Monthly Archives: September 2022

1. FIRE ranks MSU in top 5 nationally for support of student free speech  Mississippi State University
2. Just released: The 2022-2023 College Free Speech Rankings  Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
3. Columbia University is worst college in nation for free speech: report  New York Post
4. The free-speech allergy in academia | Opinion | oleantimesherald.com  Olean Times Herald
5. These are the top 10 worst schools for free speech this year  Campus Reform
6. View Full Coverage on Google News

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FIRE ranks MSU in top 5 nationally for support of student free speech - Mississippi State University

On Wednesday, September 14, 2022, at 10:00 a.m. ET, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, will hold a hybrid hearing to examine how the fossil fuel industry is weaponizing the law to stifle First Amendment protected speech and stymie efforts to combat climate change by abusing Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participations (SLAPPs) and anti-protest laws.

Since the 1980s, SLAPPs have been used by powerful entities and individuals to silence critics through costly, lengthy, and often meritless litigation. These lawsuits have recently been employed by the fossil fuel industry to target environmental activists and non-profits by claiming defamation, trespass, and even racketeering to deter them from speaking out against proposed fossil fuel pipelines and other projects that contribute to climate change.

In response to increased protest activity surrounding fossil fuel pipelines, 17 states have enacted anti-protest laws as of June 2022, labeling them critical infrastructure protection laws. These laws are selectively enacted and enforced to target environmental activists and protect corporate interests.

The fossil fuel industrys use of SLAPPs and support for anti-protest laws not only stifles free speech, but also serves as another form of disinformation about climate change. After years of spreading denial and disinformation, fossil fuel companies now acknowledge the existence of climate change but are attempting to ensure their greenwashing narrative dominates by silencing opposing views.

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Free Speech Under Attack (Part III): The Legal Assault on Environmental Activists and the First Amendment - House Committee on Oversight and Reform |

In August, the author Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the neck. The novelist has spent decades living under the threat of a hit put out by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. The religious directive was a response to Rushdies novel The Satanic Verses, which Khomeini regarded as blasphemous. For many, the attack was an opportunity to reflect on the importance of free expression, and a reminder of the clear distinction between speech and violence.

For others, it was an opportunity to remind others of the clear distinction between speech and violence, which is something that all those snowflake libs, who are sort of like the fanatic who stabbed Rushdie in the neck, should take to heart.

We live in a culture in which many of the most celebrated people occupying the highest perches believe that words are violence, Bari Weiss wrote on her Substack, citing no one in particular. In this, they have much in common with Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. She added that of course it is 2022 that the Islamists finally get a knife into Salman Rushdie. Of course it is now, when words are literally violence and J.K. Rowling literally puts trans lives in danger and even talking about anything that might offend anyone means you are literally arguing I shouldnt exist.

As an outlet, The Atlantic attempts to provide readers with a broad spectrum of perspectives based on shared values. One of these values is freedom of speech, a principle to which I and all of my cherished colleagues are deeply committed. The assassination attempt on Rushdie was a direct attack on that freedom, and it should be no surprise that writers here have a great deal to say about it. But I must respectfully disagree with some of my colleagues about the conclusions they have drawn from the attack, linking contemporary left-wing discourse with a fundamentalist theocrats call for assassination.

Read: Rushdies challenge to Islamic orthodoxy

My colleague Graeme Wood pointed to Jimmy Carters 1989 op-ed criticizing Rushdie to argue that over the past two decades, our culture has been Carterized. We have conceded moral authority to howling mobs, and the louder the howls, the more we have agreed that the howls were worth heeding. He acknowledged, however, that since the attempt on Rushdies life, almost no one has advanced these arguments, meaning a link between the emotional injury of blasphemy and the very literal violence of murder. If our society were truly Carterized, I would have expected instead to have seen some prominent American figures make the argument Carter did decades ago.

Another one of my colleagues, Caitlin Flanagan, settled for an exegesis of the views of the Twitter user @MeerAsifAziz1, whose account no longer exists. She argued that the culture of free speech is eroding every day, and offered a hypothetical example: Ask an Oberlin studentfresh outta Shaker Heights, coming in hot, with a heart as big as all outdoors and a 3 in AP Bioto tell you what speech is acceptable, and shell tell you that its speech that doesnt hurt the feelings of anyone belonging to a protected class.

Ill make no secret that I believe the focus on the misguided egalitarianism of undergraduates at private colleges has been disproportionate. People like this exist, though, and its fair to criticize them. What I frankly find puzzling is presenting this hypothetical student as the avatar of the idea that dangerous speech and ideas must be suppressed, when in statehouses and governors mansions, politicians who have the authority to enforce their ideas about censorship with state power are actually putting them into practice. Unlike the hypothetical Oberlin student, these officials are real, and the threat they pose to free speech is not only clear and present, but backed by a certain level of popular demand.

I agree with Weiss and Wood and Flanagan that there is a bright line between speech and violence that must be respected, and that trying to kill someone for offending you is monstrous. Speech is not violence, and to argue so is to imply that violence is an appropriate response. The unacknowledged reality of these three essays, however, is that what I just stated remains the broad, widely held consensus in American life, from right to left. Americans simply do not live under anything resembling the kind of repression in which people are killed for blasphemy with state or popular support.

Caitlin Flanagan: Americas fire sale: Get some free speech while you can

Weiss, Wood, and Flanagan also noted the objection of a group of writers and thinkers to the PEN association bestowing an award on Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical publication that terrorists attacked in 2015 over its caricatures of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, murdering 12 people, including several staff members, police officers, a maintenance worker, and someone who was visiting that day. The letter signers described the massacre as sickening and tragic while criticizing PEN for valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.

Weiss attacked the civic cowardice of those who objected, while Flanagan wrote that these writers were pressuring the organization to abandon its mission of protecting freedom of expression. Wood described the writers position as muddling the distinction between offense and violence, and between a disagreement over ideas and a disagreement over whether your head should remain attached to your body.

I would not have signed that letter if asked, not only because I do not sign open letters, as a matter of preference, but because I believe that blasphemy is a human right, and that the message that PEN was sending with the award was an endorsement not of Charlie Hebdos content but of the staffs bravery in the face of an attempt to silence them through murder. But just as I have no objection to the award, I have no issue with people criticizing it because they do not want it to be interpreted as an endorsement of the racist caricatures Charlie Hebdo is known for, even accepting that they are intended with a layer of irony. (Im not sure how many of the people disseminating these images are aware of the irony.) These may be mutually exclusive positions, but both are consistent with respecting free speech. Indeed, both the writers of the letter and its critics are arguing that there are things you can say but should not.

One of the significant measures of free speech in a given society is how people deal with blasphemywhether religious offense provokes state censorship or violence. America has a relatively strong record in that respect in comparison with much of the rest of the world, while clearly faltering in others. The suggestion here, however, is that the writers who objected to the award granted to Charlie Hebdo are in some sense justifying the massacre, and therefore defending the notion that violence is an appropriate response to offensive speech. But surely one can defend the right of Nazis to publicly protest while rejecting the tenets of national socialism. If I cannot defend the fundamental right of a speaker to be offensive while objecting to their speech, then what am I actually defending?

In this case, the rights being asserted seem to be the right to be offensive, and the right of the offended to shut up and like it. The former combined with the latter is not an assertion of the right to free speech so much as a right to monologue, which I do not recognize.

The American culture of free speech is indeed under threat, as Flanagan argued. Free speech requires a robust exchange of views without the coercion of threats and violence, and self-censorship in response to social pressure is a genuine risk. Yet by definition, there is no free speech if one person is allowed to make an argument and another is not allowed to object to it. Nor has there ever been a time in American history when freedom of speech was not threatened with proscription by the state, or when one could express a controversial opinion and not risk social sanction. In short, the culture of free speech is always under threat.

In almost every era of U.S. history, the bounds of free expression have been contested. In the founding era, patriots tarred and feathered royalists. Before the Civil War, southern states passed laws that could be used to prosecute the dissemination of abolitionist literature and sought to prevent the Postal Service from delivering antislavery pamphlets, saying they would foment insurrection by the enslaved. Mobs followed the abolitionist Frederick Douglass across the North, throwing rotten eggs, stones, and menacing slurs at the orator at speaking events. After Reconstruction, white supremacists destroyed the office of Ida B. Wellss newspaper, The Free Speech and Headlight, following the publication of an editorial arguing that lynchings of Black men accused of raping white women were in fact punishment for consensual relationships. The Red Scares of the 20th century saw Americans forced from their jobs and prosecuted for leftist beliefs or sympathies on the grounds that those were tantamount to a commitment to overthrowing the government. Out of that crucible emerged a civil libertarian concept of free speech that many have mistaken for timeless rather than a product of a certain history and a particular arrangement of political power. The idea that certain forms of speech or expression justify or provoke violence, let alone that blasphemy does so, is not an invention of modern social-justice discourse.

Every generation faces a different challenge when it comes to freedom of expression. Ours includes not only the widespread and growing campaign of state censorship led by Republican lawmakers, but a social-media panopticon that can both deny us the privacy necessary to come to our own conclusions and inhibit the courage necessary to express them. Most of us are not meant to be privy to every misguided utterance of a stranger, nor are we meant to have our errors or worst moments evaluated publicly by people who learned of our existence only as the focus of political propaganda, as the subject of ridicule, or as acceptable targets in pointless feuds between online cliques. (Although it must be said, there are those who thrive in such conditions, and have successfully exploited them for fame, profit, and status.)

Yet, as Aaron R. Hanlon recently wrote in The New Republic, this wave of censorship laws in Republican-controlled states bears scant mention among many of the most prominent self-styled defenders of free speech, or at least, far less than the tyranny of the ratio. But we do not become little Rushdies when our inboxes and mentions are inundated with deranged filth from disturbed strangers, as a result of the public-facing profession we chose and the technological advancements that make us more accessible to such people.

It is not minimizing the power of digital mobs to say that spending decades with the state-backed threat of an assassins blade at your throat is coercion of a different magnitude. The wrath of an online mob can be harrowing: harassment, outrageous falsehoods, and threats are not pleasant to bear, and can threaten not just your mental health but your livelihood, and in extreme cases your safety. To pretend that seeking to avoid such an experience does not condition what people say and how they act would be foolish. But to pretend that this is a left-wing ideological phenomenon rather than a structural one, when educators, medical providers, election officials, and others from all walks of life are being driven underground by right-wing influencers who can conduct a mob like an orchestra, would be equally foolish.

The United States is living through the largest wave of state censorship since the second Red Scare. Beyond the plague of education gag laws restricting the teaching of unpleasant facts about American history, conservative judges seek to rewrite constitutional free-speech protections to punish the liberal media, and conservative states pass laws against public protest and immunize from liability those who would run over protesters with their cars, while law-enforcement organizations hope to use civil lawsuits to sue demonstrations against police brutality out of existence. Conservatives have sought to fire librarians and purge public libraries of books they deem controversial by categorizing them as obscene, as state officials try to punish teachers who provide their students with public information that allows them to access samizdat from libraries in states where it is not forbidden. Not only do abortion bounty laws seek to enforce silence around reproductive health, lest a person discussing the subject prick the ears of some snitch seeking a payday, but the overturning of Roe has coincided with explicit attempts to criminalize speech about abortion. In the strongest labor market in a generation, billionaires seek to use their power and authority to crush workers organizing for better conditions and a living wage.

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There is no shortage of major free-speech issues to address in America today, but many of us in the writing profession are primarily concerned with our social-media experience, because that is what we most directly and frequently encounter. Instead of recognizing that the warped behavioral incentives created by social media are a structural problem, we tend to blame the people online who annoy us the most. In many cases, those defending free speech are not defending freedom of expression so much as seeking the power to determine which views can be publicly expressed without backlash, and which can be silenced without reproach. When we speak of an idealized past without chilling effects, we are simply imagining a time when the social consensus was repressive and stifling for someone else.

These conflicts are far more complex precisely because there is no clear line where social pressure from those exercising their rights of free speech and association crosses over into censoriousness. State censorship and violent compulsion are relatively easy to identify and oppose, if not always easy to prevent. When does accountability become harassment? When does protest become coercion? What views should be acceptable to state in polite society, and which should be appropriately shunned by decent people? When does a voice of criticism become the howl of a mob? When does corporate speech become corporate censorship? No society in human history has ever had simple answers to these questions. In a free society, sometimes people will choose to be horrible, and there is little to do other than make a different choice and counsel people to do the same.

Presenting these dilemmas as similar to an attempt to silence someone with a theocratic death mark is trivializing, and ahistorical. There has never been a golden age when anyone could say what they wanted without consequence, only eras in which one shared perspective was dominant. Though nostalgia may cloud our perceptions, those times were no more free, even if politics, ideology, or self-promotion might compel us to remember otherwise.

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Salman Rushdie, Free Speech, and Violence - The Atlantic

Brent Harold| Columnist

I've stood on the very stage in Chautauqua, New York,where Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times last month.

When I was young my grandparents used to take me and my sister to Chautauqua, a 150-year-old summer resort emphasizing lectures, music and other cultural recreation, for a few weeks in the summer. I've always owed them hugely for those memorable, influential seasons.

Along with other kids I would hang out at the Amphitheatre, where famous people would be invited to speak or otherwise perform, hoping for autographs. Perhaps there were kids hoping to score Rushdie's autograph last month.

Chautauqua defined and defines itself as in the world but not of it. During my first, idyllic visit World War II raged. The attack on Rushdie feels like an attack on the very meaning of that Brigadoon-like venue.

One of the instructive sayings I learned when young didn't all middle-class children? was: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. That is: develop a thicker skin before resorting to physical retaliation. For most of my life, that seemed axiomatic.

But the distinction between words and physical actions is a nave one, a false dichotomy. As those murdered in 2015 at the magazine Charlie Hebdo for drawing satirical cartoons of the prophet Mohammed discovered, names words, art can hurt enough that those who don't have a witty comeback in kind may resort to sticks and stones.

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Salman Rushdie learned the same thing when his words provoked thefatwadeath sentence. (I've always wondered if he has wondered if he could have put the offensive part of his novel in a gentler way without hurting the book but avoiding the life-transforming reaction.)

The freedom of speech issue is more complicated than sticks and stones suggests.

I've written this column for almost 30 years now, very much in the same innocent spirit as sticks and stones, of Chautauqua, or Charlie Hebdo. Greatly appreciative that I get to have my say, and also sort oftaking it for granted because this is a free speech democracy.

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Many years ago, in my first few years as a columnist, as rarely happened, I got a phone call in reaction to a column. I had written about angry men. I suggested that we might be a less violent nation if we didn't as a culture tend to glamorize violent men as sexy in a macho sort of way ("Go ahead, make my day!"). We should instead begin seeing such men as we had come to see smokers, a category that had formerly included the sexiest of celebs, as self-destructive unfortunates with yellow-stained fingers.

When I picked up the phone I was assaulted by one of those violent men, calling to object, as far as I could make out through the abuse, to my call for de-glamorizing his kind. Since it was a phone call it was just words, But the words sputtered obscenities suggested that if we were in person, it would be sticks and stones I'd have to worry about. It was sobering. Since Trump I've received many a sputtering, hateful email, a less aggressive medium than a phone.

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I think about that when I read about the Charlie Hebdo massacre, or all the murders of Mexican journalists (from 2000 to 2017, 104 killed). I realize that if I lived in Mexico, as painful as it would be as a writer not to have my say about cartel and government abuse I doubt I would be writing a column like this. As much as I admire their courage, as far as I'm concerned, being a Mexican journalist is above and beyond the call of writerly duty. Mexico as it is constituted doesn't deserve journalists. But of course a huge majority of Mexicans, poor, vulnerable, more endangered by government than helped by it, need all the help they can get.

Mexican journalists know how misleading it is to dichotomize words and actions. Talking the talk is walking the walk. Words are actions.

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Journalists and other practitioners of free speech in the U.S. have had hard going given the dominance of social media and the politics of fake news. But still, in crucial contrast with Mexico or Putin's Russia, we are, to my knowledge, not afraid for our lives. But there's no reason to think that will continue to be true if Trumpism is ratified in coming elections. If, as many think, a free press is essential to the maintenance of democracy, it would be the next to go.

I wonder: how would it go? How would we (will we?) get from our current situation to the plight of the press in Mexico or Russia? And at what point in that trajectory would I prudently stop practicing freedom of speech, it having become less free if practitioners have to pay with their lives.

Brent Harold, a Cape Cod Times columnist and former English professor, lives in Wellfleet. Email him atkinnacum@gmail.com.

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Opinion/Harold: Sticks and stones, free speech and writing under the threat of death - Cape Cod Times

The paradox of democracy by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing is a disappointing book. The New York Times made me aware of it, promising an analysis of what impact digital media have on democracy. Therefore, I hoped the book would outline the pros and cons of digitalisation. Unfortunately, the two authors use a far too simplistic notion of democracy and largely shy away from considering how exactly the Internet is modifying political communication.

Normally, I do not review books that I consider to be failures. In this case, however, I want to point out crucial fallacies because both topics the essence of democracy and the impact of digital media are of vital relevance. Ill start by summarising the authors core thesis and then elaborate on what they get wrong about Internet media in this blog post. In the next, Ill discuss why their idea of democracy is incomplete.

Gershberg and Illing argue that democracy is always fragile because it is defined by the freedom of speech. This freedom allows people to criticise governments and demand change. That is healthy, as they point out, because it allows grievances to be tackled in peaceful and constructive ways. The downside, however, is that the freedom of speech can also be turned against democracy itself, with authoritarian actors undermining not only elected leaders, but the political system itself. Populist demagogues, according to the authors, are doing exactly that.

On this basis, they argue that liberal democracy has died. They define liberal democracy as an order in which powerful media and strong institutions reinforce the existing order by ensuring that public discourse does not become erosive. In their eyes, newspapers and broadcasting stations no longer dominate public discourse the way they did the second half of the 20th century and the Internet has introduced an era of truly free speech. Editorial offices no longer serve as gatekeepers. Everybody is free to express themselves online, and conventional ideas of civility no longer apply. Indeed, the two authors even argue that democracy has become more democratic because masses of people are now venting frustration, anger and even hatred online without restraint. Whether statements are true or not matters less than whether they resonate, according to them.

Gershberg and Illing state that any political order ultimately depends on the underlying political culture. It is true that democratic institutions depend on public expectations, so they are indeed only as strong as peoples faith in them is. In this fundamental sense, the authors theorem of democracy being permanently at risk is correct. What Gershberg and Illing miss is that institutions can and should shape public discourse too. Moreover, not every message that is legally permitted is legitimate. The two authors fail to consider how disruptive information can and indeed should be challenged systematically.

The core reason that so much populist propaganda is spreading online internationally is that the US Congress has exempted Internet platforms from liability for the content they make available. US law matters internationally because many of the most important Internet companies are based in the States and we have no international regulation. Conventional media houses can be held accountable for disinformation they spread, but that does not apply to social media platforms. Legislation thus could and should limit the tide of fake news propaganda.

Germany experienced two totalitarian dictatorships in the 20th century, first Nazism and later, in the eastern part of the country, communism. We have learned that democracy must be able to defend itself. As a result, a legislative reform in Germany has obliged social media companies to take down within 24 hours any hate-speech post that they are made aware of. This is binding law and no longer an issue of corporate self-regulation.

Much more could be done institutionally. Given that we know that free speech can threaten democracy, readers should always be able to find out who is responsible for any kind of published information. On social media platforms, we often do not know. Accounts may be fake after all, and the platform itself is not liable.

The notion, moreover, that the Internet has facilitated truly open media is wrong. No, not everyone is equal in the digital public sphere. Gershberg and Illing basically claim that everyone can post what they like and that Internet corporations basically only give people what they want. They do not discuss the role that algorithms play, even though algorithms downplay some topics and promote others. If you invest in Facebook advertising, for example, the Facebook algorithm will ensure that your posts get more attention. Not everyone has the money to do so, but some can spend heavily.

The full truth is that Internet users pick from the choice that the algorithms present on their screens, but they hardly become aware of what is not shown. If you follow us on Facebook, you can check for yourself by comparing what D+C/E+Z content appears on your timeline with what we post on our profile page and what we publish on our website. One thing you will notice is that the Facebook algorithm does not appreciate D+C/E+Z headlines that appear even mildly controversial.

The algorithms are secret. As users, we do not fully understand their biases, though we do know that they serve corporate interests (see Ndongo Samba Sylla and myself on http://www.dandc.eu). The algorithms are designed to maximise profits by attracting users attention. So even while supposedly controversial topics on our website are downplayed, we also know that YouTube and Facebook have a tendency to drive a persons radicalisation by offering gradually more extreme content with an eye to keep users hooked.

It is also common knowledge that Russian bot farms make divisive messages go viral in western democracies. To what extent does such automated programming in a foreign nation amount to free speech that western democracies must accept? The book offers no answer.

It also ignores that disinformation tends to be particularly bad in languages other than English. The half-hearted self-regulation social-media platforms use so far hardly apply to posts in Spanish, Swahili, Amharic, Hindi, Tagalog, et cetera. Moreover, democracy subverting strategies are sometimes tested and pioneered in developing countries and emerging markets (for the example of the Philippines, see Alan C. Robles on http://www.dandc.eu). At the same time, Internet corporations are obviously keen on staying in business in Latin America, Africa and Asia, so they are doing their best not to offend autocratic leaders there. Algorithms have a pattern of accelerating anti-minority agitation in many countries, while slowing down criticism of the government.

Gershberg and Illing do not tackle these issues at all. Accordingly, they do not discuss how they could be tackled by institutional means. Instead, they muse about how radical rhetoric can essentially undermine the democratic order that allows it to spread. In my next post, Ill explain what they misunderstand about democracy.

Reference Gershberg, Z. and S. Illing, 2022: The paradox of democracy Free speech, open media and perilous persuasion. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press

Hans Dembowski is the editor in chief of D+C/E+Z.euz.editor@dandc.eu

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Freedom of speech and the internet | D+C - Development + Cooperation - D+C Development and Cooperation