Saturday, August 11, 2018
Is Freedom Of Speech Naive?
Free speech is ‘dangerously naive idea’ that leads to ‘amplification of lies,’ columnist claims
Aug 10, 2018 8:00 pm
In a column criticizing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s decision not to ban Alex Jones from the social media site, a writer for The Verge attacked the principle of free speech as “dangerously naive.”
Laura Hudson, The Verge’s culture editor, said Twitter is wrong to believe that a free marketplace of ideas is sufficient to push back against harmful conspiracy theories.
“Who doesn’t want to think that the truth will always win in the end, that information not only wants to be free, but that this freedom will lead us toward a more just world — especially when it is your job to share information?” Hudson wrote. “But in our current moment, it is a dangerously naive idea.”
Why would free speech be bad?
Hudson cited numerous studies that promote the idea that once people have believed false information, presenting them with the correct information later could just entrench them more deeply in the false belief.
Therefore, Hudson argues, social media sites like Twitter have an obligation to carefully police the speech on their platforms to limit the amplification and exposure of poisonous ideas.
“Instead, far too many of the biggest social platforms continue to tie themselves — and, by extension, their millions of users — to the railroad tracks of unfettered speech, more fearful of exuding a whiff of censorship than the oncoming train of misinformation and hate that is already barreling down upon us,” Hudson wrote.
Hudson says the First Amendment was meant to protect the public from state oppression, meaning it should not necessarily apply to what a company like Twitter allows to be posted.
“Twitter does not have the power to throw people into prison; indeed, the greater potential threat Twitter poses to the public is not its ability to lock someone’s account if they use racial slurs, but the harm it has done, and is doing, by feeding its oxygen to the ugliest and most destructive elements of society — ones that better and more civilized communities and platforms would quickly banish for the good not only of its most vulnerable members, but for discourse at large,” Hudson wrote.
Background
The debate over banning users from media platforms reignited when Apple, Spotify, YouTube and Facebook removed content by Alex Jones from their sites due to alleged violations of those sites’ hate speech policies.
Many users called for Twitter to follow suit, but Dorsey has refrained from doing so, saying Jones has not violated its rules.
“If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction,” Dorsey tweeted earlier this week. That’s not us.”
(H/T Hot Air)
Friday, August 10, 2018
Whichever Way This Jones Case Goes, It Will End Up In The Supreme Court!
Free Speech Scholars to Alex Jones: You’re Not Protected
By Alan Feuer
Not long after several of the country’s biggest tech firms — namely Apple, Facebook and Google — kicked the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones off their various online platforms, Mr. Jones’s allies complained that he had been deprived of his First Amendment rights to free speech.
“Social media goes Gestapo!” wrote Bill Mitchell, a conservative Twitter personality with 366,000 followers, on Monday evening.
“The great censorship purge has truly begun,” warned Paul Joseph Watson, a contributor to Mr. Jones’s website, Infowars.
And in his own message on Twitter, one platform that hasn’t removed his content, Mr. Jones asked: “Now, who will stand against Tyranny and who will stand for free speech?”
The removal of Mr. Jones and Infowars came after months of mounting pressure on technology companies to tackle the spread of misinformation online. Mr. Jones and Infowars have for years used social media to push unfounded conspiracy theories. On Sunday, Apple removed five of the six Infowars podcasts on its popular Podcasts app and by Monday Facebook and Google’s YouTube had followed with similar measures.
But this isn’t the only effort to stop Mr. Jones from spreading his theories. He also faces multiple defamation claims, and well before Monday’s moves, several scholars of free speech had already concluded that many of the things he has said online were not in fact protected by the First Amendment.
In a recent court filing, four law professors who specialize in free-speech issues said that Mr. Jones’s oeuvre was riddled with “absurd conspiracy theories” and urged a federal judge considering a lawsuit against him not to let him hide behind the First Amendment while publishing his rhetoric.
“False speech does not serve the public interest the way that true speech does,” the scholars wrote. “And indeed, there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.”
The filing — an amicus, or friend of the court, brief — was submitted in June in the case of Brennan Gilmore, a former State Department official and Democratic Party activist who attended last summer’s violent far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Mr. Gilmore, 39,
was on the street on Aug. 12 when James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing a woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring several others.
After Mr. Gilmore posted a video of the episode online and spoke about it repeatedly to
the media, Mr. Jones published his own video on Infowars, accusing him in a rambling
jeremiad of being a plant from the Central Intelligence Agency employed by the billionaire George Soros.
In a breathless moment (“I mean, it’s like, whoa, whoa — C.I.A.?”), Mr. Jones went on to suggest that Mr. Gilmore may have been involved in the attack on Ms. Heyer to bring about what he described as “the downfall of Trump.”
In March, Mr. Gilmore sued Mr. Jones for defamation, arguing that he had suffered threats and harassment because of the report.
Mr. Jones is also facing defamation lawsuits filed by the parents of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut for claiming the attack was an elaborate hoax. But the Gilmore suit is the first against Mr. Jones in which a judge, Norman K. Moon of Federal District Court in Charlottesville, has directly sought the opinion of First Amendment scholars.
In defending himself, Mr. Jones has claimed in court papers that his allegations concerning Mr. Gilmore were “opinion, not statements of fact” and that Infowars is a “freewheeling” website, “in which hyperbole and diatribe reign as the preferred tools of discourse.” His viewers, Mr. Jones maintained, “expect an interview or monologue to be more free-flowing and opinionated and less precise in its use of language than an article or a book.”
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While they acknowledged that the protection of speech is “a priority of the first order,” the First Amendment scholars, from institutions like Rutgers University and the University of Chicago Law School, noted that since the Middle Ages defamation law has created “social boundaries about what speech is and is not acceptable.” It has also, they wrote, long sought to balance the freedom of expression with the safeguarding of people’s reputations.
To do this, the scholars said, defamation statutes have always restricted some speech — especially for private figures like Mr. Gilmore, who have less of an ability than those like Mr. Jones with media platforms to “disseminate their own side of the story.”
The scholars were particularly scathing when it came to Mr. Jones’s contention that his videos on Infowars reflected nothing more than his beliefs. It would set a dangerous precedent, they said, if Judge Moon ruled on his behalf.
“It would allow unscrupulous news organizations to couch their language as ‘opinion’ and to mask their meaning with implication and insinuation,” the scholars wrote. That, they added, would leave “readers clear as to the message but avoiding all liability for defamatory remarks. This should not be allowed and, in fact, is not allowed.”
The law professors who signed the amicus brief were Lyrissa B. Lidsky, dean of the University of Missouri School of Law, Tamara R. Piety at the University of Tulsa College of Law, David A. Strauss from the University of Chicago Law School, and Carlos A. Ball of Rutgers.
The brief was also signed by Michael B. Hissam, a lawyer at the firm of Bailey & Glasser in Charleston, W.Va., who is amicus counsel for Mr. Gilmore, and Katharine M. Mapes and Katherine O’Konski, lawyers at the firm of Spiegel & McDiarmid in Washington.
You Are Known By The Friends You Keep
Linda Sarsour Linked to Father of New Mexico Jihadi Who Allegedly Trained Kids to Shoot Up Schools
Left-wing Islamic activist Linda Sarsour reportedly has ties to the father of the man arrested for allegedly training children to carry out school shootings on a New Mexico compound.
Police arrested Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 39, last week for allegedly holding a series of weapons training sessions on a Taos, New Mexico, compound where authorities say they found 11 children living in squalor.
Investigators say the decomposed remains of a boy had also been found on the compound. Wahhaj’s father, Imam Siraj Wahhaj, announced Thursday that the decomposed remains of the child found at the compound were of his three-year-old grandson, Abdul-ghani Wahhaj, who went missing in Jonesboro, Georgia, in December.
Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who presides over a Brooklyn, New York, mosque, is said to be an “unindicted co-conspirator” of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings and a prominent leader of the Muslim Alliance in North America. Authorities believed he was connected to the bombings, but prosecutors never filed charges against him.
But the younger Wahhaj is not the only person who had ties to Imam Wahhaj.
Linda Sarsour, a prominent Democratic activist who helped organize the Women’s March on Washington, called Imam Wahhaj a “mentor” at an Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) conference in 2017:
My favorite person in this room, that’s mutual, is Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who has been a mentor, and motivator and encourager of mine, someone who has taught me to speak truth to power and not worry about the consequences, someone who has taught me we are on this earth to please Allah, and only Allah, that we are not here to please any man or women on this Earth, so I’m grateful to you, Imam Siraj … I’m grateful to you Imam Siraj, God bless you and protect you for a long time because we need you now more than ever.
Sarsour has also showered praise upon Imam Wahhaj in a series of tweets:
"Islam has made me love people." ~ Imam Siraj #RIS2016
Had a dream last night that I was chillin on my Brooklyn stoops with Imam Siraj, @ImamSuhaibWebb and @DawudWalid. It was awesome.
Imam Siraj Wahhaj is Black American and most loved religious leader amongst diverse groups of Muslims. #blackmuslimfuture
@GMUPatriot13 Imam Siraj is an amazing man. I have prayed at Masjid Taqwa a few times but it's far from where I live.
Imam Siraj is the man. ~ @imamzaidshakir #taqwa30
@DebbiAlmontaser #taqwa30 - "may every stone in every masjid Imam Siraj helped build make dua 4 him now & hereafter."
Sarsour has not only praised Imam Wahhaj for helping shape her views about Islam, but she has also shared a stage with him at several conferences held by ISNA and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) — both organizations with ties to the global Muslim Brotherhood.
But as investigators continue to uncover more information about the training compound, a spokesperson for Imam Wahhaj’s Brooklyn mosque, Masjid at Taqwa, dismissed the authorities’ claims as nothing but fake news.
A spokesperson for Imam Wahhaj’s Brooklyn mosque claimed in a Facebook videoThursday that the media and authorities are promoting “false narratives” by trying to link international terrorism allegations to what he calls a domestic event.
“They’re not bringing up accurate events — they’re bringing up false narratives,” spokesman Ali Abdul-Karim Judan said. “Look how this case has turned from a domestic situation, and now they’re trying to create an atmosphere where his son is involved with an extremist radical group.”