Category Archives: Free Speech

LONDON Americans often cite free speech when controversial statements offend certain groups of people, but what if you went to jail for making an ill-humored joke on Facebook? That's what happened to one British man recently, over his status update. But the case raises questions about free speech laws in the U.K.

Matthew Woods, 20, became one of the most hated people in the U.K. after posting an offensive status update on Facebook about an abducted 5-year-old girl. Woods "offensive" comments included sexually aggressive and suggestive references, which attracted a number of supportive and equally derogatory replies.

Woods was charged by British police under section 127 of the U.K. Communications Act 2003, which found that his message was "grossly offensive" or "of an indecent, obscene or menacing character." He was arrested "for his own safety," reports The Guardian, following the comments posted on Facebook about 5-year-old April Jones, who was abducted close to her home in Machynlleth, Wales early this month.

The British media capitalized upon the conviction: Was Woods' comment truly "criminal?"

Free speech and social media's delicate dance

Despite being the closest ally to the United States on political, economic and defense matters, by comparison the U.K.'s free speech principles feel archaic and its laws stagnant in the digital age.

It was the same law that found Paul Chambers, 28, of Northern Ireland, guilty of unlawfully sending a message that was also deemed "grossly offensive" or "of an indecent, obscene or menacing character," in 2010, after he tweeted that he would "[blow] the airport sky high!" after his flight was cancelled following poor weather at Robin Hood Airport, U.K.

Chambers' conviction was subsequently quashed on a second appeal at the U.K. High Court in London earlier this year. The judge in the Chambers' case noted in his ruling:

"Satirical, or iconoclastic, or rude comment, the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, banter or humor, even if distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it should and no doubt will continue at their customary level, quite undiminished by [the Communications Act]."

While U.S. prosecutors could have charged Chambers with terrorism offenses, U.K. prosecutors instead opted to charge him by the contents of his tweet, despite being arrested initially by British anti-terror police.

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U.K. man jailed over Facebook status raises questions over free speech

Courts College says misunderstanding led to religious groups getting affiliate status.

An evangelical Christian club claims Snow College is unfairly giving "second tier" status to student groups that have a religious affiliation, constitutionally infringing on free speech and free association rights.

In a complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court, the Solid Rock Christian Club alleges the designation deprives such groups from being able to reserve campus facilities without charge, to advertise events on campus and to receive funding from student fees. That allows the college to favor "the speech of popular groups and exclude unpopular ones," the club alleges.

The lawsuit names the college, top school officials, the schools board of trustees and the state Board of Regents as defendants.

Scott Wyatt, president of Snow College, said Tuesday the lawsuit may be a result of a misunderstanding. He said that after realizing the impact of the affiliate status on religious clubs, "we undid this." Wyatt, who said he just received a copy of the lawsuit and had not yet read it, said it is possible none of the clubs were aware of that course correction.

"The Solid Rock ministry is a very important organization for us," Wyatt said. "They serve a number of students and we value them highly and want to continue to be a support in every way we can of their mission and their goals. I think this lawsuit is largely a misunderstanding and am confident we will work it out in a good manner and everyone will be satisfied. I am just very confident in working through all this.

Solid Rock has operated on the Snow campus, located in Ephraim, for eight years. The complaint describes the club as committed to "exalting and glorifying Jesus Christ on campus" and encouraging students and faculty to believe in Jesus Christ. The club is associated with Tri Grace Ministries, which according to their web site, also is committed to "challenging the heretical doctrines of Mormonism and ... leading as many Mormons as possible into a personal saving relationship with Jesus Christ."

With a brief exception during the 2010 school year, the club was able to use facilities without paying a community rental rate, the lawsuit states. It freely advertised activities and received student fee funding. During the 2010 school year, the college designated Solid Rock an "organization," with fewer privileges, but relented after student leaders of the group protested.

The club, one of about 32 at the college, now alleges that over the summer, college officials changed its policies regarding student groups and gave Solid Rock an "affiliate" rather than "club" status that deprived it of those benefits.

According to the current handbook, clubs must not be affiliated with any commercial or for-profit organization or religious institution. An official told the clubs advisor that "due to an internal audit, funding will not be allowed for religious organizations."

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Christian club sues Snow College over alleged free speech issues

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!

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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.

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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:

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

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the freeexercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of thepeople peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

First Amendment to the United States Constitution

From the pages rolling off our printing presses in downtown Winona, this newspaper is the First Amendment in action.

We tell you the news, our focus often on local government.

We invite you to assemble by printing your own calls for action.

We post religious gatherings, from churches that planted stones more than 150 years ago to the newest places to worship in new ways.

We celebrate your stories on these pages. You offer your opinions, your convictions, and your intimate knowledge of our region.

Together we share this mission: creating a narrative without a reaching arm of government that censors, one that limits the dialogue fundamental to democracy.

As a newspaper, we take this job very seriously.

Next week is Free Speech Week, a time to reflect on what the First Amendment really means. In the coming editions, the Winona Post will explore the rights granted by the First Amendment with an emphasis on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. First in the series is a look at the role of newspapers in both defining, and continually upholding, the right to free speech in America.

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Free speech: what it means

Reddit leadership has clarified the official rules when it comes to creeps-on-Reddit, standing up for free speech on the site, said CEO Yishan Wong in a leaked memo via Gawker's Adrian Chen. "We stand for free speech," wrote Wong. "This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it," he said, alluding to the recent uproar over Creep Shots and the various spin-offs that act as forums for photos of unsuspecting women in tight or revealing clothing. The site still can't get away from contradictions, however, as that "free speech" still does not include "doxxing posts," meaning anything attempting to reveal personal information, "because it incites violence and harassment against specific individuals." Or posts that link to sites that do that, like Predditors.

RELATED: Reddit Is Taking Down Its Creeps

As for elsewhere, however, Reddit admitted that it can't control the type of information the rest of the Internet circulates, as it tried to do by banning links to the entire Gawker Media network, Predditors, and anything that linked to Predditors. "We will not ban things which are legitimate investigative journalism," Wong continued. "Free speech is expressed most powerful through the press, and many times throughout history a bad actor has been exposed by an enterprising (even muckraking) journalist, and it has been to the benefit of society," he continued. Reddit had banned Chen's article about Violentacrez, the man behind a lot of the not safe for work content on the site. But Wong has since recognized that is inconsistent with their free speech mantra: "We chose to recognize that opponents have the right to criticize us, to expose us, to tell a story about useven if we don't like that story or we feel it's wrong. So we reversed the site-level ban on Chen's Gawker piece." Plus, it's not really sustainable to ban all posts that link to things which Reddit doesn't approve.

RELATED: The Internet War Over Creeps on Reddit

We'd say this is a compromise, at best, for creeps on Reddit. Sure, they get to post all the photos of women's cleavage they want. But they still have the rest of the Internet to answer to. If a website like Jezebel, for example, writes about Predditors, Reddit won't take it down. And, of course, the rest of the Internet doesn't have to play by the site's pseudo free speech rules.

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Reddit Defines What Free Speech Means on Reddit

(Reuters) - A St. Louis suburb's law that restricts protests around funerals does not violate the free-speech rights of a church known for holding anti-gay demonstrations at military funerals, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ordinance passed by the city of Manchester, Missouri, to curb picketing at funerals by members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas.

Pastor Fred Phelps and other church members have protested at hundreds of funerals of military members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of their religious view that God is punishing America for tolerance of gays and lesbians.

The church has gone to court to defend its right to protest and courts have wrestled with how to balance the group's right to free-speech against individuals' rights to privacy.

In March 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the group's funeral protests were protected speech under the First Amendment in a suit brought by Albert Snyder, the father of a Marine who had died in Iraq. The protesters had carried signs that stated, "God Hates You," "You Are Going To Hell" and "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" at his son's funeral.

The 8th Circuit case is the first to be decided since the Supreme Court upheld the group's free speech rights.

Although the church had never held protests in Manchester, two of its members, Shirley Phelps-Roper and Megan Phelps-Roper, sued in 2009 to challenge the city's ordinance, which bars protests within 300 feet of a funeral site within an hour before or after the ceremony. The law imposes a fine of up to $1,000 and up to three months imprisonment.

Both the district court and a three judge panel ruled in favor of the Phelps-Ropers, finding that the court could only shield unwilling listeners outside residential homes. But a larger 8th Circuit panel disagreed.

"The ordinance does not limit speakers or picketers in any manner, apart from a short time and narrow space buffer zone around a funeral or burial service," Judge Diana Murphy wrote for an 11-judge panel.

Anthony Rothert, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who represented the church members, criticized the court for carving out a new exception to the broad right of free speech on public sidewalks. He said the Supreme Court had previously recognized exceptions outside private residences and abortion clinics.

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Court upholds city's ban on protests at military funerals

TOM HENEGHAN, RELIGION EDITOR

Western opposition has made it impossible for Muslim states to obtain a ban on blasphemy, including anti-Islamic videos and cartoons that have touched off deadly riots, the Islamic world's top diplomat said.

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC), said his 57-nation body would not try again for United Nations support to ban insults to religion, but appealed for states to apply hate-speech laws concerning Islam.

"We could not convince them," said the Turkish head of the 57-member organisation which had tried from 1998 until 2011 to get a United Nations-backed ban on blasphemy.

"The European countries don't vote with us, the United States doesn't vote with us."

Western countries see the publication of such images and materials as a matter of free speech.

The posting of an amateurish US-made video portraying the Prophet Mohammed as a foolish womaniser and the publication of caricatures of him in France last month led to violent protests and renewed calls from the Muslim world for a global law against blasphemy.

The protests claimed some two dozen lives.

Ihsanoglu told a conference in Istanbul at the weekend that the OIC had failed to win a ban at the United Nations and would not revive its long diplomatic campaign for one.

Asked about recent media reports that the OIC wanted to resume the campaign for a blasphemy ban, he said: "I never said this and I know this will never happen."

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West's free speech stand bars blasphemy ban

Syracuse, N.Y. -- Lamees Dhaif, a 34-year-old journalist from Bahrain, won the 2012 Tully Award for Free Speech tonight at Syracuse University.

Dhaif won the award for not backing down from violence and intimidation intended to silence her reporting. At a ceremony tonight in Syracuse, she described repeated government threats, the jailing of her family, and a hasty exile that forces her to "live out of my bags." She described watching her house burn down after pro-government forces firebombed it with Molotov cocktails. Government officials repeatedly told her to stop reporting, and she described how one member of the all-powerful royal family told her he would have her cut in half.

The award is presented annually to journalists like Lamees by the Tully Center for Free Speech in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. It is given to a journalist who has faced a significant free speech threat.

Dhaif has worked for several newspapers in Bahrain, a small country on the Persian Gulf, including Akhbar Al-Khaleej, Sadaa Al Isboua, Al-Qabas, Al-Afaaq and Al-Waqt.

She said she began her professional career in 2005. She first reported on radical Islamists and then began reporting on widespread government corruption. Both topics resulted in pressures to keep quiet but intimidation and violence started in earnest as she reported on the 2011 Arab Spring movement in Bahrain.

She was branded as an "lying witch" and quickly blacklisted from media throughout the Persian Gulf. Following the widespread government censorship, Dhaif turned to Twitter, Facebook and her blog http://lameesbahrainperceptions.blogspot.com.

Earlier, Dhaif endured several cultural and legal challenges to free speech. For instance, she was discouraged from pursuing journalism as a career unsuitable for a woman. She was told if she thought reporting was important work, she should have her brother or another male relative do it. According to a news release accompanying her award, in 2009, she was accused in a legal complaint of insulting the judiciary after she wrote a series uncovering allegations of bias against women in Bahrains family courts. Though the case was dropped, officials made it clear that they could revive the charges at any time.

In 2011, after the large-scale anti-government protests, Dhaif was again called into court for criticizing the regime, according to the release. These charges were also dropped, but the stakes were raised when the pro-government forces burned her home.

Despite these threats, she remained unbowed in her criticism of the government's attempts to suppress the protest movement. In addition to her large social media audience and reporting published on her blog, she also writes a weekly column for the Saudi newspaper Alyaum and presents a television program on the Kuwaiti television station Al-Rai. During her speech at tonight's ceremony, Dhaif showed a film she made, graphically showing the deaths of protest members who had been shot by police.

During her talk in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium on campus, Dhaif touched on several topics. Among them:

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Lamees Dhaif, journalist from Bahrain, wins free speech award at Syracuse University