Couture, the towns Zoning Enforcement Officer, commented in an email saying, I would not consider a flag to be a sign, but once they put the flyer on it I would. I would say that these were a violation of the sign regulations.

Dean Gamanos, Vice Commander of American Legion Post 29, said veterans abide by the protocols for display of the American flag.

We should love our neighbors and always show respect for other people, Gamanos said. Our nationstands forthese time-honored principles. But we should also show respect for our flag, which is a symbol of our nation and its principles. Many men and women have fought and died for that symbol and what it stands for. We should respect the flag just as werespect other people and try to follow guidelines for its use.

Encouraging the display of our flags is of course commendable, but also creatinga situation which allows our flag to be littered about and used for commercial gain is abhorrent, Gamanos added.

Ms Metalios said that out of 4,000 flags, she only received two calls two calls from residents who felt the flag was used as an advertisement.

I have immense respect for those who serve orwho have served ourcountry, she said. My niece is a graduate of theNaval Academy and is presently a JAG officer and my husbands uncle is a retired Colonel.

I see it as a way to raise awareness for a good cause, she continued. It saddens me that they think it is a way to capture addresses. If we wanted their names and addresses, we would simply look at their tax cards. And as far as capturing emails, we only send emails to those who opt in toour newsletter.

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Clarifying Confusion in Greenwich on Illegal Signs and Protected Free Speech - Greenwich Free Press

Freedom of expression wins strong endorsements around the world when people are asked, say researchers, so why have protections for speech consistently slipped for over a decade? Part of the problem is that many of those surveyed embrace a convenient attitude toward the issue: they support protections for speech of which they approve, but not of speech that offends them. Unfortunately, a right you're willing to extend only to yourself and your allies is no right at all and leaves freedom available only to those who wield power.

"Support for free speech is generally expressed by great majorities in all countries when people are asked their opinion," finds Who Cares About Free Speech?, a report recently published by Danish think tank Justitia, Columbia University's Global Freedom of Expression, and Aarhus University's Department of Political Science. In February of this year, researchers surveyed an average of 1,500 respondents each in 33 countries to come up with that seemingly encouraging result. The devil is in the details, though.

"While citizens in most countries think that criticism of the government should be allowed, many people are unwilling to allow statements that are critical or insulting of particular groups, their religion, or the nation," the authors add. "Moreover, citizens do not always prioritize free speech when there is a potential trade-off with other things they value, such as national security, good health, and the economy."

Some of these exceptions are stark. Majorities in 14 countries say that governments should be able to prevent people from making "statements that are offensive to your religion and beliefs." Most of the countries on that list aren't a shock; is anybody surprised to discover that majorities in Egypt, Russia, and Turkey think that free speech protections shouldn't extend to criticism of their own ideas? But Brazil is on that list, too. And even Germans are divided, with 47 percent agreeing that governments should be able to muzzle expression they find offensive.

Germany is similarly divided when it comes to insults to the national flag, with 48 percent supporting government restrictionsthe same share as in Australia. But 56 percent in France agree, placing that country among the 21 countries where majorities say that governments should be able to prevent people from insulting the national symbol.

Germans and Australians, along with Britons, rank among the majorities in 22 countries who think that governments should be able to prevent people from saying things that are offensive to minorities. (Germany, by the way, is the birthplace of a new wave of Internet "hate speech" censorship laws sweeping the world.)

Majorities in Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, and Tunisia say that governments should be able to prevent people from making statements in support of homosexual relationships.

Majorities in 19 countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, say that government should be able to prevent media organizations from publishing information about "sensitive issues related to national security." Will we have to just take officialdom's word for it that suppressed articles were national security-related? The survey doesn't say.

Given the exceptions that many people carve out in their generic endorsement of free speech, and that "public opinion about free speech (popular demand) tends to go hand-in-hand with the actual enjoyment of this right (government supply)" according to the survey, the consequences are no surprise.

"Global freedom of expression is in decline, now at its lowest for a decade" according to the 2019/2020 report from Article 19, a British organization named after the portion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights addressing free speech protections. "More than half of the world's population around 3.9 billion people live in countries rated in crisis."

The slide has been accelerated by the worsening condition for liberty in countries with large populations, including Bangladesh, China, India, Russia, and Turkey.

People suffering creeping censorship may gain new appreciation for shrinking liberty. Among the top ranked countries in Justitia's Free Speech Index are Hungary and Venezuela. They rank well not because of their protections for citizens' rightsHungary has an elected but increasingly illiberal government while the totalitarianism of Venezuela's socialist regime is limited only by its decaying resourcesbut because their residents voice strong support in the survey for the freedoms they're losing.

Offering some comfort is that Americans are also highly ranked, at third place after only Norway and Denmark. Even on the contentious issue of social media, 29 percent of Americans say there should be no regulation, while 37 percent say any regulation should be done only by the social media companies themselves; only 34 percent want to government to play even a shared role in social media regulation.

On the other hand, 43 percent of Americans say their ability to speak freely about political matters in this country has worsened in the past 12 months, compared to 17 percent who think it has improved (40 percent say it is unchanged). That may foreshadow a long-term shift, since, as other researchers have found, younger Americans are less supportive of free speech. The consequences can be seen, in part, in the erosion of the ACLU as a civil liberties advocate, as younger staffers push it away from its traditional emphasis on freedom of expression.

Variance in support for free speech extends beyond age differences. "In the US, young people, women, the less educated, and Biden voters are generally more restrictive regarding free speech," notes Who Cares About Free Speech? That said, while the strength of support varies in the U.S., majorities of men and women alike, and across ages, education levels, and partisan affiliations, still favor free speech.

Free speech isn't the only quality of free societies eroding in recent years.

"[D]emocracy has not been in robust health for some time," The Economist's Democracy Index 2020 observed earlier this year. "In 2020 its strength was further tested by the outbreak of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic Across the world in 2020, citizens experienced the biggest rollback of individual freedoms ever undertaken by governments during peacetime (and perhaps even in wartime).

Other sources report similar erosion of liberal democratic norms, accelerated by government power-grabs during the pandemic. Now we can add free speech to the mix, with populations in some places skeptical of core protections for expression. Government officials surprise nobody when they reach for expanded power; defeating them and reasserting fundamental freedoms will be difficult without popular support.

Link:

The World Loves Free SpeechExcept When They're Offended - Reason

Or new Journal of Free Speech Law is faculty-edited, but we'd love to have help from students with proofreading and bluebooking. (We may also need some help with cite-checking, though so far we're having faculty have their own research assistants do that.) We publish both electronically and in print, and our first articles should be out in late July.

I've lined up several UCLA law students for this, but I'd be glad to include others as well. In particular, we're going to need at least one person who can proofread an article in the next couple of weeks, and several who can help with our symposium articles (which are on regulations of social media platforms) in early July.

As you might gather from the job description, one thing we need is attention to detail. If your mind just absorbs information from written text, and doesn't bother you by alerting you to typos, then this will be a frustrating task for you. On the other hand, if errors just jump off the page at you as you read, you'd be perfect.

I realize that this is not like a normal law review: It will likely involve both less work and less responsibility. On the other hand, you'll get to read what we hope will be very interesting scholarship, participate in the process of publishing it (plus see your name in print on the masthead), and further practice your proofreading skills. If you're interested, please e-mail me atvolokh@law.ucla.edu. (Just to be clear, as with other law reviews, we're looking for volunteers, though we hope that the students who participate will find this professionally valuable.)

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Law Students: Interested in Helping With Proofreading on the Journal of Free Speech Law? - Reason

In May, 2020, Frances National Assembly passed a bill aimed at regulating online hate speech but what passed into law just two months later looked nothing like the proposal the government had initially hoped to put in place.

The legislation ran into the same type of resistance that these efforts have been meeting from free-speech advocates around the world. In the case of France, however, the decisive blow was delivered by the courts.

Among other things, the French Constitutional Council struck down a provision that would oblige social-media companies to remove hate speech from their platforms within 24 hours of a complaint. The court found this to be a breach of the right to freedom of expression and opinion.

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Because the government was planning to establish a serious financial penalty (up to $1.7-million) for any company that didnt take down the offensive content in the allotted time under the law, the court felt this might compel some platform operators to be risk-averse and take down material that was flagged as dangerous but ultimately didnt meet a hate-speech threshold. In other words, the threat of a fine would incite a form of self-censorship.

As a result, the legislation was defanged of many of its major consequences when it became law in July, 2020.

Now, Canadas federal government is making its own foray into this realm. Ottawa is expected to introduce hate-speech legislation before Parliament rises later this month. With an election widely expected in the fall, however, any new bill will likely die on the order paper. Meantime, groups on both sides of the hate speech-free speech debate will be able to hone their arguments for the day its reintroduced, should the Liberals get that opportunity down the road.

Canadians have bore witness to the dangers of online hate. It was a factor in the murder of six men at a mosque in Quebec City in 2017, and in killings around the world, most notably the slaughter of 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, two years ago. Those are some of the incidents that have garnered broad attention. But online hate is everywhere, comes in all forms and targets many different groups.

And its beyond time that we, as a country, did something about it.

That is not to say that anything about introducing laws to safeguard us from this evil is easy. (Though in theory, you would think it should be.) There are legitimate concerns that such laws could be so all-encompassing in scope they put excessive discretion in the hands of government, and before you know it, were talking a redux of George Orwells 1984.

But to the extent this might happen especially in the early days under a hypothetical new hate-speech regime it is worth it. Avoiding the matter until you come up with language that makes all sides happy would be folly. Who knows how many more men (and to a lesser extent women) will be radicalized online in the meantime. If other governments efforts are any indication, what matters is that the work begins now.

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Indeed, the French had modelled much of their original online hate bill on what the Germans passed into law in 2018, amid great pushback from free-speechers. But Angela Merkels government prevailed. Now, any company that doesnt remove obviously illegal material within 24 hours can face a penalty of up to $73-million, proving that Germanys government is serious about cracking down on hate, no doubt motivated by the disturbing rise of far-right extremist groups in the country.

For his part, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has indicated that the legislation the federal government introduces will compel online operators to monitor and remove material deemed illegal in a timely manner or risk facing a fine. What timely manner means remains to be seen; the same goes for the type of penalty platform operators could face. But it has to be a number that means something.

The proliferation of those holding radical views shaped by a broader white nationalist movement should concern us all. It is a mortal danger to civil society and we must insist that any means by which these thoughts and ideas are being given broad exposure be brought under intense scrutiny and control.

It is no longer good enough to let social-media companies police themselves; thats clearly not working. Thats why governments need to step into the breach fraught as that may be.

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Opinion: Canada needs a tough online hate speech law now - The Globe and Mail

The allegation that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are conspiring to silence conservatisms leading voices and delegitimize conservative points of view is well-founded but not surprising. Long before the internet the political right was regularly de-platformed by the left-leaning titans of print and broadcasting,editorial boards and journalists consistently promoted Democrat politicians and progressive agendas. Long before people were logging on to get their news, almost every major network and newspaper could be counted on to either tear down conservative Republicans or ignore them.

So former President Donald Trumps recently decreed two-year ban from Facebook, added to his bans on Twitter and YouTube, are just overt reminders of that longstanding bias. What makes it especially painful, however, is that conservatives for a time thought the wilds of the internet might at last allow them to break free from elitist censorship. They didnt reckon on virtual monopolies being run by billionaire progressives.

Liberals, who in the not-so-distant past championed free speech (speaking truth to power) have now become enthusiastic supporters of censorship. While the ability to quash dissenting views is especially delicious for liberals when they are in power, as they are now, they have also mustered the timeless power of the mob to quell the opposition in all political seasons. The cancel culture is now the censorship tool of the left.

In every profession conservatives bite their tongues while inane wokeness is forced upon them, afraid that an unacceptable comment or post, or even supporting a conservative candidate, might cost them their careers. While the billionaire class parrots progressive notions and ignores communist oppression, thereby solidifying lucrative political connections, owners of small businesses dare not speak out about endemic crime in their communities in fear they will be targets of demonstrations or worse. My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, a vocal Trump supporter, is fighting to keep his company going because so many retailers have cancelled orders for his products. Those retailers live in fear of woke boycotts and so shy away from controversy. Being called a racist today is akin to being called a witch in the 1600s the louder the denial, the louder the calls for fire.

Lists of prominent persons who have been suspended or banned from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube reveal the anti-conservative bias, which gathered momentum before and after the 2020 election. That bias is bad enough when it kills controversial opinions, as when Fox News contributor Candace Owens was suspended from Facebook for criticizing Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmers draconian COVID lockdown orders. It is deadly when it kills legitimate scientific debate. Two examples of the latter are noteworthy.

Donald Trump Jr., son of the former president, had his Facebook account suspended in 2020 because he stated that Hydroxychloroquine could help patients recover from Covid-19. There is increasing evidence that the commonly used anti-inflammatory does in fact have a significant impact on the severity and duration of the disease if given early and in the proper dose, but the drug was demonized because President Trump was an early advocate. One virologist recently estimated it could have saved over a hundred thousand lives in the US.

Then there is the case of Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan, banished after she published a link to a paper suggesting that COVID-19 was created in a Chinese government lab. We now know, through US intelligence and scientific sources, that a lab leak of a manipulated virus is a very likely scenario. Big Tech has big plans in China, and little reason to risk the ire of the Chinese communists by questioning their bat theory.

Why the unwillingness of the left to allow their agenda to compete in the marketplace of ideas? The answer is obvious their ideas are foolish at best (see New Monetary Theory) and at worst they are dangerous to the unity of the nation (see Critical Race Theory). The people who promote the progressive agenda know they must act fast before their illusions are revealed by the harsh light of reality. Their love of censorship is a sign of their own fears and the bankruptcy of their ideas.

Martin Fey is a member of the Quiet Corner Tea Party Patriots.

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View from the right: social media and their left-leaning leaders attack free speech - Norwich Bulletin

The government of IndianPrime MinisterNarendra Modiis in a battle withU.S.tech firms over a new set ofonlinespeech rulesthatit has enactedfor the nationofnearly1.4billion.

The rulesrequire companies to restrict a range of topicson theirservices,comply withgovernment takedown orders andidentifythe original source of informationshared.If the companiesfail tocomply, tech firm employees can be held criminally liable.

The escalation of tensions between Modis government and tech firms, activists say, could result inthecurtailmentof Indians online speech.

Absent a change in direction, the future of free speech in the worlds largest democracy is increasingly imperiled, said Samir Jain, director of policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a digital rights advocacy group.

Users will have less freedom of expression and less access to news and entertainment that is unapproved by the government. The rules will thereby undermine Indian democracy,Jain toldVOA.

At the center of the battle is Twitter, which asked for a three-month extensiontocomply withthenew IT rules that went into effect May 25.

On May 24, New Delhi policeattemptedto deliver a noticeto Twitters office, which was closedat the time,andthenreleased a video ofofficers entering the building and searching the officeson localTV channels.

In a tweetdays later, Twitter said itwas concerned by recent events regarding our employees in India and the potential threat to freedom of expression for the people we serve.

We, alongside many in civil society in India and around the world, have concerns with regards to the use of intimidation tactics by the police in response to enforcement of our global terms of service, as well as with core elements of the new IT rules,thecompanysaid.

Earlier this month,the government sent a letter to Twitter sayingit was giving the companyone final notice adding that if Twitter fails to comply, there will be unintended consequences, according to NPR, which obtained the letter.

It is beyond belief that Twitter Inc.hasdoggedlyrefused to create mechanisms that will enable the people of India to resolve their issues on the platform in a timely and transparentmanner and through fair processes by India based clearly identified resources, the letter said.

The Indian government is pushing back on criticism that its new rules restrict online speech.

Protecting free speech in India is not the prerogative of only a private, for-profit, foreign entity like Twitter, but it is the commitment of the worlds largest democracy and its robust institutions, Indias Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said in a statement.

Some who are critical of the governments new IT rules are also skeptical of the tech industrys response.

It isnot an existential crisis as everyone will have us believe, saidMishi Choudhary, a technology lawyer and founder of Indias Software Freedom Law Center.Choudhary saiduserswill beforcedto stayon the sidelines, rather than taking an active role in discussions about their basic rights.

Some of the companies are still playing the game of we are a sales officeor our servers are in California, frustrating anyone who comes to their legitimate defense as well,Choudharysaid.

India has a long tradition of free speech,and itstech savvy market is attractive for U.S. tech firmslooking to expand.Although the Indian constitution protects certainrights tofreedom ofspeech,it has restrictions.Expressions are bannedthat threatenthe sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order,decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.

Even before the recent tensions between tech firms and the government, India was among the top nations in the worldseekingto restrict online speech.From Jan. 1, 2020,to June 1, 2020, India wasone ofthe top five countriesaskingTwitterto remove content.

For example, afterviolent protestson Jan. 26thinvolving farmersunhappy with new agricultural laws,the Modi government demandedTwitter block 500 accounts, includingthose ofjournalists,activistsand opposition leaders. Twitter didso, and then eventually reversedcourse only to receiveanoncompliancenotice,according to acompanystatement.

Several Indian journalistsfaced charges of sedition over their reporting and online posts following the protest by farmers.Among them is theexecutiveeditor of theCaravan magazine, Vinod K. Joseand although his Twitter handle iscurrently active, itwas withheld in India this year.

The government isalsoparticularly sensitive about criticism of its handling of the coronavirus, asking that social media firms remove mention of the B.1617 variant as the Indian variant. In May,the government ordered social media firms to remove any mention of the Indian variant. The variant first reported in India is now called Delta, according to the World Health Organization.

Earlier this month, Twittercomplied witha request from the government to block theTwitter account of Punjabi-born Jaswinder Singh Bains, aliasJazzyB, a rapper.While Twitter informed him that he had been blocked forreportedly violatingIndias Information Technology Act, he said he believes he was blocked for supporting the farmers in their protests, according to media reports.

JasonPielemeier,director of policy and strategy at theGlobal Network Initiative, an alliance of tech companies supporting freedom of expression online,wroteto the MeitY, calling attention to many issues with the new rules.

Each of these concerns on its own can negatively impact freedom of expression and privacy in India, he wrote. Together, they create significant risk of undermining digital rights and trust in Indias regulatory approach to the digital ecosystem.

Twitterisntthe only tech firm affected by new laws.WhatsApp,the encrypted messaging appowned by Facebook,filed a lawsuitin Mayagainst the Indian governmentarguing that the new rules allow for mass surveillance.According to the lawsuit,the new rules areillegal andseverely undermine the right to privacyof its users.

At issue forWhatsAppis that under the new rules, encryption would have to be removed, and according to The Guardian, messages would have to be in atraceabledatabase.

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Indian Government in Standoff with Twitter Over Online Speech - Voice of America

The UK is ruled by a government that struggles with reality. Whether the consequences of Brexit for Northern Ireland, the implications of a herd immunity policy for a coronavirus-type pandemic, or the result of building a coal mine in response to the climate emergency, Johnsons government is constitutionally incapable of making its rhetoric line up with the real world. But, while these other examples may be more harmful in the long-term, the most absurd example of this Conservative governments obtuseness might its inability to wrap its head around the universality of rights like freedom of speech.

When Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, discovered on Tuesday that Magdalen College Oxfords MCR the student body representing its graduate students had voted to take down a print of the Queen from their common room, his response was not to shrug and say that students can decorate their common spaces in any way they see fit. Instead, he tweeted an outraged statement, criticising the decision as absurd, and praising the Queen as a symbol of what is best about the UK.

For those of us aware that the Education Secretarys rants on freedom of speech are arrant nonsense, it is easy to dismiss him as a tragic joke, Frank Spencer from Some Mothers Do Have Em incarnated and elevated to an unjustifiably high office of state. The interior design choices of a student body even one at as illustrious an institution as Magdalen College should never spark a response from one of the most senior politicians in the UK. It is equally easy to dismiss this as a storm in a teacup, with right-wing newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express splashing the controversy over their front pages in a desperate attempt to spark yet another battle in the culture war.

But we should not forget the more serious implications that such an attitude towards free speech, as well as towards other rights and liberties, can have, especially on those who are particularly vulnerable to abuses of state power, such as refugees and asylum seekers. One such group are those asylum seekers kept at Napier Barracks, which was controversially repurposed as accommodation for them by the Home Office last autumn.

Even though Public Health England warned the Home Office that the conditions would be unsafe given the pandemic, it forced refugees into overcrowded dormitories, with almost four hundred residents, at one point, living at the facility, while reports of inadequate food, hunger strikes, and substandard hygiene continued to leak out. For the Home Office to ever house refugees in overcrowded, unsanitary barracks is distressing. For it to choose to do so in the middle of a pandemic is callous and negligent.

Inevitably, the High Court ruled last week that housing migrants in such squalid conditions was irrational, and that the Home Office had unlawfully failed to ensure a standard of living which was adequate for the health of the claimants. But despite this criticism from the Court, the Home Office has simply interfered further with the residents rights, with its contractors allegedly forbidding them from speaking to the media about living conditions in the barracks, and warning them that if they do so, it may harm their chances of being granted asylum.

It is a tragic irony that as the UK is welcoming Hong-Kongers to its shores, offering visas to those at risk of persecution from the Chinese government for speaking out against Xi Jinpings authoritarian regime, it is simultaneously attacking the freedom of speech of those hailing from less desirable countries. If freedom of speech means anything, it must include the right to criticise the government even if it is the government that you are simultaneously asking to grant you refuge.

More harmful, however, than this petty intimidation of refugees many of who, given their precarious position, will be deterred from speaking about their living conditions is the refusal of the government to effectively engage with the decision of the High Court. Rather than admitting the barracks are unfit for purpose, closing them, and rehousing the refugees and asylum seekers in safe accommodation, the Home Office has continued to use the barracks with little apparent improvement in conditions. Minnie Rahman, campaigns director for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants told the Financial Times yesterday that residents are still being housed in dorms of 14contravening public health advice, and that sanitation at the camp remains poor.

Nor does the reaction of Priti Patel in the House of Commons earlier this week suggest that this situation is likely to improve. Addressing the chamber, she refused to apologise for re-purposing the barracks in the face of warnings from PHE, and instead implicitly suggested that the asylum seekers should be grateful for what they received, giving accommodation to people who otherwise would have been sleeping in dirty makeshift tents in France and other European countries.

Setting aside the inexplicable, yet inevitable, British exceptionalism in her statement, rights are not contingent on a persons past living conditions, nor are they contingent on what passes muster in other nations. The Home Office had an ethical and more importantly now has a legal obligation to remedy the living conditions. Instead, the Home Secretary is doggedly denying the only rational conclusion, which is that the barracks must be closed, and is instead trying to shift the narrative through criticising the media for glamourising migrants crossing the Channel and encouraging the police to get back to zapping criminals.

Rights and liberties are universal. Just as a college MCR is free to put up a picture of the Queen for any reason, so it is equally free to take it down. The fact that some may view their reasons as feeble in Magdalen MCRs case, because the Queen is apparently a symbol of colonial oppression does not justify the government wading into student politics, or mean that senior fellows at the college should be required to profess loyalty to the monarch. And much as students at the University of Oxford have the right to speak out against the Queen, or the institution of monarchy, or the government, so too do asylum seekers, even as they seek refuge on British shores from persecution and oppression in their mother country. Indeed, it is because of freedoms like this that refugees risk life and limb to find safe harbour in the UK. If the government had any decency, it would celebrate such freedoms. Instead, it degrades them.

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Free speech and the culture wars The Justice Gap - thejusticegap.com

Two artists have been selected to honor Worcester icon Abby Kelley Foster and are creating a lighted lectern sculpture that will be placed downtown, Worcester city officials said.

Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier have been selected by the Public Art Working Group to complete the citys Abby Kelley Foster Artistic Node Project, officials said in a statement issued Tuesday.

Kelley Foster was a Worcester resident who served as a prominent leader in the abolitionist and womens rights movement in the 19th century, defending free speech and advocating for equality and the abolishment of slavery.

She fought abuse to exercise the right to use her voice in order to bring about revolutionary cultural change, said Hirsch. Kelley Foster teaches us that the struggle for equal rights far outweighs personal costs, and her fearlessness and dedication should inspire us all, whichever cause we hold closest to our hearts.

The sculpture will feature a perforated lectern in metal, illuminated from below and engraved with text taken from Kelley Fosters records that highlights using ones voice for social change amidst adversity. It will be at the corner of Main and Walnut streets and is planned for public activation in October, the statement said.

Hirsch said the sculpture will serve as a potent symbol of Kelley Fosters story, and will bring us closer to the woman who, in Lucy Stones words, earned for us all the right of free speech.

Last year, the city issued a call to artists for the Abby Kelley Foster Artistic Node Project, looking for an art installation recognizing Kelley Foster, the Womens Rights Movement, or Revolution as potential themes. The location of the installation area was the site of the first National Womens Rights Convention in 1850.

Between its location and its long history with activism, Worcester was the site of the first two National Womens Rights Conventions in 1850 and 1851, and Worcester County was home to many suffragists, said Erin Williams, the citys cultural development officer. Abby Kelley Foster was one of these suffragists and abolitionists. Completion of this project will honor her and the courageous women who led the way for social justice, and encourage those who see it to learn more about the woman, the womens rights movement, and Worcesters history.

The project is part of the Main Street Reimagined Initiative, which aims to improve the existing streetscapes and activate public spaces through art installations.

By tapping into the creativity and passion of artists, we are able to celebrate, honor, and share our history in ways outside textbooks and museums publicly, free of charge, and accessible to all who will pass by the area, said Worcester City Manager Edward M. Augustus Jr. Im looking forward to seeing the Abby Kelley Foster project once it is completed, and to similar upcoming initiatives.

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Worcesters Abby Kelley Foster to be honored with lighted lectern sculpture created by two artists - MassLive.com

The name, the For the People Act, has an elegant simplicity. The number, HR 1, does, too. Democrats call it a first-aid kit for a republic where big money, gerrymandering and voter intimidation have the body politic on life support.

It is that, in part. But some of the medicine packed in this gargantuan legislation will undercut Americas foundational freedoms. And that is why we do not lament the bills demise at the hands of Joe Manchin, who has said he cannot support an effort to kill the filibuster to push it and other bills through the Senate.

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Free speech is the most important right and cannot be curbed - Grand Haven Tribune

The name, the For the People Act, has an elegant simplicity. The number, HR 1, does too. Democrats call it a first-aid kit for a republic where big money, gerrymandering and voter intimidation have the body politic on life support.

It is that, in part. But some of the medicine packed in this gargantuan legislation will undercut Americas foundational freedoms. And that is why we do not lament the bills demise at the hands of Joe Manchin, who has said he cannot support an effort to kill the filibuster to push it and other bills through the Senate.

HR 1 does some very good things. It would create automatic voter registration, restore federal Voting Rights Act protections, override state voter suppression efforts, attack corrosive gerrymandering, and fix some flawed federal ethics rule. Normally, it would be worth holding ones nose about the bad parts to win passage of such provisions. Here, though, the bad parts are utterly unacceptable.

To stop dark money from infecting elections, the bill would dramatically expand regulation of speech, requiring disclosure of the names and addresses of donors who give $10,000 or more to groups engaging in campaign-related disbursements. That means that any organization whether dedicated to environmental protection, abortion rights, racial justice, public education, you name it would have to list its big donors any time it runs any ad praising or criticizing a candidate or elected official.

As American Civil Liberties Union lawyers have written, We know from history that people engaged in politically charged issues become political targets and are often subject to threats of harassment or even violence. The effect would be tying the tongues of advocacy organizations on matters of vital importance.

Meanwhile, the bill would broaden existing prohibitions on paid advocacy on foreign nationals that would prohibit many noncitizens from taking part in broader civic life. (While money isnt the same as speech, without money, speech often fails to influence public debate.) Thats almost surely unconstitutional. It is certainly wrong.

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Editorial: Against For the People: Free speech is the most important right and cannot be curbed - Yahoo News

Mackubin Owens| Guest columnist

Mackubin Owens, of Newport, a monthly contributor, is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

The latest battlefield in Americas culture war is critical race theory,a pernicious and reactionary theory that, until recently, was confined to academia. No longer. CRT now infects most U.S. institutions,corporations and the government, including the military.

CRT can be traced to Karl Marx and his epigones, manifesting itself first as critical theory, a Marxist philosophical framework that rejects the validity of concepts such as rationality and objective truth. It posits two categories: oppressed and oppressors. In Marxs original formulations, the lens was economic class. The bourgeoisie was the oppressor class and the proletariat were the oppressed. CRT substitutes race for class. According to CRT, the entire system of a society is defined by those who have power (whites) and those who dont (people of color).

Several states have now sought to ban the teaching of CRT. In response, CRTs advocates make three arguments: first, CRT issimply a benign academic theorysupporting the latest stage in the struggle for equal civil rights; second, banning the teaching of CRT is an assault on free speech; and third, opposing CRT is an attempt to whitewash American history.

Regarding the first, CRT is fundamentally at odds with the principles that underpinned all advances in the rights of Black Americans, from the Civil War constitutional amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964:that all Americans should be treated equally, regardless of race, color, creed, or religion. These are philosophically linked to the Declaration of Independence, which holdsthat human beings are equal in their possession of natural rights and that, accordingly, no one has the natural right to rule over another without the latters consent.

But CRT attacks the American Founding. Advocates of CRT do not wish to fulfill the promises of the American Founding, which they regard as racist. Instead, they want to replace the principles of the Founding with something radically different, for instance, replacing such concepts as equality with equity and subverting the meaning of justice.

Regarding free speech, CRTemploys a rhetorical tool developed by the neo-Marxist philosopherHebert Marcuse: repressive tolerance. According to Marcuse, totolerate all ideas the essence of reasonable discourse that traditionally has defined the mission of education is, in fact, repressive, since it does not privilege the correct ideas. True tolerance, Marcuse argued, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

Adopting Marcuses logic, CRTbrooks no dissent. To argue against CRT is itself fundamentally racist,evidence of the dissenters white fragility, unconscious bias, or internalized white supremacy.Thus rather offering a perspective that invites debate, CRT education is essentially ideological indoctrination.

Finally, opponents of CRT do not want to whitewash American history. But perspective matters. Slavery is Americas original sin, but when the United States was founded in 1776, slavery was a worldwide phenomenon. Americas Founding principles made the abolition of slavery a moral imperative. Jim Crow was indeed a terrible stain on America, especially as it was nationalized by Progressives such as President Woodrow Wilson. The Tulsa Massacre must never be forgotten.

But CRT ignores what Frederick Douglass said of President Abraham Lincoln: Most Americans of all races have risen above their prejudices, striving to bring American practice into accord with American principles regarding justice.

CRT demeans African Americans by stripping them of all agency, treating them as simply inanimate objects, helpless victims of impersonal forces. It also essentially absolves politicians of bad policy.

But in the end, CRT is nothing more than a return to 1850s-style racism as espoused by John Calhoun and Chief Justice Roger Taney in his infamous Dred Scott decision. It is divisive; it fosters racial hatred by trafficking in racial stereotypes, collective guilt, racial segregationand race-based harassment. It rejects Martin Luther Kings hope that we should be judged, not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character.

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Opinion/Owens: Making the case against 'critical race theory' - The Providence Journal

A Fathers Day gathering in Andover featuring Texas U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw has been called off due to planned protests, the Massachusetts GOP said.

These protests would have caused a major disturbance in my neighborhood, and I do not want my guests, my neighbors, or Congressman Crenshaw to be subjected to a chaotic and potentially volatile situation, said party Chairman Jim Lyons, who planned to host the gathering as his home. While the event is now canceled, we are nonetheless committed to hosting Congressman Crenshaw at some point in the future.

The fight against censorship, cancel culture, and the far-lefts obsession with silencing anyone who dares to express their right to free speech and free expression continues, Lyons said in a statement. The threat is real.

Crenshaw, 37, a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye in Afghanistan, has called for Roe v. Wade, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision protecting womens right to abortion, to be overturned.

He also has called for conservatives to work for stricter election laws at the state level.

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Mass GOP cancels fundraiser with Texas U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw over threat of protests - Boston Herald

The government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in a standoff with social media companies over what content gets investigated or blocked online, and who gets to decide. Bikas Das/AP hide caption

The government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in a standoff with social media companies over what content gets investigated or blocked online, and who gets to decide.

MUMBAI AND SAN FRANCISCO One night last month, police crowded into the lobby of Twitter's offices in India's capital New Delhi. They were from an elite squad that normally investigates terrorism and organized crime, and said they were trying to deliver a notice alerting Twitter to misinformation allegedly tweeted by opposition politicians.

But they arrived at 8 p.m. And Twitter's offices were closed anyway, under a coronavirus lockdown. It's unclear if they ever managed to deliver their notice. They released video of their raid afterward to Indian TV channels and footage shows them negotiating with security guards in the lobby.

The May 24 police raid which Twitter later called an "intimidation tactic" was one of the latest salvos in a confrontation between the Indian government and social media companies over what online content gets investigated or blocked, and who gets to decide.

While the Indian constitution includes the right to freedom of speech, it also bans expression or publication of anything that risks India's security, public order or "decency." But the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has introduced a long list of new IT rules going beyond this. They require social media platforms to warn users not to post anything that's defamatory, obscene, invasive of someone else's privacy, encouraging of gambling, harmful to a child or "patently false or misleading" among other things.

If the government orders it, platforms are required to take down such material. The rules also require platforms to identify the original source of information that's shared online or, in the case of messaging apps, forwarded among users. Company executives can be held criminally liable if the platforms don't comply.

Many tech companies are aghast. They say these rules violate their users' freedom of expression and privacy, and amount to censorship. Free speech advocates warn that such rules are prone to politicization and could be used to target government critics.

India's Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad (left) and Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar announce new regulations for social media companies and streaming websites in New Delhi in February. India's government has warned Twitter to comply with the country's new social media regulations, which critics say give the government more power to police online content. Manish Swarup/AP hide caption

India's Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad (left) and Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar announce new regulations for social media companies and streaming websites in New Delhi in February. India's government has warned Twitter to comply with the country's new social media regulations, which critics say give the government more power to police online content.

But India with nearly 1.4 billion people is one of the tech companies' biggest markets. The country's hundreds of millions of internet users present a ripe business opportunity for companies such as Twitter and Facebook, especially since they're banned from operating in China.

And India's government like others around the world knows this, says Jason Pielemeier, policy and strategy director at the Global Network Initiative, a coalition of tech companies and other groups supporting free expression online.

"Over time, the governments have become more and more sophisticated in terms of their understanding of the pressure points that large internet companies have and are sensitive to," he says. "Those companies have also, to some extent, become more sensitive as they have increased the revenue that they generate in markets all around the world. And so where you see companies having large user bases and governments increasingly dissatisfied with those companies' responsiveness, we tend to see situations like the one that is currently flaring up in India."

Some companies, including Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, have reportedly complied, at least partially, with the new rules, which took effect May 25. Others are lobbying for changes. Twitter says it's "making every effort to comply" but has asked for an extension to do so. WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, has sued the Indian government.

The police raid last month on Twitter's offices in New Delhi came amid squabbles between India's two biggest political parties, accusing each other of spreading misinformation.

Politicians from Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, had been tweeting screenshots of what they claimed was a "media toolkit" used by their main rival, the Indian National Congress party, to amplify online complaints about Modi's handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Twitter's rules about platform manipulation prohibit users from "artificially amplifying" messages.

But the screenshot BJP politicians were tweeting of this alleged "toolkit" was fake. Some of India's most reputable fact-checkers concluded it was a forgery. After its own investigation, Twitter slapped a "manipulated media" label on those tweets by BJP politicians.

The government then asked Twitter to remove that label. Twitter did not. Police raided its offices three days later.

"We, alongside many in civil society in India and around the world, have concerns with regards to the use of intimidation tactics by the police in response to enforcement of our global Terms of Service, as well as with core elements of the new IT Rules," a Twitter spokesperson wrote in a statement emailed May 27 to NPR and other news organizations.

To many observers, it looked like the Indian government was trying to drag Twitter publicly into a dispute between rival political parties, by sending the police to serve Twitter executives with a notice that could have been sent electronically especially during the pandemic.

"Serving a notice of that kind, in the form that played out, just confirms the idea that this is just theater," said Mishi Choudhary, a technology lawyer and founder of India's Software Freedom Law Center.

Choudhary says the optics are troubling. It looks like the Indian government has rewritten the country's IT rules to endow itself with extraordinary powers to silence its critics online. In February, on orders from the Indian government, Twitter blocked more than 500 accounts but then reversed course when it realized many belonged to journalists, opposition politicians and activists.

More recently, the Indian government demanded that social media companies remove news articles or posts referring to the B.1.617 coronavirus variant as the "Indian variant." (The WHO has since renamed this variant, which was first identified in India, as "Delta").

"The government has been trying to either block handles or curb dissent," Choudhary says. "Both the government and [social media] companies are claiming they're protecting users, when it's convenient for them, but users are really the ones left without much power."

Modi's government published its new IT rules on Feb. 25 and gave social media companies three months to comply. So the rules took effect May 25. Twitter is asking for another three-month extension.

"We will strive to comply with applicable law in India. But, just as we do around the world, we will continue to be strictly guided by principles of transparency, a commitment to empowering every voice on the service, and protecting freedom of expression and privacy under the rule of law," a Twitter spokesperson said in the May 27 statement.

One of the requirements Twitter finds most onerous is that it name an India-based chief compliance officer who would be criminally liable for content on the platform. The company says it's worried about its employees in that situation.

Indian government officials say Twitter has already had three months to comply with this and the rest of the requirements.

"You are a giant, earning billions of dollars globally! You can't find a technological solution?" India's IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, recently said on India's CNN-News18 channel.

Prasad acknowledged that India's social media rules might be more onerous than what tech companies are used to in the United States. But India is a place where mob violence has erupted over rumors shared on social media. The government needs to take extra precautions, he said. And big tech companies could comply with these rules, he insisted, if they really wanted to.

"The same Twitter and social media companies are complying with all the requirements in America! In Australia! In Canada! In England!" Prasad said. "But when it comes to India, they have a double standard."

Tech executives have been grilled about misinformation by members of the U.S. Congress. But when India summons them, they often don't show up. Choudhary says this has fueled anger among Indian politicians, who fume that they're not taken seriously.

"The companies say, 'Our servers are in California. So we don't have this information.' Or, 'We can't come and talk to you,'" she says. "That gives the government justification to say, 'How can you monetize our users, but when we want to have a discussion with you, you claim you're only a sales office?'"

India has reason to be sensitive to the threat of being taken advantage of by foreign powers. It has a colonial past. Even before Great Britain ruled India, a foreign corporation, the East India Company, pillaged it for centuries.

Choudhary calls what big tech companies are doing in India "digital colonialism."

"It's now the Silicon Valley 'bros' who think they can tell us what to do and what not to do," Choudhary says.

In a particularly harshly worded statement issued May 27, the Indian government called Twitter a "private, for-profit, foreign entity" that needs to "stop beating around the bush and comply with the laws of the land." It accused Twitter of "seek[ing] to undermine India's legal system" and blamed the company for what it called "rampant proliferation of fake and harmful content against India."

Last weekend, the Indian government appeared to reject Twitter's request for an extension. It sent the company what it called "one final notice" as a "gesture of goodwill," urging the tech giant to comply with the new social media rules. The government warned of "unintended consequences" if Twitter refuses to comply.

Nigeria's government recently banned Twitter after the company took down a tweet from President Muhammadu Buhari that appeared to threaten separatists. There are fears that India could do the same.

For Twitter, that would be a blow not just to its business interests, but to its avowed commitment to fostering public conversation.

"As much as these kinds of centralized corporate platforms can be frustrating in a number of ways, they are, when it comes down to it, the place where the majority of the world interacts," says Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"Years ago, I would have said that companies should stand up to authoritarian governments to tell them, 'Hey, block us if you want to, but we're not going to comply with these restrictions,'" she says. "But as time has gone on, that's become less and less of a viable option. ... For some people, these are really vital channels for accessing a global audience, for reaching people outside of their normal space, especially during the pandemic."

In India, for example, people took to Twitter to source medical supplies and raise money during a devastating COVID-19 resurgence.

On Monday, a Twitter spokesperson told NPR that the company remains "deeply committed to India," has been "making every effort to comply" with the new IT rules and has been sharing its progress with the Indian government.

The same day, Twitter also disclosed to a Harvard University database that it had restricted access within India to four accounts including those of a hip-hop artist and a singer/songwriter that had criticized the Modi government online. To comply with Indian law, Twitter sometimes blocks content in India but allows it to remain visible outside the country.

Twitter and other companies face pressure from other governments too. Around the world, free speech advocates say, there are increasing demands to restrict certain types of speech and for governments to play a greater role in regulating online platforms.

Germany, for example, has a law requiring social media platforms to act quickly to take down illegal speech or face financial penalties.

In the U.S., Democrats are pushing companies to curb misinformation, while Republicans have turned their own complaints about social media censorship into laws like one passed in Florida last month that bars platforms from banning politicians.

Another part of the showdown between India's government and tech companies hinges on privacy.

The government wants to be able to trace misinformation that's shared online. So as part of its new IT rules, it's asking social media companies to be able to identify the "first originator" of any piece of information. It says it will ask for that information only in rare cases where a potential crime is suspected to have been committed.

WhatsApp filed a lawsuit over this last month in the Delhi High Court. The company says it's unable to provide "first originator" information unless it traces every message on its platform which would amount to what it called "a new form of mass surveillance."

"To comply, messaging services would have to keep giant databases of every message you send or add a permanent identity stamp like a fingerprint to private messages with friends, family, colleagues, doctors, and businesses," WhatsApp wrote in an FAQ about traceability on its website. "Companies would be collecting more information about their users at a time when people want companies to have less information about them."

Experts say messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal would likely have to break their end-to-end encryption which ensures only the sender and recipient, not the company or anyone else, can read a message to comply with Indian law. Namrata Maheshwari, an India-based lawyer and policy consultant for the Center for Democracy and Technology, predicts that will have a "chilling effect" on free speech.

"This is problematic for users' right to privacy, because the core promise of end-to-end encryption is that users can communicate safely and securely without any unauthorized access by any third party, including the service provider," she says.

Maheshwari says the WhatsApp lawsuit is one of many filed in various high courts across India challenging India's new IT rules. They bring a key third party judges into the ongoing standoff between the Indian government and social media companies. The lawsuits will be decided over several months, or even years.

"As far as the question of who the stronger entity here is, I actually think it's now the Indian courts," she says. "The battleground has moved."

Editor's note: Facebook, Google and LinkedIn are among NPR's financial supporters.

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India And Tech Companies Clash Over Censorship, Privacy And 'Digital Colonialism' - NPR

Washington, DC In advance of the bilateral meeting between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Representative Mikie Sherrill (NJ-11) released the following statement:

As a former Russian policy officer in the US Navy, I know that the only thing that Vladimir Putin understands is power-politics. For years now, Vladimir Putin has operated with impunity because of the former administration's failure to hold him accountable. Whether it is the harboring of cybercriminals, attacks on political free speech, especially on opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny, or military provocations throughout the region, Putin has operated as if there are zero consequences for his actions.

It is reassuring to know that there is finally an American president with the ability and the willingness to hold Putin accountable. As President Biden enters into tomorrows bilateral meeting, the message will be clear: the United States will no longer accept Putins aggressive support for violations of international law.

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Representative Sherrill Statement on Biden-Putin Meeting - Mikie Sherrill

This article is part of a special report on the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers.

The Pentagon Papers case was a triumph for press freedom. Or was it?

The Supreme Courts unsigned opinion rejecting the Nixon administrations attempt to censor publication of a secret history of the Vietnam War was just three paragraphs long and declared only that the government had not overcome a heavy presumption against prior restraints on that occasion.

The vote was, moreover, fairly close 6 to 3. Every justice contributed a concurring or dissenting opinion, none of which got more than two votes. You need a spreadsheet to make sense of who voted for what, but the bottom line is at odds with the conventional view that the case was a flat-out First Amendment victory.

A majority of the Supreme Court not only left open the possibility of prior restraints in other cases but of criminal sanctions being imposed on the press following publication of the Pentagon Papers themselves, Floyd Abrams, who represented The New York Times in the case, wrote in his 2014 book, Friend of the Court.

There are, it turns out, two ways to understand the Pentagon Papers decision. One is that it was a potent vindication of press freedom establishing a bedrock principle: The government cannot stop the new media from providing information to citizens in a democracy.

Another view takes account of the letter and limits of the decision. Even as to prior restraints, the Supreme Court left the door slightly ajar. As to the possibility of punishing the press after publication, two justices in the majority wrote that they had no doubt that news organizations could be prosecuted under the espionage laws.

To be sure, the decision has taken on a symbolic weight that has swamped its technical holding, said Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and an editor of a volume of essays commemorating the 50th anniversary of the decision, National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press.

The case created a largely overwhelming sense that the press cannot be either enjoined from or prosecuted for publishing national secrets, he said. Thats become the expectation as a result of Pentagon Papers.

But even if the decision seems to have created near-absolute protection for the press, he went on, it addressed only one piece of the relationship between citizens and their government.

An intermediary the press was protected. But neither its sources nor its readers gained rights.

What Pentagon Papers and its successor decisions created, Professor Stone said, was an incoherent state of the law.

The decision did not live up to its promise, Anthony Lewis, a Supreme Court reporter and columnist for The Times and an authority on the First Amendment, wrote in his 1991 book, Make No Law.

The Pentagon Papers case was a famous victory for the press, and for the Madisonian principle that the public must know what its government is doing, wrote Mr. Lewis, who died in 2013. Or so it seemed at the time. Later decisions showed that it was not much of a victory.

Prior restraints against the press may have been effectively barred, Mr. Lewis wrote, but the Supreme Court did not hesitate to block books by former government officials who sought to write about national security secrets they had learned in the course of their employment.

In those later decisions, Professor Stone said, the court took the view that there is no right to leak and no public right to information.

The decision had another, darker side, wrote Alexander Bickel, the Yale law professor who argued the case for The Times in the Supreme Court.

The American press was freer before it won its battle with the government, he wrote in his classic 1975 book, The Morality of Consent.

Through one civil and two world wars and other wars, there had never been an effort by the federal government to censor a newspaper by attempting to impose a prior restraint, he wrote. That spell was broken, and in a sense, freedom was thus diminished.

Justice William O. Douglas, who was in the majority in 1971, wrote two years later that the vote had been too close and had followed two weeks of successful government-imposed censorship.

We have allowed ominous inroads to be made on the historic freedom of the newspapers, he wrote. The effort to suppress the publication of the Pentagon Papers failed only by a narrow margin and actually succeeded for a brief spell in imposing prior restraint on our press for the first time in our history.

The Supreme Court: Upcoming Cases

It was unimaginable, though, that the Supreme Court would rule out prior restraints entirely, and that posed a litigation-strategy puzzle for Professor Bickel when he argued before the justices.

He conceded, at least in the abstract, that courts could stop a publication if it would lead directly and unavoidably to a disastrous event.

Justice Potter Stewart explored the point. What if, he asked, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?

Professor Bickel tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him: You would say that the Constitution requires that it be published and that these men die?

Professor Bickel yielded, to the consternation of some of The Timess allies. Im afraid, he said, that my inclinations of humanity overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion to the First Amendment.

As a matter of litigation tactics, it was a necessary answer, said David Rudenstine, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and the author of The Day the Presses Stopped, a history of the case.

I dont think an advocate could say anything else, Professor Rudenstine said, unless you really wanted to lose the case.

Still, Professor Bickels response outraged the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an unusual brief that same day disavowing Mr. Bickels answer. It said Justice Stewarts question must be answered in a totally different manner and that the answer is, painfully but simply, that the right of a free people to determine its destiny has been, and should continue to be, paramount to any attempt by the government to impinge upon, erode or ultimately destroy the right of the people to know.

Professor Bickel had made another concession when he argued the case in the federal appeals court in New York. Asked for an example of a government secret that would justify a prior restraint, he posited, presciently as it turned out, one in which the hydrogen bomb turns up.

Eight years later, on the only other occasion on which the federal government has sought a prior restraint on national security grounds, a federal judge in Wisconsin barred The Progressive magazine from publishing an article called The H-bomb Secret, which included detailed instructions for making a hydrogen bomb.

While the appeal was pending, others published similar information and the government dropped its case.

As that case suggests, prior restraints that actually keep information already in the hands of the press from the public are hard to accomplish. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in the Pentagon Papers case, more than a dozen newspapers had published parts of them. These days, a whistle-blower like Daniel Ellsberg could skip the intermediaries entirely and post documents directly on the internet.

In a contemporary context, the prohibition on prior restraints is almost irrelevant, Professor Rudenstine said.

The more significant constraint is the possibility of criminal prosecution after the fact, one left open by some of the justices in the majority in the 1971 decision.

According to a 1975 memoir by Whitney North Seymour Jr., who was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan in the early 1970s, Richard G. Kleindienst, a deputy attorney general, suggested convening a grand jury in New York to consider criminal charges against The Times. Mr. Seymour said he refused. A grand jury was then convened in Boston, but it did not issue an indictment.

So far, there have been no prosecutions of journalists in the United States for seeking or publishing classified information, but the espionage laws on their face may well be read to forbid possession and publication of classified information by the press.

One, enacted in 1917, prohibits anyone with unauthorized access to documents or information concerning the national defense from telling others. In the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Byron R. White, joined by Justice Stewart, said it seems undeniable that a newspaper can be vulnerable to prosecution under the 1917 law.

But the law, as Harold Edgar and Benno C. Schmidt Jr. described it in a comprehensive 1973 article in the Columbia Law Review, is in many respects incomprehensible and so sweeping as to be absurd.

If these statutes mean what they seem to say and are constitutional, they wrote, public speech in this country since World War II has been rife with criminality.

At the same time, there is an almost universal consensus that the government classifies far too much information. Erwin Griswold, a former dean of Harvard Law School who argued the case for the Nixon administration as U.S. solicitor general, agreed that the classification system was broken.

It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material, he wrote in a 1989 essay in The Washington Post, that there is massive over-classification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.

That applied, he wrote, to the Pentagon Papers themselves. I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication, he wrote. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat.

The presss victory in the Pentagon Papers case may have been incomplete. But a loss would have been devastating.

What would be the law today if the case had come out differently? Professor Rudenstine asked. Its very possible that there could have been a prosecution of The Times. That would have changed American law quite a lot.

The general thought, he said, was that if you lost the prior restraint case that there was no chance of winning the criminal prosecution. The opposite happened, said Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University and the other editor of National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press. As a practical matter, the press and the government have arrived at the state of mind that there will not be prior restraints or subsequent prosecutions that that would violate the spirit of the First Amendment, he said. Apart from the Progressive case, the government has not gone after the press in either form.

But he added that this was in large part a product of mature accommodation among responsible institutions, one that was at risk during the Donald Trump administration.

The continuing viability of a fulsome Pentagon Papers doctrine does not apply in the context of a near-authoritarian government like the one we had, he said. Its those kinds of ambiguities about Pentagon Papers that makes the whole system much more vulnerable when you have a true threat to democracy.

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The Complicated Impact the Pentagon Papers Had on Free Speech - The New York Times

At the end of April, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Brandi Levy, a high school cheerleader, who posted Fuck school fuck cheer fuck softball fuck everything to Snapchat in 2017 and was kicked off the team for a year. The words were superimposed over a photo showing B.L. and her friend with their middle fingers raised, members of her legal team explained. The courts ruling in this case could potentially disrupt the established principle that students do not lose their right to free speech at the schoolhouse gate, as the court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines in 1969. Mother Jones called Levys case the most important student free speech case to come before the Supreme Court in a half-century.

One notable figure on todays free speech beat, Michael Powell of The New York Times, surely missed an opportunity to highlight this case in his story, published this weekend, on the alleged wavering of First Amendment defense at the American Civil Liberties Union. In Powells telling, the organization is locked in an unprecedented, perhaps irreconcilable struggle between free speech and social justice. Its national and state staff members debate, often hotly, whether defense of speech conflicts with advocacy for a growing number of progressive causes, including voting rights, reparations, transgender rights and defunding the police, Powell writes. As a result, he claims, the organization has fallen down on its principles. One hears markedly less from the A.C.L.U. about free speech nowadays. Its annual reports from 2016 to 2019 highlight its role as a leader in the resistance against President Donald J. Trump. But the words First Amendment or free speech cannot be found. Nor do those reports mention colleges and universities, where the most volatile speech battles often play out.

Much the same, however, could be said about some glaring omissions in Powells own missive. What he pitches as a document of an existential threat to the organizations commitment to free speech should be seen for what it is: a culture war in 1As clothing. Its a familiar trick, one which everyone from Josh Hawley to Abigail Shrierwhose anti-trans work Powell referenceshas tried in the immediate post-Trump era. By comparison, Powell aims for a lighter touch, but his omissionsof history, of the organizations present caseloadreveal the storys true concern: a certain kind of speech, for a certain kind of person.

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The New York Times' Culture-War Definition of Free Speech - The New Republic

That may be an overstatement. Mr. Wizner, who runs the A.C.L.U.s free speech project, has represented the National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden and rattled off important cases his lawyers handled. But FIRE, he acknowledged, has taken a strong lead on campuses, where so many consequential battles are fought.

FIRE does not have the same tensions, Mr. Wizner said. At the A.C.L.U., free speech is one of 12 or 15 different values.

Traditionally, the A.C.L.U.s state affiliates monitor and argue free speech cases, but in recent years some shied from such fights. Here are a few examples:

In 2015, University of Missouri students protested racism and established an encampment in a campus quad. When a student journalist tried to take photos and talk to protesters, students and a communications professor physically blocked the reporter from doing so. The A.C.L.U. of Missouri applauded the courageous leadership of student activists and faculty members, and two national A.C.L.U. officials wrote columns about the protests. They did not mention First Amendment rights.

Four years later at the University of Connecticut, two white students walking home late at night loudly repeated a racial slur. In the ensuing uproar, the university police arrested and charged the students with ridicule on account of race.

The A.C.L.U. of Connecticut demanded that the university hire 10 Black faculty and staff members and require a freshman course on ending racism on campus. It made no mention of the arrests, other than to opine that the police force is an inherently white supremacist institution.

Two days later, Mr. Cole issued a corrective: The students conduct is not criminal, he stated. The First Amendment protects even offensive and hateful speech.

Even the New York Civil Liberties Union, traditionally an independent-minded A.C.L.U. affiliate that has produced several national executive directors and stood at the forefront in defending free speech cases, did not want to talk about those issues. A spokeswoman for its executive director, Donna Lieberman, said, We dont feel well have anything to add.

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Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis - The New York Times

Jun 7th 2021

WESTERNERS TEND to regard freedom of speech as a universal good. However, a forthcoming report by Justitia, a Danish think-tank, demonstrates that public support for freedom of expression varies widely among countries, just as legal restraints on speech do. In many countries, particularly authoritarian regimes, people say they want fewer controls. But perhaps surprisingly, in a handful of places poll respondents suggest they want less freedom than they currently have.

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The report is based on a survey conducted in February of 50,000 people in 33 countries. The researchers asked respondents whether they believed that a wide range of controversial statements, such as insulting the national flag or making offensive comments about minority groups or religious beliefs, should be permitted. They combined the average responses to each of these questions into an index of support for free speech. They then compared these scores with an index of freedom of expression compiled by V-Dem, another think-tank, which measures how much liberty people in each country enjoy in practice.

In general, the more freedom respondents in a given country said they wanted, the more that country tended to provide. One inescapable weakness in the reports approach is that people in places with tight restrictions on speech may not feel comfortable telling pollsters how they really feel. However, large shares of respondents in many authoritarian countries, including Egypt, Turkey and Russia, were nonetheless willing to say that they approved of liberties that their governments do not protect. This was particularly true in countries that started to limit freedom of expression only recently, such as Hungary and Venezuela. Perhaps people who once enjoyed freer speech than they do now are more likely to support it than are those who have always lived under stricter rules.

However, just as respondents in many countries said they did not have enough freedom of expression, people in others tended to say they were actually given too much liberty. This pattern was most pronounced in Kenya, Tunisia, and Nigeria. These countries grant rights similar to those found in Japan or Israel, but their citizens tend to disapprove of freedom of speech just as much as people do in Egypt or Turkeythe two countries with the toughest restrictions on expression among the 33 surveyed by Justitia.

Although not enough data is available to explain this phenomenon fully, faith and sectarianism may play a role. In general, respondents in Muslim-majority countries were far less supportive of free speechparticularly when it comes to offensive comments about religionthan those elsewhere. Within the Muslim world, this pattern tends to hold regardless of a countrys form of government: respondents were barely more enthusiastic about freedom of expression in democratic Indonesia than they were in authoritarian Egypt. In both Tunisia and Nigeria, Islamist movements have gained ground over the past decade. They may have shifted public opinion against free speech faster than those countries governments could change laws.

Another possible explanation is sectarian conflict. Kenya and Nigeria have been riven by fighting between ethnic groups at various points during the past two decades, and citizens of those countries may fear that hostile speech presages violence. Kenyas low overall score on support for freedom of expression was driven largely by the 82% of respondents there who said that the government should be able to prevent people from making statements that are offensive to minority groups, which was by far the highest share in the survey. In both rich countries and poor ones, people are often willing to sacrifice civil liberties if they think their safety is at risk.

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In some countries, people think they have too much freedom of speech - The Economist

Free speech is all around us, even in ways that might not be immediately obvious.

We talk a lot about the First Amendments free speech protections during campaign season, when individuals want to express a deeply held idea, when they want to refrain from speaking, and when an idea is deemed unacceptable by certain groups.

The Constitutions protection of free speech surely matters in all those situations, but free speech is a much broader value than thatit is at the root of our most basic human and social needs, including our economic dealings.

Our daily economic lives depend on free speech in underappreciated ways. Many of us earn our livelihood through creative activity and trade, and both are directly related to the First Amendment. But every single one of us depends on commercial messagesadvertisements, solicitations, and descriptions of products and servicesto improve our economic well-being in one way or another.

All those boxes on the grocery store shelves, for example, are not just dinner; they are the tangible expression of the First Amendment.

But surprisingly, courts have not treated this essential and routine expression of free speech to full First Amendment protection.

Since the 1980 case of Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission, several Supreme Court decisions have created an untenable hierarchy in First Amendment law. The law sometimes reserves the highest protection for the expression of political ideas but allows the government more latitude to restrict speech that provides commercial information.

Further, courts have held that speech by compensated professionals may be regulated in ways that political speech may not.

So when award-winning restaurateur Chef Geoff Tracy wanted to advertise happy hour deals at his Virginia restaurant, the speech police were waiting to shut down ads that used the verboten phrases happy hour or two-for-one. Why? Because of an arbitrary law restricting his freedom of speech.

Virginia law allowed restaurants to offer half-priced drinks but made it illegal to call these specials two-for-one.

A similar situation faced Peggy Fontenot, an Indian artist who belongs to a tribe that the State of Oklahoma doesnt recognize. When she marketed her artwork as American Indian-made, the state told her she didnt qualify as a real Native American.

Likewise, the Georgia Board of Nursing was worried that if Debbie Pulley honestly explained her decades of experience as a midwife, people might jump to the conclusion that she was a practicing registered nurseso they tried to deny her the right to use the word midwife to describe herself.

In each of those cases, Pacific Legal Foundation fought back and won, protecting the right of free speech. But in each of those cases, the odds were stacked against us because the speech touches on economic regulations. Government had a thumb on the scale that wouldnt be there in any other free speech case.

Because the courts have created a two-track First Amendment, numerous free speech principles that protect the free expression in some contexts have no application to commercial or professional speech.

The overbreadth and prior-restraint doctrines prevent government from regulating speech with too broad a brush, or stifling speech before it is uttered, but they are generally inapplicable to commercial speech restrictions. And while restrictions on noncommercial speech that discriminate against certain topicswhat courts call content-based restrictionsare subject to the highest judicial scrutiny, content-based restrictions on commercial speech remain subject to only middling review.

Justice Clarence Thomas has correctly written that there is no philosophical or historical basis for asserting that commercial speech is of lower value than noncommercial speech.

The truth is that for many people, seemingly mundane communications about products, services, prices, and economic opportunities are as important to them in their daily lives as the most contentious or momentous political debates. This is truer than ever in the age of the internet, where global trade thrives online and new ways of delivering professional services, like telemedicine and online education, are becoming the norm.

The free exchange of ideas and information is vital for human progress in both our intellectual and material lives.

PLF is committed to the consistent application of the First Amendment, overturning the precedent that has undermined protections for commercial and professional speech.

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Free speech protects ideas, including the right to truthfully advertise - Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF)