Monthly Archives: July 2022

EFF joined the Association of Progressive Communications (APC) and other digital rights organizations from around the world, urging the Indian government to withdraw its new amendment to Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code (2021 IT Rules).

EFF has already expressed its concerns about IT Rules chilling effect on Internet users freedom of expression and privacy. The 2021 IT Rules compel significant social media intermediaries (those with registered users in India above a 5 million user threshold) to deploy technology measures to proactively monitor certain types of content that have previously been found in violation of the 2021 IT Rules. This includes child sexual abuse material and content that has previously been removed for violating rules. Proactive monitoring will force companies to provide automated tools which require monitoring what users post and share online, and inevitably rely on error-prone filters that undermine lawful online expression.

Online intermediaries face harsh penalties for failure to comply with the 2021 IT Rules, including a jail term of up to seven years.

The online intermediaries are also forced to comply with strict removal timeframes, e.g., they have 36 hours to remove restricted content, and 72 hours to respond to government orders and requests for datanot allowing providers enough time to assess the legality, necessity and proportionality of the request.

The latest amendments to the 2021 IT Rules include three major developments which put these human rights at risk. They add new burdensome due diligence obligations, introduce new powers for the position of Grievance Officer, and envision the establishment of a new government-led Grievance Appellate Committee.

In the new due diligence obligations, online intermediaries must ensure compliance with the IT Rules. The intermediaries are required to both inform the users of the rules and make sure the users do not host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share any of the restricted types of contents. This actively pushes the online intermediaries towards more proactive monitoring of online content, deepening the adverse impact on freedom of expression.

The 2021 IT Rules oblige the intermediaries to appoint resident Grievance Officers to respond to user complaints and government and court orders. The new amendments further expand the Grievance Officers powers: the Officers can now address issues related touser account suspension, removal or blocking, or any user complaint on some types of restricted content. The Rules set a short deadline to resolve user complaints, stripping the users who were complained about of the opportunity to obtain any meaningful redress.

Additionally, the amendments also envisage the establishment of a government-led Grievance Appellate Committee to hear appeals against the Grievance Officers decisions. The Committee would effectively have the power to overturn platform content moderation decisions, regardless of judicial assessmentwhich goes against our Manila Principlesthat advocate for content removal based on only judicial decisions.

Proactive monitoring restricts user privacy and leads to removal of legitimate speech. It also increases government involvement in content moderation, instead of direct judicial oversight.

These overbroad, restrictive, and intrusive amendments further tighten the rules for intermediary liability, which further exacerbates the disproportionate intrusion of free speech in India. Proactive monitoring restricts user privacy and leads to removal of legitimate speech. It also increases government involvement in content moderation, instead of direct judicial oversight. And it is happening in a context where companies, such as Twitter, are being depicted as having lost intermediary status for their failure to comply with the IT Rules.

EFF and partners call on the Indian government to suspend the implementation of the 2021 IT Rules, withdraw the new amendments, and hold inclusive public consultations.

To learn more about the legal trends affecting online intermediaries around the world, check out our recently published four-part series on the topic, which begins here.

The full text ofEFF's submission to the Indian government, and list of signatories, is below:

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New Amendments to Intermediary Rules threaten Free Speech in India - EFF

from the not-to-be-dogmatic... dept

Antonio Garca Martnez recently invited me on his podcast, The Pull Request. I was thrilled. Antonio is witty, charming, and intimidatingly brilliant (he was a PhD student in physics at Berkeley, and it shows). We did the episode, and we had a great time. But we never got to an important topicAntonios take on free speech and the Internet.

In April, Antonio released a piece on his Substack, Freeze peach and the Internet, in which he asserts the existence of a content moderation regime that is utterly re-defining speech in liberal societies. That regime wants, Antonio contends, to arbitrate truth and regulate online behavior for the sake of some supposed greater good. It is opposed by those who still support freedom of speech. Antonio believes that the regime and its opponents are locked in an epic battle, and that we all must pick a side.

Im not sure what to make of some of Antonios claims. Were told, for instance, that freedom of reach is freedom of speechwhich sounds like a nod to the New Lefts call, in the 1960s and 70s, to seize the means of communication. But then were told that Twitter isnt obligated to give you reach if user interest in your speech is low. So Antonio is not demanding reach equality. Its simply not the case, he says, that freedom of speech is some legal binary switched between an abstract allow/not-allow state. Maybe, then, the point is that we must think about the effects of algorithmic amplification. Who is ignoring or attacking that point, I do not know.

At any rate, a general critique of Antonios article this post is not.

In 1951 Willard Van Orman Quine, one of the great analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, wrote a short paper called Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Quine put to the torch two key assumptions made by the logical positivists, a philosophical school popular in the first half of the century. Antonio, in his piece, promotes two key assumptions commonly made by those who fear Big Tech censorship. If Mike Masnick can riff on Arrows impossibility theorem to explain why content moderation is so difficult, I figure I can riff on Quines dogmas paper to explore two ways in which the fears of online censorship by private platforms are overblown. As were about to see, in fact, Quines work can teach us something valuable about content moderation.

Antonios first dogma is the belief that either youre for free speech, or youre notyoure for the censors and the would-be arbiters of truth. His second is the belief that Twitter is the public square, and that the state of the restrictions there is the proper gauge of the state of free speech in our nation as a whole. With apologies to H.L. Mencken, these dogmas are clear, simple, and wrong.

Dogma #1: Free Speech: With Us or Against Us

AGM insists that the debate about content moderation boils down to a single overriding divide. The real issue, he saysthe issue the consensus pro-censorship crowd will never directly addressis this:

Do you think freedom of speech includes the right to say and believe obnoxious stupid shit thats almost certainly false, or do you feel platforms have the responsibility to arbitrate truth and regulate online behavior for the sake of some supposed greater good?

Thats it. If you think that dumb and even offensive speech is protected speech, youre on the Elon [Musk] side of this debate. Otherwise, you think that platforms should be putting their fingers on the scales, and youre therefore on the anti-Elon side. As if to add an exclamation point, Antonio declares: Some countries have real free speech, and some countries have monarchs on their coins. (Ive seen it said, in a similar vein, that all anyone really cares about is political censorship, and that thats the key issue the consensus pro-censorship crowd wont grapple with.)

Antonio presents a nice, neat dividing line. Theres the stuff no one likesAntonio points to dick pics, beheading videos, child sexual abuse material, and hate speech that incites violenceand then theres peoples opinions. All the talk of content moderation is just obfuscationan elaborate effort to hide this clear line. Quibbling over the precise content policy in the pro-content moderation view, Antonio warns, is just haggling over implementation details, and essentially ceding the field to that side of the debate.

The logical positivists, too, wanted some nice, neat lines. Bear with me.

Like most philosophers, the LPs wanted to know what we can know. One reason arguments often go in circles, or bog down in confusion, is that humans make a lot of statements that arent so much wrong as simply meaningless. Many sentences dont connect to anything in the real world over which a productive argument can be had. (Extreme example: the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress.) The LPs wanted to separate the wheat (statements of knowledge) from the chaff (metaphysical gobbledygook, empty emotive utterances, tribal call signs, etc.). To that end, they came up with something called the verification principle.

In 1936 a brash young thinker named A.J. Ayerthe AGM of early twentieth century philosophypublished a crisp and majestic but (as Ayer himself later admitted) often mistaken book, Language, Truth & Logic, in which he set forth the verification principle in its most succinct form. Can observation of the world convince us of the likely truth or falsity of a statement? If so, the statement can be verified. And a sentence, Ayer argued, says nothing unless it is empirically verifiable. Thats it.

Problem: mathematics and formal logic seem to reveal usefulindeed, surprisingthings about the world, but without adhering to the verification principle. In the LPs view, though, this was just a wrinkle. They postulated a distinction between good, juicy synthetic statements that can be verified, and drab old analytic statements that, according to (young) Ayer, are just games we play with definitions. (A being whose intellect was infinitely powerful would take no interest in logic and mathematics. For he would be able to see at a glance everything that his definitions implied[.])

So the LPs had two dogmas: that a sentence either does or does not refer to immediate experience, and that a sentence can be analytic or synthetic. But as Quine explained in his paper, these pat categories are rubbish. He addressed the latter dogma first, raising a number of problems with it that arent worth getting into here. (For one thing, definitions are set by human convention; their correct use is open to empirical debate.) He then took aim at the verification principleor, as he put it, the dogma of reductionismitself.

The logical positivists went wrong, Quine observed, in supposing that each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation. Its misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement, he explained, because statements face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body. There arent two piles of statementsthose that can be verified and those that cant. Rather, the totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even pure mathematics and logic, is a continuous man-made fabric. As we learn new things, truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others. Our knowledge is not a barrel of apples that we go through, apple-by-apple, keeping the ripe ones and tossing the rotten. It is, in the words of philosopher Simon Blackburn, a jelly of belief, the whole of which quiver[s] in reaction to recalcitrant or surprising experience.

See how this ties into content moderation? Steve Bannon was booted from Twitter because he said: Id put [Anthony Faucis and Christopher Wrays] heads on pikes. Right. Id put them at the two corners of the White House. As a warning to federal bureaucrats: Either get with the program or youre gone. Is this just an outlandish opinionsome obnoxious stupid shit thats almost certainly falseor is it an incitement to violence? Why is this statement different from, say, Id put Gentles and Funshines heads on pikes . . . as a warning to the other Care Bears?

When Donald Trump told the January 6 rioters, We love you. Youre very special, was that political speech? Or was it sedition? As with heads on pikes, the statement itself wont answer that question for you. The same problem arises when Senate candidate Eric Greitens invites you to go RINO hunting, or when a rightwing pundit announces that the Consitution is null and void. And who says we must look at each piece of content in isolation? Say the Oath Keepers are prevalent on your platform. Theyre not planning an insurrection right now; theyre just riling each other up and getting their message out and recruiting. Is this just (dumb) political speech? Or is it more like a slowly developing beheading video? (If a platform says, Dont care where you go, guys, but you cant stay here, is it time to put monarchs on our coins?)

Similar issues arise with harassment. Doxxing, deadnaming, coordinated pile-ons, racist code words, Pepe memesall present line-drawing issues that cant be resolved with appeals to a simple divide between bad opinions and bad behavior. In each instance, we have no choice but to quibbl[e] over the precise content policy. Disagreement will reign, moreover, because each of us will enter the debate with a distinct set of political, cultural, contextual, and experiential priors. To some people, Jordan Peterson deadnaming Elliot Page is obviously harassment. To others (including, I confess, myself), his doing so pretty clearly falls within the rough-and-tumble of public debate. But that disagreement is not, at bottom, about that individual piece of content; its about the entire panoply of clashing priors.

Its great that we have acerbic polemicists like Antonio. Im glad that hes out there pushing his conception of freedom and decrying safety-ism. (Hes on his strongest footing, I suppose, when he complains about the labeling, fact-checking, and blocking of Covid claims.) I hope that he and his swashbuckling ilk never stop defending our American birthright of constant and cantankerous rebellion against the status quo. But its just not true that theres a free speech crowd and a pro-censorship crowd and nothing in between. Content moderation is complicated and difficult, and peoples views about it sit on a continuum.

Dogma #2: The Public Square, Website-by-Website

Antonios other dogma is the viewheld by manythat Twitter is in some meaningful sense the public square. Antonio has some pointed criticisms for those who believe that Twitter isnt the public forum, and as such shouldnt be treated with the sacrosanct respect we typically imbue anything First Amendment-related.

As the second part of that sentence suggests, AGM gets to his destination by an idiosyncratic route. He seems to think that, in other peoples minds, the public square is where solemn and civilized discussion of public issues occurs. But as Antonio points out, theres never been such a place. Were Americans; weve always hashed things out by shouting at each other. Today, one of the places where we shout at each other is on Twitter. Ergo, in Antonios mind, Twitter is the public square.

I dont get it. Everyone invoking some fusty idea of debate or even a healthy marketplace of ideas, Antonio writes, is citing bygone utopias that never were, and never will be. Who is this everyone? Anyway, just because theres a place where debate occurs does not mean that that place is the public square. In 2019 Antonio was saying that we should break up Facebook because it has a stranglehold on attention. So why isnt it the public square? Perhaps its both Twitter and Facebook? But then what about Substackwhere AGM published his piece? What about the many podcast platforms that carry his conversations? What about Rumble and TikTok? Heck, what about Techdirt? The public squareif we really must go about trying to precisely define such a thingis not Twitter but the Internet.

Antonio appeals to the conditions our democracy was born in. The vicious, ribald, scabrous, offensive, and often violent tumult of the Founders era, he notes, makes modern Twitter look like a Mormon picnic by comparison. This begs the question. Look at what Americans are saying on the Internet as a whole; its as vicious, ribald, scabrous, offensive, and violent as you please. If what matters is that our discourse resemble that of the founding era, we can rest easy. Ben Franklins brother used his publication, The New-England Courant, to rail against smallpox inoculation; modern anti-vaxxers use Gab to similar effect. James Callender used newspapers and pamphlets to viciously (but often accurately) attack Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson; Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald use newsletters and podcasts to viciously (but at times accurately) attack Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. In his Porcupines Gazette, William Cobbett cried, Professions of impartiality I shall make none; the website American Greatness boasts about being called a hotbed of far-right Trumpist nationalism. Plus a change . . .

Antonio says that we need unfettered debate in a public square that we shar[e] with our despised political enemies. Surveying the Internet, Id say we have exactly that.

Now, I dont deny that theres a swarm of activists, researchers, academics, columnists, politicians, and government officialsnot to mention the tech companies themselvesthat make up what journalist Joe Bernstein calls Big Disinfo. Not surprisingly, the old gatekeepers of information, along with those who once benefited from greater information gatekeeping, are upset that social media allows information to bypass gates. That the most prestigious liberal institutions of the pre-digital age are the most invested in fighting disinformation, Bernstein submits, reveals a lot about what they stand to lose, or hope to regain. Indeed.

But so what? Theres a certain irony here. The people most convinced that our elite institutions are inept and crumbling are also the ones most concerned that those institutions will take over the Internet, throttle speech, and (toughest of all) reshape opinionall, presumably, without violating the First Amendment. Are the forces of Big Disinfo really that competent? Please.

Antonio and I are both fans of Martin Gurri, whose 2014 book The Revolt of the Public is basically a long meditation on why Antonios content-moderation regime cant succeed. A curious thing happens to sources of information under conditions of scarcity, Gurri proposes. They become authoritative. Thanks to the Internet, however, we are living through an unprecedented information explosion. When theres information abundance, no claim is authoritative. Many claims must compete with each other. All claims (but especially elite claims) are questioned, challenged, and ridiculed. (In this telling, our current tumult is more vicious, ribald, etc., than that of the founding era.) Unable to shut down competing claims, elites cant speak with authority. Unable to speak with authority, they cant shut down competing claims.

Short of an asteroid strike, World War III, the rise of a thoroughgoing despotism, or some kind of Butlerian jihad, the flow of information cant be stopped.

Filed Under: antonio garcia martinez, content moderation, free reach, free speech, public square

Originally posted here:
Two Dogmas Of The Free Speech Panic - Techdirt

A jury just awarded a flight attendant $5.3 million in a controversial case involving free speech rights.

Charlene Carter had been a Southwest Airlines flight attendant for more than 20 years when she was fired in March 2017 for violating the companys policies on social media use. Carter disagreed with the pro-choice stance of her union, the Transportation Workers Union of America Local 556, when associated flight attendants attended a pro-choice march in Washington. Carter didnt like the fact that her union dues were being used to support her colleagues' attendance, and she voiced her complaints to the union president via social media.

"This is what you supported during your paid leave with others at the Womens March in D.C.," she wrote in one Facebook message to Stone, according to the Dallas Morning News. "You truly are despicable in so many ways."

Stone reported Carter to Southwest Airlines, and they terminated her employment. Southwest said her Facebook posts were "highly offensive" and that her private messages were harassing. Carter obviously believed she had a right to speak her mind without facing unemployment. Carter filed suit and has been battling Southwest Airlines and the union in court for the past five years. She had actually left the union in 2013, but she was still required by the airline to pay union dues.

A federal jury in Texas sided with Carter, believing that she was unlawfully discriminated against for her sincerely held religious beliefs. The jury found that the union did not fairly represent her and retaliated against her for expressing her views. Although both the union and Southwest will likely appeal, if Carter prevails, she will be awarded $4.15 million from Southwest Airlines and $1.15 million from the union.

"Today is a victory for freedom of speech and religious beliefs. Flight attendants should have a voice and nobody should be able to retaliate against a flight attendant for engaging in protected speech against her union," Carter said in a statement. "I am so humbled and thankful for todays decision and for everyone whos supported me these past five years, including the National Right to Work Foundation."

Carters case is unique in that it combines multiple hot-button issues: union representation and political advocacy versus personal beliefs, and the precarious line between free speech and company policies.

Still, Im actually surprised a jury found in Carters favor given company policies on harassment. While Carter certainly had the right to express her disappointment in what her union dues represented, its hard to believe the right to harass an employer publicly or privately would fall into that category. That said, its also difficult to make the case that Southwest had a right to fire Carter over her beliefs on abortion, which were rooted in religion, even if she expressed them in a vivid way.

While this may be a boon for free speech rights overall, a far more pro-life stance might have been to advocate for pro-life marches too, or to petition her employer to release her from union due obligations, since she vehemently disagreed with them. To be fair, perhaps Carter did those things too.

Regardless, this is a win for freedom.

Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She is an opinion columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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Southwest Airlines and union defeated in win for free speech - Washington Examiner

Outsider Kemi Badenoch, who said that we need to reinvigorate the case for free speech has been knocked out, but the final two candidatesRishi Sunak and Liz Truss have varied records on the topic which is likely to become a battleground in the race to become Britains next Prime Minister.

Sunak as far as I can see has virtually no statements about free speech, Andrew Tettenborn, common-law and continental jurisdictions scholar and advisor to the Free Speech Union (FSU), told The Epoch Times. I probably prefer Liz Truss on free speech, he said, but I think shes marginally less bad than Rishi Sunak.

I think that whoever we have as Prime Minister, is now likely not to do very much [on free speech], said Tettenborn.

We have some useful legislation, of course, in the form of the Bill of Rights. Where we have a government consultation coming up. The Free Speech Union agreed to be fairly active in that Im down to help draft what we say. I think could be quite useful, he added. The FSU is an organisation dedicated to upholding free speech in Britain.

Tettenborn added that he believed that the governments planned legislation that will make universities have a new duty to secure freedom of speech will go ahead.

The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is a proposed Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that would impose requirements for universities and students unions to protect freedom of speech.

I doubt the Conservative government will take it much further than that, he said, adding that more needed to be done in regards to making extensions for free speech for employers and professional associations.

Rishi was Chancellor of the Exchequer having previously served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. His resignation as chancellor on July 5 helped to trigger an avalanche of ministerial resignations.

Truss has held more positions including Education Minister, Secretary of State for the Environment, Justice Secretary, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade, as well as Minister for Women and Equalities.

She is currently Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs.

In December 2021, when Truss was Minister for Women and Equalities Truss, she affirmed the governments stance that free speech and religious liberty should be protected from a conversion therapy ban.

She was asked by Labour MP Kate Osborne in Parliament if the ban would cover non-physical conversion practices in religious settings, including prayer.

The Minister replied that what is important is that we ensure that people are not coerced into conversion therapy, but it is also important to protect freedom of speech.

I hear Opposition Members asking whether freedom of speech is a good thing. Yes, it is, added Truss.

Last September, Truss, when Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, told LBC radio in May women do have vaginas in response to student Lisa Keogh who was facing disciplinary action at university for making the same comment. We need to uphold our very, very important tradition of free speech, said Truss.

In a speech in December, when Foreign Secretary, Truss gave amajor policy speech at Chatham House in London saying that the free world took its eye off the ball following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

After the collapse of communism, many breathed a sigh of relief and called it the end of historyconfident that freedom and democracy would inexorably go global under its own steam, she said.

She added that societies turned inwards. Rather than engaging with the big ideas shaping the world, failed ideas ran rife, like the post-modern philosophy that there is no objective truth.

Writing for the Mail on Sunday in a piece calledEquality should be for everyonenot just for the woke warriors favoured few. Truss said she has has witnessed the spread of misguided, wrong-headed, and ultimately destructive ideas, which, sadly, have become steadily more prevalent in many aspects of British life.

Too many people have jumped on this woke bandwagon and lost sight of what most people want: a life in which they can live happily in a secure home, work in a good job, and send their children to a decent school. Rather than engage with these priorities, the Left has been swept up by a warped ideology and all its bizarre obsessions, said Truss.

On quotas, diversity agendas, and so-called unconscious bias training she called them dehumanising, disempowering, and dysfunctional ideas do nothing in practice to make life fairer.

Those behind this pernicious woke culture see everything in terms of societal power structures. To these zombies, truth and morality are merely relative, wrote Truss.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunak was responsible for the policy of furlough and if elected would also be Britains first Asian prime minister.

In March, Talk TVs Julia Hartley-Brewer challenged Sunak to Define what a woman is? It is a question that has become a hot topic for some politicians in recent months.

Sunak did not offer his own definition and deferred to a definition previously used by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

In a recent manifesto for womens rights published in the Daily Mail on July 9, Sunak said that he will oppose biological males being allowed to compete against women in sport, while calling on schools to be more careful in how they teach on issues of sex and gender.

Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University, writer, and member of Academics for Academic Freedom and Dont Divide Us, Prof. Jim Butcher said that he found the former equalities minister and former candidate Badenoch interesting for her approach to critical race theory and free speech.

During her short run, Badenoch gained support from the Tory membership andfeminists.

I think we do need to speak out on cultural issues by really, really making clear that freedom of speech is sacrosanct, said Butcher.

I think we have to remember that the Conservative Party is not a free speech party. And actually the majority of them didnt even vote for Brexit in the referendum, said Butcher, adding that he believed that nobody is saying that the Conservatives are a sort of peoples Populist Party.

But Butcher said that those who are interested in free speech warmed toBadenoch because the old left-right divisions are not necessarily the ones that people divide on today and rightly so, as these are really important issues.

Still in the background is the Online Safety Bill, which is currently on ice until a new prime minister is in place in the autumn, a move that won praise from free speech supporters.

The planned legislation on online spaces has been increasingly criticised by top Tories for handing unprecedented censorship powers to the secretary of state and to online regulator Ofcom.

Badenoch in a post on Twitter had described the Bill that will regulate online spaces as cracking down on free speech to prevent hurt feelings.

Last week, The Times Of London reported that Truss will revise online safety laws to ensure they do not damage freedom of speech if she wins the Tory leadership contest.

She also told The Spectators leadership hustings that she was a believer in freedom of speech. I also believe that we need to protect particularly the under 18s from harm.

And I think there is a place for further amendments to this legislation to make sure were delivering it and also make sure that everybody is aware of the intention of the Bill as well, which is also important, she added.

Sunak said he would look into legal but harmful definitions in the Online Safety Bill.

And weve got to find a way to protect children against that in the same way as we do in the offline world, so to speak, he told The Spectator.

Sunak said he was glad the governments paused the Bill so the government can refine its approach here, that the challenge is whether it strays into the territory of suppressing free speech.

And the bit in particular that has caused some concern and questions is around this area where the government is saying, look, heres some content thats legal but harmful, and its thats this kind of area, which I think people rightly have said, well, what exactly does that mean? he said.

A noted critic of the Bill, Tettenborn said that if Labour wants to insist on picking up this legislation, then it will come out as the restrictive party, as the Tories have not been keen on restricting free speech.

I have a funny feeling that it will miraculously turn out that there isnt parliamentary time for it, he said.

The Epoch Times contacted Sunak and Truss for comment.

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Owen Evans is a UK-based journalist covering a wide range of national stories, with a particular interest in civil liberties and free speech.

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Free Speech Policy Pledges That Sunak and Truss Have Made in the Conservative Leadership Election - The Epoch Times

Over the past three years, Gov. Ron DeSantis has restricted Floridians First Amendment rights and repeatedly pushed for laws that violate basic American freedoms. During this years session of the Florida Legislature, these assaults accelerated.

The First Amendment guarantees the rights to free speech, a free press, freedom to assemble and protest peacefully, the right to petition the government for change and freedom from the imposition of religious beliefs by government.

In the wake of national protests after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, DeSantis championed the anti-protest bill, House Bill 1. It dictated that any person participating in a rally or protest could be charged with a felony if three or more other people at that event engaged in unlawful activity resulting in imminent danger of damage to property or injury to another person. In other words, you could be charged for an offense committed by people who were total strangers to you, even if you were protesting peacefully.

In 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker struck down that provision of the law. Walker stated that HB 1 could effectively criminalize the protected speech of hundreds, if not thousands, of law-abiding Floridians. This violates the First Amendment.

That ruling hasnt stopped DeSantis from trying to impede free speech in other ways. In this years legislative session, he and his allies pushed House Bill 7, an educational censorship bill, signed into law in April. That bill prevents content from being taught in schools that illustrates the discrimination, including race and gender discrimination, that has existed for centuries in our society.

HB 7 even bans private employers from requiring diversity training or other workshops related to race and gender discrimination, which are often used to create inclusive, productive work environments. Worse, the law gives employees the ability to sue an employer for requiring such workshops. HB 7 is a clear attempt to whitewash American history and to ban viewpoints the governor and his allies do not like.

DeSantis and his legislative allies continued to attack Floridians First Amendment rights by targeting LGBTQ+ youth and families with the dont say gay bill (House Bill 1557). This dangerous legislation bans teachers from addressing LGBTQ+ topics in grades K-3. It also prohibits such discussions at any grade level if someone else does not deem them age-appropriate.

Any parent who thinks a classroom discussion was inappropriate will be able to sue, a provision of the law that will end up chilling speech and creating chaos. This legislation will further shame, stigmatize, and isolate LGBTQ+ youth, who already suffer from high rates of depression and suicide.

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On Feb. 17, 25 people were banned from the Capitol for a year, and another was unjustly arrested and held in jail overnight. All because a few people were chanting in opposition to the passing of House Bill 5, the 15-week abortion ban backed by DeSantis. That law is yet another way that a constitutional right the right to privacy and bodily autonomy is under attack in Florida.

In addition, over the past few years, we have witnessed journalists being denied access to official press conferences and briefings by DeSantis attempts to block coverage of critical public matters, including coronavirus updates and bill signings.

DeSantis is waging a terrifying and unconstitutional assault on Floridians First Amendment rights, and all Floridians should be outraged by his attempts to silence us.

Dissent is patriotic; government censorship is undemocratic, unconstitutional and un-American. We will all do better when we have leaders in Florida who use their power to improve our lives and our livelihoods and are dedicated to making the values of liberty and justice a reality for all of us.

Amy Turkel is the interim executive director of the ACLU of Florida.

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DeSantis and his allies in Florida are trampling on our First Amendment rights | Column - Tampa Bay Times