The Cato Institute

Are You Being Censored Online?

Instead of continuing to allow EU regulators to set the rules of free expression across the globe, Silicon Valley tech companies should fight on behalf of their users to contain government overreach…

In the wake of the 2015 terror attacks across Europe, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube signed an agreement with the European Commission to “prohibit the promotion of incitement to violence and hateful conduct.”

In other words, European regulators are using threats of harsher laws and potential liability to pressure tech companies into controlling and suppressing “extreme speech” on social media websites. This regulatory effort runs the risk of censorship creep, whereby protected speech, including political criticism and newsworthy content, could be removed from online platforms on a global scale.

In theory such an agreement does not seem to have egregious effects on society, however in reality, the line between censorship of violence-provoking hate speech and censorship creep is very slim.

However, tech companies have four possible strategies they can use to push back against government overreach and ensure that this vague line is not crossed…

1. Definitional Clarity: Clear and universal definitions of hate speech and violent extremist material, developed with assistance from human rights groups and academics, is essential for containing censorship creep. Guidelines for these policies should also provide specific examples of content deserving this designation.

2. Robust Accountability: Rigorous accountability is also necessary to check government efforts to censor disfavored view points and dissent. Removal requests by state employees and the NGOs that represent them must be subject to rigorous review. A wise approach for tech companies is to subject government requests to several layers of review by their most senior staff to ensure governments are not merely silencing political dissent.

3. Detailed Transparency: Companies should be required to provide detailed reports on governmental efforts to censor hate speech and extremist material. Transparency reports enable public conversations about censorship, and although transparency alone cannot solve the problem of censorship creep, it can help to contain it.

4. Ombudsmen Oversight: Ombudsmen, or public editors, should work to protect press freedom and to promote high-quality journalism. One concern of censorship creep is its potential to suppress newsworthy content. To address this concern, companies should consider hiring or consulting ombudsmen, whose life’s work is the news-gathering process. They would help to identify requests that would remove material that is important for public debate and knowledge.

By pressuring Silicon Valley to alter private speech policies and practices, EU regulators have effectively set the rules for free expression across the globe. Companies can and should adopt prophylactic protections designed to contain government overreach and censorship creep for the good of free expression.

Learn more…

“PC” is Just as Much of a Problem on the Right

Conservatives use “patriotic correctness” to regulate speech, behavior, and acceptable opinions…

Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood.

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. “Patriotic correctness” is a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history, and cherry-picked ideals.

Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.

Learn more…

How the FCC is Trampling on Your First Amendment Rights

Political actors and activists are able to harness the FCC’s regulatory process to chill unwanted speech and to promote speech favored by various pressure groups…

Today, regulated companies—including broadcast TV and radio, satellite TV and radio, cable TV, and internet service providers (ISPs)—are the primary producers and distributors of mass media and publications. Given the power that the Federal Communication Commission has over these regulated companies, most must remain in the commission’s good graces to operate.

In the new issue of Regulation, Brent Skorup and Christopher Koopman argue that this power should be viewed skeptically in light of the danger it poses to both the First Amendment and the Rule of Law.

Regulatory agencies have a natural incentive to engage in empire building behavior and the FCC, through its public interest standard, faces few formal legal constraints on growing its power.

In prior decades, license approval of broadcasters gave the commission and special interests a powerful tool to influence TV and radio programming. It also provided the FCC with power to dictate network operations, such as Fairness Doctrine compliance.

However, in a world of broadband and 500-channel TV offerings, these tactics have changed. Increasingly, the FCC has turned to transaction reviews to extract “public interest benefits” from merging media and telecommunications firms, and uses its leverage during licensing and transaction proceedings to engage in ad hoc merger review that substitutes for formal rulemaking. It also enables the commission to pursue agendas unavailable to it through its rulemaking process.

Through license renewals and transaction approvals, the agency allows special interest groups to dictate media content, business models, and operations.

This development has alarmed both communications scholars and free speech advocates.

Learn more….

Is Freedom of Speech Under Assault on Campus?

In a new analysis, Daniel Jacobson argues that the hostility toward free speech on college campuses makes dissent tantamount to heresy.

In Freedom of Speech under Assault on Campus, Daniel Jacobson, professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, contends that today’s progressives use the classical liberal arguments that champion freedom of speech to simultaneously defend and threaten free speech on college campuses. Jacobson looks to writings from John Stuart Mill to defend the freedom of speech and explains how cognitive biases are reinforced by this anti-free speech doctrine.

The most recent wave of assault on free speech is being carried out by the students themselves. The toleration of unpopular and even offensive opinions was once considered central to the purpose of a liberal education, which was not to indoctrinate students dogmatically but to teach them how to form beliefs in what Mill called “a manner worthy of  intelligent beings”: by critically assessing the best arguments on all sides.

Mill believed the best way for students to form their own beliefs is through adverse discussion–the confrontation of opposing arguments. His arguments anticipate several psychological phenomena, three of those are epistemic closure, group polarization and confirmation bias, which are widely recognized today. Epistemic closure is the tendency to restrict ones sources of information to those that one agrees with. Group polarization explains how like-minded views become more extreme in the absence of dissent. Confirmation bias describes the tendency to focus on evidence that supports one’s views, discounting contrary evidence. All three of these tend to undermine the justification of our beliefs, supporting the notion that the toleration of unpopular opinions is necessary to gain knowledge.

Jacobson observes that there has been a recent power shift in academia from liberals who value toleration to progressives who want to stifle it for political purposes. A postmodern challenge states that free speech is impossible because censorship is bound to happen. The progressive challenge advances the postmodern challenge by claiming that free speech should be sacrificed equally to advance the interests of the disadvantaged over the privileged. The multiculturalist challenge holds that certain opinions constitute literal violence and should not be tolerated at all. These challenges build pressure to support a heckler’s veto–denying the rights of those who disagree with popular opinion from sharing their views.

These developments are ironic in the sense that they reinforce both of the liberal arguments for freedom of speech: the freedom of speech is a natural right and that its acceptance best promotes human flourishing. Progressives on campus interpret the natural rights argument to mean that students have a natural right to a safe space free from offensive opinions and sentiments, and this natural right justifies banning certain speech to promote the utility of human flourishing. This interpretation has resulted in everything from trigger warnings and safe spaces to the actual resignations of professors who challenge these sentiments, sending a dangerous message to all campuses that adverse discussion is not welcome.  

“This movement encourages the cultivation of intellectual vices that are antithetical to an intellectually diverse society by granting power to the thin-skinned and the hotheaded—or at any rate to those most ready to claim injury or to threaten violence,” concludes Jacobson. “And it does so subversively, by pretending to enforce norms of civility and tolerance, while doing violence to the classically liberal ideals of a freethinking and intellectually diverse university.”

Read the paper…

Liberty Usually Violated Before the “Ban”

Originally posted by neonm3

It is Banned Books Week, designated by the American Library Association and others as the time for “celebrating the freedom to read.” Of course, having the freedom to read whatever one wants is essential to a free society. But regular abuse of the term “banning,” and the violations of freedom that often occur before any so-called banning is attempted, are just as crucial to recognize if we really care about liberty.

Neal McCluskey discusses Banned Books Week and liberty on the Cato blog…

Originally posted by literarygifs

FREE TILL WEDNESDAY: Get Flemming Rose’s New Book, “The Tyranny of Silence”

With the tragedies in Denmark, at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, and now in Garland, Texas, issues of self-censorship in the face of intimidation and the nature of free speech moved to the forefront of public debate. 

No one knows this debate better than Flemming Rose, the editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, who in 2005 published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, inciting a worldwide firestorm. 

From now till noon on Wednesday, download your FREE copy of Flemming’s newest book The Tyranny of Silence on ebook. 

In The Tyranny of Silence, Flemming Rose recounts his story and takes a hard look at attempts to limit free speech - offering an extraordinarily authentic perspective that can be fully applied to debates raging over threats of violence and what it means to live in a multireligious, culturally borderless world.

Watch Flemming tell his story in this video from our #WhyLiberty series. Then, download your FREE copy of his book here: http://store.cato.org/free-ebooks/tyranny-silence