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Tag: freedom of speech
Trump Opposes ‘Censorship’ — But Yearns To Censor His Critics

Trump Opposes ‘Censorship’ — But Yearns To Censor His Critics

An ordinary hypocrite would know better than to demand absolute freedom of speech for his friends, and deny it to his critics in the next breath. But then Donald J. Trump is no ordinary hypocrite. Because that’s exactly what the president did last week.
 Last Thursday, social media giant Facebook announced that it was banning a bunch of crackpot conspiracy theorists and professional race-baiters from its platform. The list included Infowars’ Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, racial provocateur MiloYiannopoulos and the notorious Jew-baiter and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
All but the last, of course, are Trump’s allies in seeking the crucial antisocial sorehead vote. Taking to Twitter, the president erupted: “I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms. This is the United States of America—and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH!” Trump wrote. “We are monitoring and watching, closely!!”
Actually, the First Amendment begins “Congress shall make no law…” It doesn’t say a word about private entities such as Facebook, the Washington Post, the National Enquirer, or the publication in which you are reading this column. All are free to publish or not publish, as they choose. The Constitution’s purpose is to enhance press freedom, not limit it.
As usual, Trump’s got it backwards. His pet bigots remain free to speak, but nobody’s required to amplify their voices.
By Sunday, the president had changed his tune on censorship. He retweeted a Twitter account calling for the defenestration of a Fox News personality who criticized him. “When you look at the continuous incorrect statements by [Judge Andrew] Napolitano over the past 2 years, it is fair to ask FNC why they allow him to have national air time…Unacceptable! Take him off the air!”
 Napolitano, see, had committed the unpardonable sin of reading the Mueller Report. Like the 450 or so former federal prosecutors who have signed a statement saying that anybody but the president would be prosecuted for obstructing justice for his attempts to hamstring the Russia investigation, Napolitano was shocked by Trump’s actions. He used words like “immoral” and “repellent.”
Remember, this is the same president who once threatened a federal investigation of Saturday Night Live for lampooning him. Twice, actually. Both when actor Alec Baldwin’s comic impersonation first got under his skin, and then again when the show was re-broadcast a few months later. 
 It’s axiomatic: show me a bully, I’ll show you a coward.
Not that Facebook deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. With regard to InfoWars, what took them so long? From the social media giant’s perspective, this amounts to a cost-free publicity stunt. Former Fox News sweetheart Megyn Kelly did a takedown of InfoWars’ sweaty, blustering proprietor Alex Jones during the first outing of her ill-fated NBC News career almost two years ago.
Banned from Facebook? Jones and Watson, his British alter ego, deserve to be tarred, feathered and exiled to a desert island in the remote South Pacific, along with their imbecile followers. Preferably one that gets swallowed up as the oceans inexorably rise. Global climate change has got to be good for something.
Just to remind you, Jones is currently being sued for his bizarre insistence that the 2012 massacre of 26 children and teachers at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut was a hoax—supposedly an Obama-orchestrated theatrical spectacle to promote gun control.
It’s not going well for him.
Another of InfoWars greatest hits was a 2016 YouTube posting in which Jones asserted that Hillary Clinton had raped, murdered and dismembered scores of children. “Yeah, you heard me right,” he claimed. “Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”
So naturally, he’s Trump’s bosom buddy. In the midst of the 2016 campaign, the candidate gave Jones’ radio program a 30-minute telephone interview. “Your reputation is amazing,” Trump said.
That’s definitely one word for it.
On Saturday, Trump re-tweeted Paul Joseph Watson’s indignant response to his Facebook banishment. “Dangerous’. My opinions? Or giving a handful of giant partisan corporations the power to decide who has free speech? You decide.”
 It’s an easy call. Among Watson’s greatest hits are a same day post arguing that the mass murder of 32 students and professors at Virginia Tech University “could very well be another government black-op.” According to Nico Hines in The Daily Beast, within a week of the 2005 London Underground terror attack that killed 52 of his countrymen, he published “How the Government Staged the London Bombings in Ten Easy Steps.”
This joker wants a mass-media platform with no strings attached? Let him petition the BBC.
 Anyway, these two are probably the least noxious of the rabble-rousers Facebook banned. The others, such as neo-Nazi pal Yiannopoulos, and “white genocide” promoter Laura Loomer, like Farrakhan, traffic in overt race-hatred.
It’s a damned shame to see even Trump defending them.
IMAGE: Screenshot of Milo Yiannopoulos.
Poland’s Holocaust Bill Is a Hate Speech Ban

Poland’s Holocaust Bill Is a Hate Speech Ban

In Poland, as in several other European countries, it is a crime to deny the Holocaust. Soon, thanks to a bill that was approved by the lower house of the Polish parliament on Friday, it may also be a crime to discuss the Holocaust too frankly.

The pending ban on references to Polish complicity in Nazi genocide, which has provoked outrage in Israel and around the world, may seem inconsistent with the ban on Holocaust denial. But the two taboos are of a piece with each other and with Poland’s prohibition of ethnic insults — a fact that should give pause to American fans of European-style speech regulation.

The Polish bill makes it a crime, punishable by fines and up to three years in prison, to accuse “the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.” The legislation was motivated largely by anger at the common use of phrases like “Polish death camps,” which could be read to mean that the war crimes committed by Germans in occupied Poland were a project of the Polish government.

“German Nazi crimes are attributed to Poles,” Deputy Justice Minister Patryk Jaki complained last week. “And so far the Polish state has not been able to effectively fight these types of insults to the Polish nation.”

Some of these “insults” happen to be true, since part of “the Polish nation” was “complicit in the Nazi crimes.” Poles saved Jews, but Poles also murdered Jews, under Nazi instruction and on their own initiative.

Acknowledging that complicated and troubling reality could expose people to criminal liability under the proposed law, notwithstanding its focus on statements “contrary to fact” and its exemption for people engaged in “artistic or scientific activities.” The bill, which applies to mistakes as well as deliberate misrepresentations, charges the government with determining what is true and whose motives are elevated enough to shield them from prosecution.

The impact of such a system goes far beyond the people who are actually fined or imprisoned, since the possibility of an investigation encourages self-censorship. The result — people afraid to speak their minds, lest they attract unwanted attention from the government — hardly seems consistent with the “freedom to express opinions” and “disseminate information” guaranteed by the Polish constitution.

The same could be said of the Polish laws that make a criminal out of anyone who minimizes or denies Nazi war crimes or who insults or incites hatred against people based on their nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. These are fuzzy categories that invite arbitrary and unpredictable enforcement, chilling speech that might offend the sensibilities of protected groups.

The proposed ban on charges of Polish complicity in the Holocaust is similar in logic as well as impact, since it criminalizes “insults to the Polish nation,” a kind of group defamation. The same principle that is aimed at protecting minorities from verbal oppression can be easily adapted by majorities seeking to suppress speech that makes them uncomfortable.

We need not look abroad to see how slippery the concept of hate speech can be. Last year Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, argued that the University of California at Berkeley’s decision to cancel a speech by conservative commentator Ann Coulter did not raise any constitutional issues because “hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.

Dean was wrong about that, since “hate speech” is not a legally relevant category in the United States, and his loose use of the phrase demonstrated why making it so would be dangerous. Why bother to argue with your opponents when you can have them arrested?

The Polish legislators who want to criminalize speech that offends them are trying the same shortcut. The only way to close it off is by rejecting, once and for all, the illiberal idea that people have a right not to be offended.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @jacobsullum. To find out more about Jacob Sullum and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

PHOTO: Holocaust survivors walk under the sign that reads Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work makes you free”) after paying tribute to fallen comrades at the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland, on January 27, 2015

 

 

Zuckerberg To Convince Conservatives Of Facebook’s Neutrality

Zuckerberg To Convince Conservatives Of Facebook’s Neutrality

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg will meet this week with prominent conservatives in the media, a spokesman said on Sunday, to address allegations of political bias at the popular social networking site.

Some 12 “conservative thought leaders” will join the meeting with Zuckerberg on Wednesday, a Facebook spokesman said. Among the invitees are media personality Glenn Beck, Fox News Channel’s “The Five” co-host Dana Perino and Zac Moffatt, co-founder of Targeted Victory, a technology company that aims to bring transparency to media buying.

Facebook came under fire last week when an unnamed former employee told technology news website Gizmodo that workers often omitted conservative political stories from the company’s “trending” list of topics.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has “found no evidence that this report is true,” but would continue to investigate. A U.S. Senate committee has also opened an inquiry into Facebook’s practices.

Beck, a former Fox News host, took to Facebook early Sunday to say he is going to the meeting in Menlo Park, California, and “it would be interesting to look him (Zuckerberg) in the eye as he explains.”

“While they are a private business and I support their right to run it any way they desire without government interference,” Beck said, “it would be wonderful if a tool like face book [sic] INDEPENDENTLY CHOSE to hold up Freedom of speech and freedom of association as a corporate principle.”

On Friday, Facebook outlined its “Trending Topics” guidelines in its media relations section and stated that reviewers are neither allowed nor advised to discriminate against sources.

Facebook, now valued at around $350 billion, has become a bigger source of news for its more than 1 billion daily active users. Sixty-three percent of users, or 41 percent of all U.S. adults, say they get news from the site, according to a study last year by the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation.

 

Reporting by Marcy Nicholson; Editing by Mary Milliken and Chris Reese

Photo: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks on stage during the Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco, California April 12, 2016. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/Files

Pontiff Wrong On Limiting Freedom Of Expression

Pontiff Wrong On Limiting Freedom Of Expression

A few words on the limits to freedom of expression:

For what it’s worth, there are a few that are acceptable. You don’t threaten or incite violence. You don’t defame. You don’t produce child pornography. And you don’t falsely shout “Fire!” in the proverbial crowded theater.

To these restrictions, Pope Francis wants to add another: You may not say anything that insults religious beliefs. “You cannot provoke,” he told reporters Thursday. “You cannot insult the faith of others.”

As you might have guessed, he was referring to the act of terror by extremist Muslims against Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine known for provocative, scathing and even vulgar attacks on Islam — along with other religions, institutions and entities. The magazine was notorious for running cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, even though many Muslims consider any representation of Mohammed to be deeply offensive. Twelve people died in the attack; one was a Muslim police officer.

So one can understand the pontiff’s concerns. But he could not be more wrong.

There is something in free people that instinctively rebels against being told what they cannot do, something that requires them to do the banned thing, not because they particularly need or want to do it, but, rather, as an act of self-assertion. So if you want to protect Islam from insult, the worst thing you can do is ban insults to Islam.

It is worth noting that, in America at least, most publications have long refrained from printing images of Mohammed. This came about, not from fear of violence, though that has become a concern in recent years, but, rather, out of deference to Muslim sensibilities. In the ordinary run of things, there is no particular reason to publish such images, and doing so would affront a great swath of humanity. Why give gratuitous offense?

Point being, left to our own devices, most of us police our own speech quite effectively. We don’t need threats or law to respect one another. We give respect as a matter of course.

Most of us. And then, there are the Charlie Hebdos of the world. In a free society, there always will be.

Shout back at them, if you must. Laugh them off or ignore them, if you want. But to censor them by force of law because you fear violence? Few things could be more antithetical to freedom — or more counterproductive.

After all, last week’s attack, hardly destroyed Charlie Hebdo. Rather, it elevated an obscure left-wing rag to arguably the most famous publication on Earth. The magazine’s first post-attack issue had an initial press run of 3 million against a normal run of 60,000. Even then, they couldn’t keep copies on the shelves.

Again, in a free society, the thing you seek to ban inevitably becomes the thing people seek.

While condemning the massacre, the pontiff also seems to feel the problem here is free speech. Using the hypothetical example of a friend who cursed his, the pontiff’s, mother, he argued that some things are so profoundly offensive you have to expect people to respond with violence. But the pope should ask himself: How many Catholics shot up how many newspapers over harsh coverage of the church’s sex scandals? The issue is not free speech but the fanaticism of some Muslims — some Muslims –who apparently believe they have a God-given right never to be offended — and to do violence when they are.

The worst thing the free world can do is seek to appease these unappeasable people by trampling our own fundamental values. If the pope doesn’t understand that, well … many of us do, as evidenced by the million people who descended on Paris Sunday to march in solidarity against terrorist repression.

One woman held aloft a sign that distilled the message quite nicely. “Freedom,” it said, “is non-negotiable.”

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

AFP Photo/Alberto Pizzoli