15 Oct 19 | Index in the Press, News and features
Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of Index on Censorship, wrote an opinion piece for Big Issue North:
“Free speech” has become something of a dirty word in recent years. While most people like to say they are in favour of free speech, when you drill down into the areas where speech should be curtailed, it is apparent that views on where the lines should be and are drawn differ widely. And it is in debates about those lines that a gap has opened up in the defence of free speech, into which the far right has gleefully stepped.
“Free speech” is now the rallying cry for those who want to defend bigoted and hateful views, and who want to defend the right to use terms like “cockroach” and “vermin”, while also denying the rights of those they denigrate to speak in their defence. And as free speech becomes increasingly linked with those who espouse intolerance and division, so free speech as a universal value becomes tarnished.
This has meant in turn that those who would have traditionally championed free speech have become increasingly willing to tolerate or even advocate censorship as a social good. But censorship is never a social good. Whether imposed by states, big business, or the mob, censorship always ends up targeting those who are already oppressed and marginalised…
Read the full article: Big Issue North 14-20 October
25 Sep 19 | News and features, United Kingdom
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”109702″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]“There is no grey area when someone swears at you,” said Rebecca Roache, senior lecturer in philosophy at the Royal Holloway University of London. Other types of rudeness may have been unintended, but swearing is an unambiguous attack. Roache gathered together a panel of professionals and academics to offer their perspectives on the part swearing plays in communication and expression in modern society, for her workshop Swearing by the Rules: A Workshop on the Regulation of Swearing.
Hosted by Royal Holloway University in leafy Bedford Square, the air was thick with expletives as the nature of swearing was discussed. Why is swearing offensive? Is fuck only a swearword because we’ve all agreed that it is? Are there any benefits of swearing? Would the regulation of swearing compromise the freedom of expression of those being regulated?
Roache opened by questioning “Why do we get more excited about swearing than other breaches of etiquette?”. She posited that, while a person neglecting to say “thank you” to someone holding a door open for them could be rationalised away by the door holder, if the person instead said “fuck you” as they walked past, the disrespect and contempt being displayed could not be ignored. Rules of etiquette exist to allow members of a society to affirm respect to one another. Swearing exists to break those rules. It could be suggested that swearing, when used to breach etiquette, breaks the unwritten rules of mutual respect that hold a society together. But does this mean it should regulated?
A representative of the Thames Valley police, who preferred not to be named, argued that in fact swearing can be “potentially be a force for good”, and expressed his anxiety around suggestions of the regulation. Drawing on Salman Rushdie’s claim that “nobody has the right not to be offended”, he suggested that swearing can be critical to expression, and that, in the right company, it can be a bonding exercise. He also pointed out that swearing can be a form of rebellion, and attempts to censor it would only add to its cache. He stressed that these were his personal views, rather than the official stance of the police. The representative of the police found a bedfellow in Richard Stephens, a senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of Keele.
“The emotional aspect of swearing gives it pain relieving effects” Stephens explained during his presentation. He has conducted an experiment that involves participants placing their hand in a bowl of ice-water for as long as they can while loudly repeating a swear-word. He found that participants were able to tolerate pain for longer while swearing, than while saying a neutral word. He also noted that participants who reported swearing regularly in day-to-day life, reported less pain-relieving effects during the experiment. Does this suggest that the more swearing becomes part of common vocabulary in society, the less power it holds?
Mihaela Popa-Wyatt discussed the power language can wield in her presentation, ‘How Words Oppress’, in which she questioned whether hate speech is covered by freedom of speech. Popa-Wyatt, a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, explained that the more common the expression of racist ideas become, the more they lend legitimacy to discriminatory practices. This is pertinent today, when populist, anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise in the West. Opinium, an insight agency who conduct research into what people think, feel and do, found that minorities are facing a rise in racial discrimination since January 2016, before the Brexit vote. While freedom of expression must be protected, and swearing can form an individual’s mode of expression, using language to discriminate, sub-ordinate and legitimate harm towards oppressed groups in society must not be framed as freedom of expression.
It only takes a glance at the comments under Donald Trump’s tweets to see that in the West directing obscenities at those in power is permitted as an act of free speech. Ugandan academic Stella Nyanzi was denied her freedom to criticise long-ruling Ugandan President Museveni when she was imprisoned in November 2018, where she remains. Nyanzi’s offence was stating on Facebook that she wished Museveni had been burned up by the “acidic pus” in his mother’s birth canal. Freedom to challenge those in power, via obscenities or otherwise, is the cornerstone of a democracy. Roache said: “we don’t breach somebody’s rights by swearing at them”. We do breach somebody’s rights by criminalising their expression of discontent.
Context is key. This is the theme that ran through the workshop. What is offensive to some may not be offensive to others. The choice to swear at another person must be governed by that individual’s decision on how they want to exercise their freedom of expression. As the representative of the police summed up: “Over-legislating disempowers us all.” [/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1569401459756-9148910b-76e3-2″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
12 Sep 19 | News and features, United Kingdom
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”88714″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]Time was when the political right and social conservatives were enthusiasts for censorship – for “no-platforming” drama, film and books deemed obscene, disrespectful of authority or unpatriotic. The left, and liberals, were the supporters of freedom – calling for the publication of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960; supporting the editors of Oz Magazine in the 1970 prosecution for obscenity; and opposing the charge of gross indecency in the staging of Howard Brenton’s Romans in Britain in 1982.
In every one of these cases, the liberals won, mocking those who were active in the prosecution. The victories effectively ruled out any further action to stop publication or staging.
It is different now. Significant parts of the left now wish to rule out speech they deem offensive.
In the USA, especially on college campuses, the view that freedom of speech furthers understanding, broadens the mind and sharpens, modifies or even changes one’s own beliefs is now frequently opposed by another view, often militantly expressed.
This holds that institutions of all kinds have a responsibility to protect people from opinions they find odious because they will sustain psychological damage from exposure to them. It dictates that the person or group who would cause such harm should not be given any kind of platform – in person, on the web or in print.
In the UK, several universities have been drawn into the struggle around the allegations of “hurt” and efforts to deny hearings for speakers accused of spreading hurtful speech.
Those university authorities tend to be more robust than their US equivalents in insisting that, once invited, a speaker be heard – though not invariably.
Freedom of speech and publication is passing, on the left, from being necessary to being suspect. One strong voice is that of Nesrine Malik, a Guardian columnist, who believes that “freedom of speech is no longer a value”, writing that: “It has become a loophole exploited with impunity by trolls, racists and ethnic cleansing advocates… aided by the group I call useful liberals – the ‘defend to the death your right to say it’ folk.”
The notion that freedom of speech is a neutral principle uncontaminated by history or social bias is, she believes, a “delusion”. Liz Fekete, director of the Institute of Race Relations, takes the same approach. She believes that “it is the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life that has emboldened identitarian and neo-Nazi activists, who are experts at manipulating naive liberal arguments about freedom of speech”.
These themes, if less strongly put, now appear in official discourse. A government white paper – usually a prelude to legislation – on Online Harms, which aims to make the UK “the safest place in the world to go online”, defines harms as “behaviour online which may hurt a person physically or emotionally”.
Thus free speech shifts from being something essential to a democratic society (even when offensive) to an issue dependent on a vague definition of emotional harm – which, by its nature, must attract myriad charges from those who claim criticism has damaged them emotionally, and thus must be censored.
Index on Censorship’s robust recognition, in an August 2018 statement, that “we, as users, will have to tolerate the fraudulent, the offensive and the idiotic” if speech is to be free now faces an existential challenge.
In a BBC Breakfast discussion in August last year, the former chief crown prosecutor, Nazir Afzal, suggested that prosecuting someone for hate speech could stop his or her later development into a major criminal. Jodie Ginsberg, Index’s chief executive, countered that, saying: “The idea that we can prevent future crimes by policing expression is a dangerous road to go down.”
Yet it is an indication of how official thinking now develops.
Earlier this month, an essay – Designating Hate – was published by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. It was an unusually clear argument for censorship – in this case of organisations “which demonise specific groups on the basis of their race, religion, gender, nationality or sexuality”.
The proposal would task the Home Office with the duty of drawing up a list of those organisations which habitually use speech designed to prompt hatred, and to limit them “from appearing on media outlets or engaging with public institutions”.
They would be given a chance to reform: reviews would determine whether or not the organisation had changed its behaviour and, if so, it could be admitted to the media or engage with public institutions once more.
The good intentions of such legislation and proposed legislation are obvious. The framers of these policies wish to dam the flood of hate and threat which now pulses through social media, and to protect vulnerable people from their effects. But it’s questionable if they do protect – suppression of speech tends merely to re-route it, making it more alluring to those it attracts. And what is less in question is that they will in future promote a new kind of censorship, as algorithms pick up on key words to shut down blogs and messages which quote hate speech in order to oppose it; or which remove the output of far right or far left groups which, though repellent to liberals, have a right to be published.
The deletion of speech judged harmful opens up an endless trajectory, in which one excision begets another. “The fraudulent, the offensive and the idiotic” have always been with us, and though social media and the web amplify their reach, we still must tolerate them if we wish to preserve a robust civil society.[/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1568819478334-b34b0086-8688-0″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
06 Jun 19 | Campaigns -- Featured, Digital Freedom, Digital Freedom Statements, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Social media platforms have enormous influence over what we see and how we see it.
We should all be concerned about the knee-jerk actions taken by the platforms to limit legal speech and approach with extreme caution any solutions that suggest it’s somehow easy to eliminate only “bad” speech.
Those supporting the removal of videos that “justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status” might want to pause to consider that it isn’t just content about conspiracy theories or white supremacy that will be removed.
In the wake of YouTube’s announcement on Wednesday 5 June, independent journalist Ford Fischer tweeted that some of his videos, which report on activism and extremism, had been flagged by the service for violations. Teacher Scott Allsopp had his channel featuring hundreds of historical clips deleted for breaching the rules that ban hate speech, though it was later restored with some videos still flagged.
It’s not just Google’s YouTube that has tripped over the inconsistent policing of speech online.
Twitter has removed tweets for violating its community standards as in the case of US high school teacher and activist Carolyn Wysinger, whose post in response to actor Liam Neeson saying he’d roamed the streets hunting for black men to harm, was deleted by the platform. “White men are so fragile,” the post read, “and the mere presence of a black person challenges every single thing in them.”
In the UK, gender critical feminists who have quoted academic research on sex and gender identity have had their Twitter accounts suspended for breaching the organisation’s hateful conduct policy, while threats of violence towards women often go unpunished.
Facebook, too, has suspended the pages of organisations that have posted about racist behaviours.
If we are to ensure that all our speech is protected, including speech that calls out others for engaging in hateful conduct, then social media companies’ policies and procedures need to be clear, accountable and non-partisan. Any decisions to limit content should be taken by, and tested by, human beings. Algorithms simply cannot parse the context and nuance sufficiently to distinguish, say, racist speech from anti-racist speech.
We need to tread carefully. While an individual who incites violence towards others should not (and does not) enjoy the protection of the law, on any platform, or on any kind of media, tackling those who advocate hate cannot be solved by simply banning them.
In the drive to stem the tide of hateful speech online, we should not rush to welcome an ever-widening definition of speech to be banned by social media.
This means we – as users – might have to tolerate conspiracy theories, the offensive and the idiotic, as long as it does not incite violence. That doesn’t mean we can’t challenge them. And we should.
But the ability to express contrary points of view, to call out racism, to demand retraction and to highlight obvious hypocrisy depend on the ability to freely share information.[/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1560160119940-326df768-f230-4″ taxonomies=”4883″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
