Tag Archives: free speech

Free Speech

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…British style.  There is a trial in progress in Leeds (northern England, a bit up the road northeast of Manchester) concerning a

Muslim gang on trial for raping and grooming hundreds of victims, some as young as eleven.

Tommy Robinson, a British activist-journalist, was arrested and hauled off to prison for the heinous crime of reporting information about the defendants—public information, mind you.

British media are forbidden from reporting on certain trials….

The rationalization is that reporting might taint the jury.  Because some juries are more easily tainted than other juries on other trials.  Cue Bill the Cat.

No, it’s a matter of the British government, in the land that gave the world the Magna Carta and John Locke—and jury trials—not trusting its own citizens with the truth.  It’s also a matter of political correctness run amok.  Telling the truth might hurt the feelings of the defendants.

This is the culture the Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally want us to have.

 

h/t Ralph for this one.

Free Speech of the Left

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Recall Kanye West’s remarks supporting President Donald Trump, even though he disagrees with Trump on a number of questions, and West’s further remarks saying that 400 years of slavery was a choice—and his follow-on statement that the latter remark was “just an idea.”  Just an idea that Americans who happen to be black don’t all have to think alike—they’re as free to think and speak their own minds rather than engaging in Left-approved group think as any other American.

In a clear demonstration of West’s point, we get this from a pair of denizens of the Left:

A Detroit radio station said it will ban Kanye West’s music over controversial comments the rapper made earlier this week that slavery “was a choice.”

Hosts Shay Shay and BiGG of 105.1 the Morning Bounce made the announcement Thursday on Facebook with the hashtag “Mute Kanye.”

These two went further:

We don’t want to hear Kanye’s music, we don’t want to play Kanye on our show, we don’t want to talk about Kanye anymore.  So we are taking a stand and we aren’t playing his music anymore; we just are refusing to give him a platform.

Not only that.  Because they don’t want to hear it, these two are dictating what their listeners will be permitted to hear, and they’re dictating to their listeners how they’ll be allowed to evaluate what they are permitted to hear—because Shay and BiGG think their listeners are too grindingly stupid to think for themselves, or their listeners must be required to think only Left-approved thoughts and evaluate with Left-approved paradigms.

They have to be kept locked away in the mental prison that West talked about.

And Leftists, of which Shay and BiGG are only too typical, are the keyholders.  Because there’s only way right way to think and to speak, and these personages Know Better.  George Orwell would be proud: censorship is free speech.  Or Vladimir Putin: there is no free speech, only permitted speech.

Battle Against Hate Speech?

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Bob Pearson, co-author of Countering Hate and CIO of W2O Group says that AI is able to identify hate speech today.

All human beings follow patterns online.  You can see what language, content, channel, and people matter to them. You can see which words trigger information seeking, which language is most associated with hate topics or sites, which people are the most important influencers and you can see a range of behavioral characteristics.

Except that humans can’t define “hate speech;” we can’t even define “hate.”  All that can be done is for each of us, individually, to identify what it seems like that to us—not what it is to anyone else.  A Justice’s remark about pornography—that he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it—is worse than wholly inadequate when Government tries to regulate speech, or when private enterprises try to regulate speech in the public spaces they create as their business models or offshoots of them.  Such regulation is a threat to individual liberty.

Artificial Intelligence certainly is not up to this task of discriminating unacceptable speech from acceptable.  The definitions of those terms will be programed by a select group of humans—who can’t define the terms except as they personally apply the terms to themselves.  This frangibility is demonstrated by those cases that go to jury trials and the differing outcomes differing juries reach on substantially similar cases.  All AIs can do is reflect the prejudices of their programmers.

How, indeed, is “hate speech” to be discriminated from the merely rude or offensive or uncivil speech?  To narrow the thing a bit, think about civility—simple courtesy.  Why should a New Yorker’s version of civility be forced to take a back seat to a Midwesterner’s or a Californian’s version of civility?  Why should one of the other two be forced to take a back seat to a New Yorker’s version?  On what basis would any definer pick one or identify a middle ground that doesn’t wind up being a more insidious censorship?

Consider Marshall McLuhan’s the medium is the message.  Sometimes the overt rudeness—even “hate”—is a demonstration of a point.  Is burning our national flag an act of hatred or political speech?  Is posting a picture of Mohammed…?  Prove it: it’s a hard line to draw between that and rudeness on the one hand or actual hate on the other.

Not even civility is “simple.”  How is something as complex as hate speech to be handled?

Yet the whole argument over identifying, and then censoring, hate speech is irrelevant other than the threat to freedom that is that effort to identify and censor.

The problem he [Pearson] says, is that Facebook and other companies have not taken up the charge to make the battle against hate speech a major priority.

No, Pearson is utterly wrong on this.  Facebook, et al., must not take up the battle, any more than can Government be allowed to.  Any effort along these lines can only be the despicable bigotry and the equally shameful cowardice of censorship.  Bigotry because all such efforts amount to is one man, or a small group of them, imposing his prejudice of acceptability on the speech of all others.

Hackneyed as it’s become, Justice Louis Brandeis still is right: the answer to bad speech—however defined—is more, and better, speech—however defined.

Engage in the discourse, don’t cower away from it.

A Judicial Miss

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Recall the Marquette University case wherein a graduate-student instructor, Cheryl Abbate, shut down debate on the subject of gay marriage, arguing that views that didn’t accept such things were “homophobic and unwelcome in her classroom.”  Tenured Political Science Professor John McAdams objected, in blunt terms, to the evident bigotry demonstrated by Abbate in a personal post on his personal blog.  Marquette disciplined him for disagreeing—that’s a violation of Marquette “speech” policy.  McAdams demurred and took Marquette to court.

Milwaukee County Circuit judge sided with the university. The judge, David Hansher, wrote that academic freedom “does not mean that a faculty member can harass, threaten, intimidate, ridicule, or impose his or her views on students.”

And yet, that’s exactly what the graduate-student instructor was doing. Hansher needed to pay actual attention to the facts of the matter.

Free Speech

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The Supreme Court has taken up the case of National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (Nifla) v Becerra, whose proximate subject centers on abortion rights but whose real subject is freedom of  speech.

California’s Reproductive FACT Act, the law in question in NIFLA, requires pro-life centers to advise their clients of the availability of abortion centers.  This is forced speech, and it destroys the 1st Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech, since speech cannot be freely spoken if it cannot also be freely not spoken.  This is as true for factual speech as it is for opinion speech.

The Supreme Court expressly held as much…when it rejected a distinction between compelled statements of opinion and compelled statements of fact, finding that “either form of compulsion burdens protected speech.”

Indeed. And one obvious consequence of losing that distinction (by, for instance, ruling for Becerra rather than for NIFLA) would be to expose all news outlets to lawsuits over their editorial choices of what sets of facts to publish and what to withhold in every single article they publish.