Category Archives: Censorship

Free speech is under attack.

And regardless of whether our position is with someone recently banned from social media platforms, the argument is not about that individual. It is about each of us, and not only whether we will be silenced as well but what will be kept from us.

Were not for inciting violence, and were not for spreading false information. As a reminder of the prime example, free speech has never given anyone the unpunishable ability to walk into a crowded theater and yell Fire!

Weve said it here before opinions are like noses, everybody has one, and the difference in the 21st century is everyone can have a megaphone under it to let the world hear their voice.

Yet freedom of speech remains beautiful. The Founders believed this right to be inherent and essential to mans pursuit of happiness; in fact, it was two years ahead of the Declaration of Independence in John Dickinsons Declarations of Resolves.

We hear paid professionals in television, radio and other media forms speaking about the nations political divide. And getting through it. The incoming administration is preaching about a time for healing.

The hard truth is the divide has existed for as long as weve had the political parties and isnt going away. And the healing talk is hypocritical to the most recent four years of strategy to remove an administration, never mind the eight birth certificate years prior to that.

Spare us. And give us debate on real issues. Thats what strengthens our democracy. Using critical thinking and reasoned argument, we can have dialogue that constructively advances any topic.

If the words we hear dont match ours, the remedy isnt censorship. Its more speech, more dialogue.

But lest the shouting. And not rallying people to violence and destruction of property, whether its the Capitol in Washington or the downtown businesses in North Carolinas major cities.

It needs to be something substantive and delivered respectfully. We need the discourse, and not just when there are elections or movements for social justice.

A couple of years ago, we shared the words of Elon Universitys president. Theyre worth a listen again today.

Dr. Connie Book writes, Learning to ride a bicycle is not intuitive. Nor is knowing how to conduct a civil dialogue. While a broadly educated student can become familiar with the ideas and theories driving differences in points of view, the practice of exchanging those ideas with each other is a set of skills that can and should be taught.

Her writing was not only to champion her schools contribution to that end, but all of higher education. Many among us could use a course.

Book shared optimism for students to be passionate, zealous and fierce about sharing ideas in hopes of making a difference in the world.

The people shouting have that goal, too. We may have opinion on their tactics in addition to the agenda they push, but rest assured they believe theyre trying to make a difference.

Passion isnt measured in volume or destruction. And a better situation wont come from censorship.

We have to be better than who we are today.

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Censorship isn't ever the answer - Laurinburg Exchange

In a time when some say free speech is being censored by big tech companies, Representative Becky Currie is hoping to prevent that in Mississippi, with HB 151 the Stop Social Media Censorship Act.

The bill would indicate that the Legislature is opposed to any online censorship unless the content is harmful to children or promotes human trafficking. Only in those instances would the Legislature be able to limit censorship.

The bill reads:

The purpose of this act is to: (a) Level the playing field between consumers and the major social media websites; (b) Encourage the free flow of political and religious ideas and robust debate; (c) Hold major social media websites to a higher standard for having substantially created a digital public square; (d) Deter bad-faith, unfair dealing, fraud, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and the marginalization or oppression of competing worldviews;

Also

(f) Deter the owner or operator of a social media website from engaging in false advertising; and (g) Deter the owner or operator of a social media website from maliciously interfering with local, regional, and national elections.

The bill was referred to the Judiciary A committee. Representatives Calvert and Smith are co-authors on the bill.

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Bill of the Day: An act to prevent social media censorship - Yall Politics

If other world leadersare calling out Twitter for removing President Trump from its platform, then it is clearly an issue, Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich said on Thursday.

"There is German Chancellor Angela Merkel coming out and saying that the banning of President Trump on social media is a serious problem. When you have a country that has a history of real fascism and book burning, warning the United States and Big Tech companies that this could lead to worse consequences for the country, you should probably pay attention," Pavlich told "America's Newsroom."

ANGELA MERKEL RIPS TWITTER'S 'PROBLEMATIC' TRUMP BAN

Pavlich referred to a spokesman forChancellor Angela Merkelwho said Monday that the German leader regards Trump'seviction from Twitterby the company to be "problematic."

Twitter permanently suspended Trump from the social media platform on Friday, citing a "risk of further incitement of violence" after supporters of the outgoing presidentstormed the U.S. Capitolto protest Congress certification of the Electoral College vote.

Asked about Twitter's decision, Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said social media companies "bear great responsibility for political communication not being poisoned by hatred, by lies and by incitement to violence."

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Pavlich highlighted that "leading Russian dissident against Vladimir Putin" and the American Civil Liberties Union criticized Big Tech companies for banning Trump.

"You also, of course, have the leading Russian dissident against Vladimir Putin coming out and saying he is very concerned. You have a number of leftists activists coming out as well. The ACLU coming out and saying that, look, power structures change in America and if they can ban one side of the political aisle from discussing issues in these forums online, they can do it to the other side," Pavlich said.

"When Big Tech becomes bigger than the government and overtakes these principles of the First Amendment, for example, there are serious questions about what can be done about it," she added.

Fox News'Bradford Betzcontributed to this report.

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Pavlich: The left should pay attention to how world leaders are reacting to Big Tech censorship - Fox News

It's been a very tough week in the United States of America. Aspasm of mob violence has been followed by an unprecedented crackdown on our basic civil liberties. This is the darkest time many Americans can remember.

But even in the midst of this disaster, there have been flashes of comedy and we're grateful for every one of them. We got one Tuesday in the form of astatement from a group called the global Public Policy team at Twitter.

Now, you may have thought Twitter was just a social media company run by some bearded, ethereal pothead in downtown San Francisco, but not anymore. While you were sleeping, Twitter got bigger than you ever imagined it could. Twitter is now an independent nation-state with its own National Security Council, an inner agency constellation of foreign policy experts whose job it is to manage the world's affairs.

So Twitter's global Public Policy team is really the company's own NSC. They weighed in Tuesday, as security councilsdo, on the upcoming elections in Uganda. Here's what they said about those elections:

Now, marinate in that for a bit. Twitter is reminding the Ugandan people that censorship is immoral.

"Sorry, Ugandans, you're not allowed to silence other people's Twitter accounts, especially in the run-up to an election. You just can't do that. Now, we recognize you don't have a Bill of Rights or a centuries-old tradition of self-government out there in Uganda, so you might not have known this, as we do here. But to restate: Censoring voters' social media accounts is hugely harmful. Online censorship violates'basic human rights.' In fact, it's an attack on democracy itself. Got that, Ugandans?Now we understand you're a primitive, developing nation, so we'll give you a pass this time, but don't forget it. Censorship bad! #OpenInternet"

We actually had to check and make sure Twitter'sstatement was real, which it is. Twitter actually sent that, which only proves that the tech monopolies are even worse than we thought.

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Not only are they cruelly authoritarian and totally dishonest as well as limitlessly ambitious, but they are also -- and we didn't know this -- childishly stupid. They have no idea how they appear to others. They can't see themselves. They lack even a glimmer of the ironic self-awareness that is a prerequisite for wisdom. They are idiots. They don't even get their own jokes.

On the other hand, none of this is really very funny. It's terrifying. We don't need to convince you of that. You have seen the crackdown and the censorship all week long and you sense all of it is going to get worse. And you're right about that, it is going to get worse.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the Jan. 12, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

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Tucker Carlson: Twitter brazenly deplatforms conservatives, then reminds Uganda that censorship is bad - Fox News

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Two days after the 2020 election, a defiant Kathy Griffin retweeted the notorious picture of her holding a prop that looked like the bloody head of a decapitated Donald Trump. Earlier last year, Irans supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted out a call to his followers to destroy Israel. Both tweets passed the censorship rules of Twitters 20-something judges in San Francisco.

In contrast, Mr. Trump has been banned for life from Twitter and barred indefinitely from Facebook. Twitter said in a statement it excluded Mr. Trump due to the risk of further incitement of violence.

The president had called for thousands of his followers to assemble at a massive Washington, D.C., rally protesting the results of the election. Splinter groups broke off from the massed protesters. Some stormed into the halls of Congress, Social media platforms canceled Mr. Trump after he urged his followers, albeit peacefully and patriotically, to go protest at the U.S. Capitol, where the mayhem followed.

After the assault and after Democrats won the presidency, kept the House, took the Senate and threatened to pack the U.S. Supreme Court furor broke out against Mr. Trump. The outrage included the banning of Mr. Trump and some of his supporters from social media.

Thousands of scared social media users then retreated to the more conservative site Parler. But in near-unison, Google, Apple and Amazon removed Parler from their platforms.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri had his upcoming book a call to clamp down on Big Tech monopolies abruptly canceled by publisher Simon & Schuster. Mr. Hawleys crime was apparently his quixotic persistence in questioning the authenticity of the 2020 election.

What are the new standards that now get a book or a social media account canceled?

After all, the Vicki Osterweil book In Defense of Looting, a justification for theft and property destruction, came out last summer amid the Antifa and Black Lives Matter unrest. The author was even featured on National Public Radio in a largely sympathetic interview.

Is Madonna banned from social media? Shortly after the 2017 inauguration, she voiced a desire to blow up the White House with the Trump family in it.

Is AK-47-toting rapper Raz Simone banned from social media? He took over a swath of downtown Seattle last June and declared it an autonomous zone. For weeks, his armed guards reigned supreme without worry of police. There were at least four shootings and two deaths in or around Raz Simones kingdom. He was neither prosecuted nor deplatformed from social media. The lyrics of his song Shoot at Everyone are full of allusions to violence, racial slurs and stereotypes. The song is posted on YouTube, and Raz Simone still enjoys a large social media presence.

So, why did Big Tech, the media, the publishing industry, a host of corporations and a growing number of campuses double down on censoring some free speech? Why now blacklist, censor and cancel thousands of people?

True, Mr. Trump gave them an opening when some rogue supporters vandalized the Capitol. But the real reason is that the left has long been eager to curtail the speech of those it opposes. Last week simply offered members of the left the sort of perfect crisis that they determined should never go to waste.

With an unpopular Trump on the way out, and with control over the levers of government, members of the left abruptly settled all their old scores. Their aim was not just to humiliate opponents but to curtail opponents ability to organize against them.

Democrats applauded the censorship. And why not? In a few weeks they will likely seek to end the Senate filibuster. In revolutionary fashion, they may try to admit new states, pack the Supreme Court and end the Electoral College moves designed to emasculate their conservative opposition.

Over a century ago, the oil, railroad, telegraph and power industries created huge monopolies. They set up vertically integrated cartels. And they used their enormous profits to lavish gifts on politicians, control information and destroy competition.

Some people likened these huge trusts to octopuses whose tentacles strangled freedom. In reaction, angry workers and farmers, muckraking journalists and novelists, and crusading populist and progressive politicians passed antitrust laws.

And so they broke up the monopolies.

Today, however, progressive politicians, Wall Street, the media, academia, Hollywood and professional sports are all on the side of the mega-rich tech cartels. Partnering with Big Tech is both politically useful and financially lucrative.

So the values of the 19th-century rail and oil monopolies are back. But now they are married to the 20th-century leftist totalitarianism of George Orwells 1984. And they are further powered by the 21st-century instant reach of the Internet.

This time around there will be no progressive trustbusters or muckrakers. They are in league with, or bought off by, the new electronic octopus.

And its tentacles are strangling the thoughts and speech of an increasingly unfree America.

Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, is the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvictorhanson.com.

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Democrats applaud social media that blacklists, censors and cancels thousands of Americans - Washington Times

BOULDER, Colo. (KDVR) The protests that turned violent at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday could have been partly fueled by misinformation on social media, according to University of Colorado Boulder professor Dr. Casey Fiesler.

Fiesler, a professor of information science, focuses on social media ethics and law. She says theres evidence of the influence of filter bubbles in creating a widespread belief the 2020 election was fraudulent. She says social media platforms make it easy for people to only see information that aligns with their beliefs.

You have a sense that you know so many people because you have so many interactions with strangers on forums like Facebook. You feel like you have this bigger sense of the world but you have still curated your social media feeds such that youre only interacting with people who are like yourself, said Fiesler.

In severe cases, she says that could lead to becoming radicalized.

Social media platforms took quick action against President Donald Trump following the chaos in Washington. Twitter froze the presidents account temporarily and removed several tweets, citing rule violations. Facebook and Instagram blocked his accounts indefinitely.

Twitter has flagged the presidents tweets about alleged election fraud for months, saying the claims are disputed. Fiesler says those warnings wont stop the spread of misinformation.

When Twitter flags something for misinformation, that doesnt make a lot of people think its false. And thats the problem, said Fiesler, when you see a piece of information that confirms what you already believe, youre going to believe its true.

Fiesler says social media platforms have their own terms of service and rules that users have to abide by. Those platforms can remove content for violating those terms if they choose. However, she says some may choose to leave certain posts up even when they violate the rules if the post is of interest to the general public. Fiesler says a tweet from the president could be an example of this exception.

Fiesler believes an effective way to stop the spread of misinformation is to limit the ability for people to share it that could include disabling retweets on content considered dangerous or false.

At some point, it becomes a matter of principal and values. What are you going to allow your platform to be a part of? said Fiesler.

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CU professor: Stopping spread of misinformation on social media will take more than censorship - FOX 31 Denver

Amid the chaos and tragedy of Wednesday afternoon, an unexpected concession was made. President-elect Joseph R. Biden asked President Donald J. Trump to go on TV and give a speech to the American people, and the typically uncooperative POTUS technically did just that.

Years, if not months, earlier such a clear-cut request and response couldve been seen as a justifiable rationale to air Trumps pre-taped address without warning or censorship. The Capitol was under siege by Trump supporters, and any attempt to end the violence was worth a shot. Plus, who would call out cable or network news for showing something both presidents wanted the country to see?

But on Wednesday, after years of putting Trumps speeches through exhaustive fact-checks and suffering through power-hungry ratings ploys, the news anchors proved a bit smarter than that.

It certainly helped that the speech started with a lie (though whether it was referred to as such, or instead labeled a baseless assertion, depends on who you heard describe it). Trump, trying to connect with his already devoted gang of domestic terrorists, claimed at the onset we had an election stolen from us. After the video ended, CNNs Jake Tapper said, I also want to note that in that video, he lies about the election being stolen and pours more fuel on the fire. [] He continues his shameful behavior of lying to his supporters about what happened. It is absolutely disgraceful. I feel ambivalent about the fact that we even aired it.

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There was no ambivalence on CNBC, where Shepard Smith shouted for his producers to Stop the tape before its minute-long runtime elapsed. That is not true, and we are not airing it, he said. Other networks didnt air the video at all, while still others claimed to be duty-bound to let the riot leader try to calm his rioters. Meanwhile, the arguably more-powerful social media sites of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter all deleted the video entirely. (Calls to ban Trump from the latter two platforms have yet to be acknowledged, despite his continued propagation of hate speech.)

AP

Would it have been better for the networks to follow suit and not air Trumps video at all? Most likely, yes. Like a TV villain who gets too many chances by the kind-hearted protagonist, everyone should know by now that Trump is incapable of denouncing even his most despicable supporters. But the clarifying remarks made surrounding the video, as well as calls like Chuck Todds to avoid glorifying the terrorists behavior by showing their photos from inside the Capitol, stand as progress for TV news. When Trump was running and first elected to office, reporters were drawn to his asinine antics like moths to a flame; the unprecedented nature of his presidential behavior was too unbelievable to disregard, so they didnt.

Now, they are or theyre trying to, at least. That could be because theyve learned from their mistakes, slowly realizing that feeding a beast who thrives on ratings is a gradual way to get eaten alive. Or perhaps theyre a bit quicker to call out a lame duck president, knowing they wont have to put up with him for four more years. (Major networks cut away from his election week speech, when he baselessly tried to undermine the results theyd already recognized as accurate.) Or, and this is entirely possible, it just feels like national pundits are putting Trump in their rearview because were all eager to do the same thing.

But Wednesdays events and the infuriating reaction showed the fine line media has to walk moving forward. Trump, his message, and their combined toxicity need to be cut out of the discourse. His office and title are no longer reason enough to justify coverage, and the droves of invaders swarming the Capitol were a terrifying example of what happens when his manipulative pity parties are given a national platform. Too many people only hear his words, and they miss the anchor explaining why theyre wrong.

At the same time, the consequences of Trumps tenure demand not only our attention but a quick and assertive response and as contradictory as those goals may sound, they are distinct. Trump isnt going to just quietly sulk off into the sunset, and even if he did, hes already activated a following thats angry and eager to act out. Keeping Trump off TV wont magically put out the fire, but it will cut out some of the oxygen feeding it. When the flames inevitably erupt, as they did Wednesday, the response has to be better than the cops taking selfies with terrorists; there has to be more decisive action taken to defend America than there was to defend American property. (Despite what Republicans claimed later that night, Wednesday most clearly illustrated the police forces appallingly inequitable treatment of white and Black protesters.)

In other words, it cant feel like those in charge of protecting democracy are just sitting around watching TV. Most people watching at home are helpless to do anything, but the cop staring at the same cell phone we are doesnt need to be taking a picture or checking the news. He needs to be taking action. This kind of tepid response to a nightmare scenario the last time I watched bombs be placed in the Capitol, it was on Designated Survivor led to growing panic and immense frustration. Once video surfaced of officers parting the barricades to let the Trump supporters through, many onlookers said theyd had enough. After an afternoon spent watching TV, they walked away or changed the channel.

The media doesnt have that option. They have a responsibility to cover the news in its entirety, and aside from a few notable mistakes (like not airing that video of the gates being opened), they did just that on Wednesday, from noon to well past midnight. Many of us couldnt stop watching, which made it all the more important that Trumps rhetoric wasnt given additional airtime. Thats a start. Someday, hopefully, the fallout will fade from the airwaves, as well. But only when its been addressed, not appeased.

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TV Is Starting to Cut Ties with Trump, as His Legacy Wreaks Havoc on Reality - IndieWire

And while Twitter and Facebook finally took the welcome if insufficient steps of cutting off Donald Trump and his associates who have using the platforms to promote the violent overthrow of our freely elected government, this comes only after these and other tech companies have been implicated in the promotion of antidemocratic politics around the world.

There is no doubt that much of what takes place on Twitter and Facebook is real, unfettered exchange about fundamental political issues. Such discussions are often not incredibly civil, and they dont need to be. But much of what is spread by social media from misinformation to intimidation strikes at the heart of democratic ideals.

How can anyone argue that democracys own core principles require us to let them tear it apart for as long as they want?

The problem stems from the fact that in the United States, and to a lesser extent around the world, we have come to develop an absolutist perspective on free speech. The First Amendment begins Congress shall make no law, and thats often held to mean that government may not touch anything that even looks like speech. But that claim is untrue: Even in the United States, law touches speech in hundreds of ways. For example, speech used in furtherance of a criminal enterprise such as murder or fraud counts as primary evidence of the crime. There are penalties for libelous and slanderous speech. There are full prohibitions on noxious material like depictions of the exploitation of children. Yet technology companies, far-right agitators, and other groups continually present the issue as black and white: They claim that either we protect speech absolutely (despite the fact that we dont do this) or we dont protect it at all.

As a small group of scholars and activists are arguing with increasing force, this is a false choice, and it is manifestly possible to protect free speech and thus enhance the political and democratic values free speech is meant to promote while suppressing, or at least not actively encouraging, the efforts of those who want to turn democracies against themselves.

And if we grasp that protections on speech really exist to enhance democratic participation, then its easier to see through the claims that digital products such as Bitcoin or Apples computer code count as speech. In other words, wed see that a lot of cries for freedom of speech in the Internet era are really just demands for freedom from regulations that wouldnt be challenged in the offline world.

Computer code on a pedestal

The problem of freedom of speech being used to undermine the democracy it is meant to promote has deep historical roots, but two unfortunate trends have made it especially acute. One trend is that the far right has, at least as far back as the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, sold the view that the speech we hate is somehow the most valuable speech in democracies and legal scholars and organizations like the ACLU have helped to advance that claim. One of the most famous First Amendment cases in the 20th century was the ACLUs defense of a proposed march by Nazis on Skokie, Ill., in the 1970s. When Americans learn about this event, they learn that the ACLU was protecting a fundamental democratic value by defending Nazis. Yet how it can be that democracy depends on tolerance for speech that is designed to generate hatred not just of minorities but of democracy itself?

The idea that Nazi speech must be tolerated to have a functioning democracy is provably false. Nazi speech has been outlawed in Germany since World War II, and yet Germany continues to score very high, sometimes higher than the United States, in assessments of the worlds democracies. For example, in the Democracy Index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which weighs such factors as civil liberties and the health of political culture, Germany rates as a full democracy while the United States is a flawed democracy. Are we defending democracy by protecting the speech of Nazis or are we, as legal scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic put it, simply defending Nazis?

The second unfortunate trend has to do with the blurring of lines between speech and actions taken by corporations. In its infamous 2010 Citizens United decision, the US Supreme Court appeared to assert that spending money on political ads is the same thing as speaking. As in the Nazis-in-Skokie case, the ACLU sided with the party here, corporate interests that seemed on its face to be antidemocratic.

But the issue runs even deeper than this case, because wave after wave of technological change has complicated the speech/action distinction. For example, in the last decade or so a doctrine has arisen called code is speech. It holds that because computer programs are made of code that looks something like human language, everything done with computer code deserves First Amendment protections, and never mind the fact that the whole point of computer programs is to do things to take action. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other digital advocates routinely suggest that code is speech is an obvious and well-established legal principle. Apple made this very claim in court filings in 2016, when it said it had a First Amendment right not to provide the FBI with a way of unlocking, under legal warrant, the iPhone of a suspect in the San Bernardino terror attack.

So far, many judges have rejected the code is speech doctrine on its face, precisely because computer programs, when they are run, perform actions. And yet, as absurd as the code is speech argument is, it is nevertheless a rock-bottom foundation for much commentary about and on social media commentary that more often than not conflates what most of us understand as speech with things as varied as the operation of Googles search engine, the deployment of facial recognition algorithms, the targeting of protesters with artificial intelligence, and the operation of drones.

Its an attempt to accord actions with the protections granted to speech in fact, with more protections than speech itself actually has. After all, the First Amendment allows the government to write laws affecting speech in a variety of ways, depending on the kind of speech and regulation in question. One very rarely hears the complaint that the broadcasting standards issued by the Federal Communications Commission violate free speech, despite the fact that large categories of content that most of us would think of as speech in some sensethink especially of otherwise legal, adult pornographic materialare barred from appearing on the public airwaves, even when those public airwaves are licensed to private corporations. Issuing orders to commit crimes, or falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in a 1919 decision, does not receive First Amendment protection. The claim that speech has absolute protection from law is a species of the assault on governmental regulation that has characterized right-wing political activism for decades.

Into a black hole

In addition to the code is speech doctrine, the absolutist approach to speech has made it hard to regulate digital technology under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 has recently become a target of both progressives and conservatives, in no small part owing to ambiguity about its meaning and effects. Some of that agitation, especially from President Trump, has obscured the work of progressive activists, lawyers, and legal scholars who have been working for years to push back against the shield of legal immunity the law appears to give to digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The title of lawyer, journalist, and cybersecurity professor Jeff Kosseffs excellent 2019 book, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, repeats a claim we often hear from the laws supporters: that social media companies could not exist without it. Those 26 words read: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. The law was intended to have two related effects, which in some ways are at cross purposes. One was to encourage platforms to moderate problematic content: Congress hoped to encourage the companies to feel free to adopt basic conduct codes and delete material that the companies believe is inappropriate, Kosseff observes. But it was also intended, Kosseff says, to allow technology companies to freely innovate and create open platforms for user content. Shielding Internet companies from regulation and lawsuits would encourage investment and growth, they thought.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Section 230 is the lack of agreement, among even the well informed, about what it means. Appearing to endorse the claim that the law is necessary, Kosseff writes that YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Wikipedia, Twitter, and eBay ... simply could not exist without Section 230. Yet in the same paragraph Kosseff rightly notes that those companies operate in many countries that do not have Section 230 protection or anything close to it, and do not come crashing to the ground. In none of them does the Internet break. Even if Section 230 somehow created the Internet, the Internet nevertheless persists quite robustly where the law does not exist.

Section 230 has become a glaring example of the negative consequences of absolutist views of free speech. Internet companies and their promoters and lobbyists have encouraged courts and companies to believe that they have and need to have legal impunity for the content on their sites. Because of this misunderstanding, any editorial intervention or moderation on their part is cast as censorship, despite the fact that, as far as the First Amendment goes, it is only government curtailing of speech that qualifies as censorship. As soon as one starts to consider the actions of private companies to be censorship, the most ordinary activities associated with publishing such as editing can be disingenuously described as censorship.

Section 230 has been used in courts to shield companies from what seem like entirely reasonable legal consequences. One of the most egregious instances is a lawsuit known as Herrick v. Grindr, in which the dating app Grindr repeatedly invoked Section 230 to shield itself from liability for providing a tool that enabled the outrageous harassment of one user, Matthew Herrick. Herrick had met a partner over Grindr. After they broke up, Herricks ex set up a fake profile for Herrick on Grindr and another app and sent a stream of hookups to Herricks home, telling them that he wanted rough sex and that if he appeared to refuse, this was part of the game and the partner should persist in other words, directly provoking people to rape and assault him.

Herrick was resourceful enough to stave off physical harm. He called the police more than a dozen times. He also contacted Grindr and the other dating app company, demanding the fake profiles be removed. The smaller app company immediately did so. But despite the fact that his exs behavior directly violated Grindrs terms of service, Grindr repeatedly refused to help. Herricks lawyer, Carrie Goldberg, has fought a years-long uphill battle against the company, which has hidden behind the near-total immunity provided by Section 230 even though prior legal theories around product liability would seem to apply in the case.

One of the most trenchant critics of the way digital technologies are distorting free speech is University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks. In her 2019 book The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech, Franks shows how claims of censorship have been hurled against stalking laws, revenge porn statutes, anti-harassment training, diversity initiatives, blocking users on Twitter, criticism of sexism in video games, pointing out racism, closing comments sections and much more. Rather than encouraging free speech, she writes, these efforts have hobbled attempts to build a truly diverse and robust online free speech culture.

Franks and her Cyber Civil Rights Initiative also have led efforts to ban so-called revenge porn, the disclosure of sexually explicit images without the subjects consent. This nonconsensual pornography, she writes, often plays a role in intimate partner violence, with abusers using the threat of disclosure to keep their partners from leaving or reporting their abuse to law enforcement. Almost every state now has a law criminalizing nonconsensual pornography, but a federal law harmonizing the state standards has remained elusive. The chief opponents have been the ACLU and the self-nominated digital rights advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As Franks writes, The ACLU took the position that no criminal law prohibiting the nonconsensual distribution of sexually explicit images was permissible within the bounds of the First Amendment. The organization also has made the slippery slope claim arguing that laws against revenge porn could be overapplied, although Franks notes that in briefs opposing the law in Illinois, the ACLU was not able to point to a single actual case of overapplication of such laws in other states. Even now, when the state laws against nonconsensual porn have resulted in no documented impacts on freedom of speech at all, technology advocates still make the same slippery slope arguments to oppose a potential federal law.

In other words, an abstract commitment to free speech absolutism supports a penumbra of legal untouchability around digital technology outweighing the actual, concrete, verifiable harms that revenge porn does to thousands of real people. This stretch of the First Amendment, Franks argues, is turning it into a black hole from which nothing democracy, autonomy, or truth will be able to escape.

Corporate power in disguise

We are supposed to think that the crisis of free speech in social media is about individuals being censored. Never mind that private companies by definition cannot censor. Never mind that the loudest complaints of censorship come from either the companies themselves or from white supremacists and other members of the far right, the same people who insist that hoaxsters and provocateurs like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos and Jack Posobiec and QAnon promoters have something to say that the mainstream media is illicitly suppressing. That these are the same political forces that have long made common cause behind the metastasizing First Amendment should come as no surprise. All dispassionate analysis shows that the political right not only is not being suppressed but is actively promoted and helped in numerous ways by social media.

In fact, its most accurate to say that technology platforms do not merely permit white supremacist material and other extremist content but actively distribute it. And what can easily be lost in all this is that Twitter, Facebook, Google, and their supporters have not really been advocating for the freedom of individual speech that the doctrine was designed for, to help promote democracy. Rather, it is the antithesis of that: It is corporate power that they have been seeking to uphold even as the actions of right-wing trolls, actions that look like speech because they include words, drive marginalized people in droves away from these platforms, often much the worse for wear due to threats of every kind of violence, some of which come to fruition.

Last year the invasive facial recognition company Clearview AI asserted a First Amendment right to distribute its surveillance technology and to collect pictures of hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans it scraped from the Web from public and even apparently private forums. The spirit of code is speech lurks in that argument. What Clearview AI does has nothing to do with political speech, and yet the company finds it plausible to claim it has the right to violate everyones privacy and sell a profoundly invasive product. In a bastardization of freedom of speech, it asserts the right to ensure a freedom to surveil at will, as law professors Neil Richards and Woodrow Hartzog put it in the Globe.

This expansion of speech rights into territory that has nothing to do with speech is particularly visible in the rhetoric surrounding Bitcoin, the digital currency birthed by far-right online agitators who call themselves crypto-anarchists. Part of what makes Bitcoin distinct is its use of so-called blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is said to be distributed and decentralized, which in this case means that anyone anywhere can run the software that checks the authenticity of transactions and mines Bitcoin in the process. That means the only way to stop it is to shut down every computer that could run it. That makes it very hard to control, and even legislation making it illegal would be difficult to put into practice.

Its true that a software process that is difficult to stop is a new thing in the world. But does that justify the way Bitcoin promoters describe it as censorship resistance? In fact, the co-chair of a law firm serving the cryptocurrency industry, building explicitly on the code is speech position, has claimed that Bitcoin is speech. Yet blockchain technologies are not on their face anything like political speech at all: They simply produce ledger entries, transaction verification, tokens. The idea that laws or regulations that stopped that technology would be censorship can gain traction only in a world that has lost track entirely of the nature of political speech and its role in democratic governance. Indeed, its hard not to pause over the fact that the crypto-anarchists who call blockchain censorship resistant have only contempt and often outright hatred for democracies, so its odd for them to be gesturing at a core democratic value as if it should encourage others to support the technology.

Even today, more than five decades after his death, Marshall McLuhan is widely considered the visionary thinker who most clearly foresaw the Internet. McLuhan was an erratic and self-contradicting writer whose ideas like the global village and the medium is the message often sound far more visionary than careful reflection can support. Much less well known, but arguably far more important, is McLuhans teacher Harold Innis, the Canadian economic historian and media theorist whose learning was vaster and whose writing was far more precise than that of his pupil. In a 1951 meeting in Paris, Innis delivered a paper called The Concept of Monopoly and Civilization. In that wide-ranging paper, Innis worried that large newspapers determined what people thought about across entire continents, creating what he called monopolies of knowledge. The paper was not published until 1995, by which time digital mass instantaneity was finally beginning to show the consequences that his contrarian thinking had predicted: In the name of freedom, a technological framework has been built that the citizens of democracies have very little power over. And the very power to shape that technology has somehow been declared censorship by people who mean to deprive democracy of some of its most important features.

Its welcome that Donald Trump and his QAnon supporters, and even entire products like Parler and 4chan, have been deplatformed since Wednesdays insurrection in Washington, D.C. Twitter, Facebook and others rightly hold Trump responsible for stoking the violence. But theyre also responsible for it, because they served as tools of antidemocratic propaganda. It is time to ask hard questions about whether these products are in fact compatible with democratic governance. It is not clear that private companies should be in position to decide whether to ban elected national leaders from their platforms. That suggests not that the bans are wrong but rather that the existence of the platforms, at least in their current forms, is. Reddit, which moved to a heavily moderated model in the wake of earlier scandals, suggests one form social media could take in the future. But there is no reason to think there cant be other forms of it.

It remains incumbent on all of us to make democratic values central online, and put them ahead of any idea of technological progress or free speech pursued as an absolute and antidemocratic goal.

This means focusing our activism and our legal system on strengthening democracy and its institutions, not handing more and more power to those who pretend to champion democracy while doing everything they can to undermine it. Technology can be useful toward those ends, but only when our uses of it are based on a clear understanding of our core values.

David Golumbia, associate professor of digital studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, is the author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism.

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Trumps Twitter ban is a step toward ending the hijacking of the First Amendment - The Boston Globe

NCAC Statement on Cancellation of Book by Josh Hawley

The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) shares the outrage of our fellow citizens over the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters who disrupted the certification of President-elect Joe Biden. The Capitol does not belong to any group or party. The attack struck at the heart of the democratic process, which guarantees the right of every citizen to be heard. We also understand the anger at President Trump, Senator Josh Hawley and the other Republicans who fed the anger of the mob by challenging the legitimacy of our elections.

However, we are deeply concerned by the decision of Simon & Schuster to cancel a forthcoming book by Hawley because of his role in what became a dangerous threat. Of course, publishers have a First Amendment right to publishor not publishany book they choose. Hawley is certainly wrong to claim that Simon & Schuster has violated his First Amendment rights. His book can, and probably will, be published by another company.

Canceling the book weakens free expression. American publishers play a critical role in our democracy by disseminating the books that inspire the public debate that shapes our future. Many of the booksand many of the authorsare highly controversial and generate intense opposition. When that happens, it is crucial that publishers stand by their decision to publish, even when they strongly disagree with something the author has said. Canceling a book encourages those who seek to silence their critics, producing more pressure on publishers, which will lead to more cancellations. The best defense for democracy is a strong commitment to free expression.

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NCAC Statement on Cancellation of Book by Josh Hawley - Blogging Censorship

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius stated, Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

What we observe to be reality is not reality, but our perception of it. We are all marred by our own limitations in comprehending what is true. What then becomes of our understanding of the world when information is culled by intermediaries? The entities who do this say our comprehension will be heightened, but what is their authority? Might they not see the objects of their consideration parallactically in which what they take to be truth is observed from different vantage points, altering its content and meaning.

The Internet today may be viewed as our centurys Gutenberg press. In the middle of the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg introduced to Europe a printing press with movable, metal type. Its creation facilitated many advancements, including the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and expanded literacy. As with any leap forward, pernicious ramifications also ensued. Religious friction, which exploded into riots, massacres and open warfare, was driven, to a degree, by this new technology, which accelerated the networking of allied forces.

When the frontiers of expression are enlarged, a compelling impulse for censorship follows. This may come from establishmentarians or supposed reformers. The online censors of our time may be compared to both the iconoclasts of the former era, who destroyed great works of religious art, or to the compilers of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which limited the expansion of human knowledge by banning transformative works.

The names of the banned on this list are testament to the errancy of authorities, for we would not have our modern world if the work of Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes and John Locke were kept from us, but these and many other geniuses were the subject of restriction or removal.

The same excessive and deeply destructive desires for dominance are as present in our technological world as they were centuries ago, for the human heart has not changed. Today, the richest people who ever lived control the largest markets for goods ever conceived as well as the most prevalent means of communication.

Search engines, financial communication, social media, newspapers, television, movies and politics are all dominated by a few individuals. Paradoxically, though each made their fortune via the free market, all seem to be wedded to neo-socialist causes and woke politics that miscast race as the central issue in economics and social relations.

Deceit is wrought by lies and omissions, which are propagated to cover, to protect or to enrich. It, therefore, is significant that great numbers of Americans have asserted that search and social-media companies have acted deceitfully, for the terrain these companies control is vast. Are the leftist politics of such enterprises a cover for their rapacious greed to dominate economic life? Such supremacy requires political control that is attained readily if the putative goal be perceived as benevolence for the many and not dominion for the few.

These technological enterprises know no precedent. The Founding Fathers could not have conceived of the power, the scope and the wealth of the combines at issue. Their owners have been called barons, but such an appellation seems wrong. We may wager that if by some magic the Founding Fathers could be transported to our time, they would call these men, kings, and we know the Founders beliefs with regard to monarchical despotism.

It would be bad enough if the tools used by these companies were straightforward and perceptible to consumers. They are not. Intrinsic to targeted advertising is the placing of people into cohorts, which may be determined by their search or messaging patterns. Those with similar patterns are grouped together. Though seemingly benign, pattern recognition, aided by algorithms and artificial intelligence, allows companies to know more about the inclinations of users than people know about themselves.

With such knowledge, future actions may be plotted with accuracy, and suggestions, omissions of information and ephemeral goads may be used to entrench behaviors. All this can be done without conscious perception. These companies exceed in their powers the agents conceived by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech . A law, foundational to the expansion of the Internet, has, in its recent application, done just that. Section 230 states, No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. The intent was to promote discourse. Through the censorship of disfavored speech, this intent has been turned on its head.

Reports exist of a nexus between fact-checkers employed by American companies and China. If proven, this is an extreme danger, for fact-checking has figured prominently in politics. A new rule to replace Section 230 is needed desperately.

To mirror our Framers intent, such a rule may read, People may post anything that is lawful and which does not incite imminent violence. Content or images prohibited by law would thus be excluded; there could also be an age-sensitive viewing function. While not a comprehensive solution to the ills of the medium, such a substitute could be of profound benefit.

Many actions can be explained by greed, some by cowardice and a great number by stupidity. We must limit all these as we strive to ensure that people are not manipulated nor information suppressed.

John Poindexter is a physicist and a former assistant to the president for national security affairs. Robert McFarlane is chairman of an international energy company and a former assistant to the president for national security affairs. Richard Levine is a former deputy assistant secretary of the Navy and a former NSC staff director. They recently authored the book Americas #1 Adversary And What We Must Do About It Now!

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Technological expansion of expression has lead to new levels of censorship - Washington Times