Daily Archives: October 17, 2012

Conservative MP Dominic Raab talks to Mike Harris about civil liberties, free speech and how he wouldnt lose any sleep if the UKs communications data bill were canned

This is the first of a new Index Interviews series

LONDON, 16/10/2012 (INDEX). Dominic Raabs father fled Czechoslovakia just before the Second World War. The Conservative politician cites the fall of the Berlin Wall as one of his biggest political influences and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the writer whose life he most admires. In many ways, his style is from another generation of politicians; he shoots from the hip describing Vladimir Putin as a very Machiavellian, ruthless politician, he is unaccompanied by an aide, and, rarer still, he doesnt check his BlackBerry every five minutes.

Index is meeting Raab in a side room off Portcullis House, Parliaments new office block for members of Parliament (MPs) and their staff. On the agenda are free speech issues both in the UK and abroad from the Leveson Inquiry to the Kremlins suppression of Russian NGOs.

Lets start with an easy question: Does he believe the culture of offence has got worse? He does.

There is certainly much more legal restriction on what you can say. Weve seen it with the incitement to religious hatred debate, he says, the glorification of terrorism debate and the ASBOs (Antisocial Behaviour Orders) that originated under the last government. His concern is that these limitations are making society less open: Were narrowing the space where free speech and open debate takes place.

Raab defends preacher Philip Howard, who was banned from street preaching by Westminster Council in 2006:

I used to walk past him on Oxford Street with his microphone. The eccentricities of British life thrive on there being an open space where free expression can take place, and I dont think most people thought he was such a nuisance that he ought to have been banned from preaching. Were seeing the salami slicing of free speech.

The law I draw is the very clear one that John Stuart Mill drew, that you shouldnt be saying things which incite violence or disorder, or cause tangible concrete harm to other people. Mere offence or insults dont satisfy that test.

Raab is clear he thinks the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has over-prosecuted free speech cases in the past citing the Paul Chambers Twitter joke trial case: Aside from the free speech issue, what a waste of money!

Go here to see the original:
Index Interview: The salami slicing of free speech

Everyone has a right to free speech -- and that even extends to creeps.

49-year-old computer programmer Michael Brutsch was the main moderator for Reddits Creepshot forum, which sparked outrage last month for encouraging users to post covert photos they had taken of women in public, typically close-ups of body parts for voyeuristic sexual thrills.

Brutsch was publicly exposed by Gawker writer Adrian Chen last weekend, leading his real-world employer to fire him and many Reddit administrators to ban links to Gawker websites as a show of solidarity with head creep Brutsch.

Please dont do that, said Yishan Wong, CEO of the massive social news site.

We stand for free speech, Wong wrote in a private post on the site obtained by Chen. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because thats the law in the United States but because we believe in that ideal independently.

Besides, banning any links from Reddit to Gawker just looks bad, he wrote.

Lets be honest, this ban on links from the Gawker network is not making Reddit look so good, Wong wrote.

Wong began his post -- titled we seem to be in a bit of a pickle -- by laying down the law: Reddit is all in favor of the freedom of legal speech, even if that speech is as clearly offensive as Brutschs Creepshots was.

The majority of Wongs posting dealt not with free speech or whether Reddit ought to host forums such as Creepshots -- a revolting collection of images so widely denounced that it was ultimately removed from the site -- but Chens investigative journalism and ultimate decision to reveal the identity of the forum moderator.

Moderators were enraged by Violentacrez's "doxxing" (hacker slang for outing) and decided to censor Gawker links in protest, Chen explained.

Read more:
Reddit CEO defends free speech -- even for creeps like Violentacrez

Note: This posta response to Reddit's free speech argument in the wake of Gawker's Violentacrez storywas originally published on writer John Scalzi's personal blog, and is republished here with permission. You can find the original here.

I've been watching with some interest the drama surrounding Gawker writer Adrian Chen revealing Reddit user/celeb/moderator/troll Violentacrez's real life identity (Michael Brutsch), which among other things resulted in Brutsch losing his job, presumably because Brutsch's employer was not 100% comfortable employing someone who spent his days moderating online forums with titles like "Chokeabitch" and bragged about the time he performed oral sex on his 19-year-old stepdaughter. It also resulted in Reddit globally banning links from Gawker (since rescinded, although forum moderators ("subredditors") can choose to block links within their forums - and do), and various bannings due to discussion of the drama.

Wrapped up in all of this are various chest beatings about free speech and whether someone's online anonymity is sacred, even if he is a creep, the culture of Reddit in particular and the Internet in general, and in a larger sense where the rights of one individual - say, a creepy middle-aged dude - begin to impinge on others - say, young women who don't believe that merely being in public is an invitation to be sexually degraded. This is all interesting stuff, to be sure, and naturally I have a few thoughts on these topics. In no particular order:

1. The "free speech" aspect of this is largely nonsense. Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; it's a privately owned space on the Internet. From a legal and (United States) constitutional point of view, people who post on Reddit have no "free speech" privileges; they have what speech privileges Reddit itself chooses to provide them, and to tolerate. Reddit chooses to tolerate creepiness and general obnoxiousness for reasons of its own, in other words, and not because there's a legal or constitutional reason for it.

Personally speaking, when everything is boiled down to the marrow, I think the reason Reddit tolerates the creepy forums has to do with money more than anything else. Reddit allows all those creepy subreddits because its business model is built on memberships and visits, and the dudes who visit these subreddits are almost certainly enthusiastic members and visitors. This is a perfectly valid reason, in the sense of "valid" meaning "allowing people to be creepy isn't inherently illegal, and we make money because of it, so we'll let it happen." But while it makes sense that the folks at Reddit are either actively or passively allowing "we're making money allowing creeps to get their creep on" to be muddled with "we're standing up for the principles of free speech," it doesn't mean anyone else needs be confused by this.

If someone bleats to you about any of this being a "free speech" issue, you can safely mark them as either ignorant or pernicious - probably ignorant, as the understanding of what "free speech" means in a constitutional sense here in the US is, shall we say, highly constrained in the general population. Additionally and independently, the sort of person who who says "free speech" when they mean "I like doing creepy things to other people without their consent and you can't stop me so fuck you ha ha ha ha" is pretty clearly a mouth-breathing asshole who in the larger moral landscape deserves a bat across the bridge of the nose and probably knows it. Which is why - unsurprisingly - so many of them choose to be anonymous and/or use pseudonyms on Reddit while they get their creep on.

On the subject of anonymity:

2. Anonymity/pseudonymity is not inherently evil or wrong. Astute observers will note that on this very site I allow both anonymous and pseudonymous postings, because sometimes you want to say something you wouldn't normally say with your name attached and/or because you have personal/business reasons to want not to have a trail of comments lead back to you. Perfectly reasonable and perfectly acceptable, and as I moderate this site pretty attentively, anyone who decides to use the cloak of anonymity to be an assbag will get their words malleted into oblivion in any event.

It's not anonymity or pseudonymity that's the issue. The issue is people being assholes while anonymous because they don't believe it's ever going to get back to them. This is a separate issue from anonymity/pseudonymity. Someone who is anonymous shouldn't be assumed to be an assbag, any more than someone who uses their real name should be assumed to be a kind and decent human being. In both cases, it's what they say that should be the guide.

However:

Continued here:
Why the Violentacrez Story Isn't About Free Speech [Reddit]