Oh Shakespeare redoux: First eliminate free speech and there will be no lying, then kill all the lawyers and there will be no law suits, murder the doctors and none will be sick, then jail the psychologists and there will be no mental illness, and finally defund the police and there will be no more arrests. There are dangers of free speech, but ignorance, dogma and stupidity are, by far, more dangerous. Liberal Democracies can manage Parler, Twitter and Gab. They cannot survive the stubborn cowardice of enforced newspeak.
"The power to police speech historically, and in our own time, tends to be unbalanced and used to suppress the views of the dissenters, the marginalized, those out of power, and to reinforce the prerogatives of those who have the greatest control."
later...
"A lot of what can manifest itself in censorious impulses among young people is born of a noble instinct, which is to protect people from harm, to drive forward a more equal, inclusive society."
And many of those in power who use or have used power over speech to control their politics and culture believe they are doing so for noble and important reasons. That the reasons behind the arguments for censorship are noble (or appear noble to many) is no more relevant for young people than it is for old oligarchs.
With regard to "censorious impulses" and "noble instincts," this may be true of some, or even many, college students and now former college students. It's certainly not true of the faculty who are training these students in what they cynically call critical thinking. I'll keep saying over and over: if you want to understand why college students and grads hold the attitudes they do--about democracy, free speech, liberalism, conservatism, rule of law, oppression, etc.--resist the urge to focus your attention just on young adults. My colleagues in the "radical" fields are deliberately inculcating a set of anti-democratic viewpoints that are compelling in part because they constitute stigmatized knowledge. Try telling these students that the faculty who taught them they're special because they know the truth were lying to them. That's the project, not fine-tuning their conception of the value of free speech.
"All of our First Amendment jurisprudence, and most of the free-expression jurisprudence around the world deals with infringement on speech by governments."
Not true. Sounds like our "expert" should familiarize herself with the Supreme Court ruling in Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980).
That aside, in my experience the younger generation have completely conflated "censorship" with the First Amendment, to the point that they think the word applies only to government actions. That is, they think it isn't "censorship" unless the government does it.
As the article makes clear, the problem isn't "free speech", but mass disinformation and incitement to violence. We have laws to deal with the latter, but for the former we are generally forced to rely on the imperfect solution offered by personal libel and slander lawsuits.
However, as the recent (and refreshingly effective) lawsuits by Smartmatic and Dominion against various elements of the disinformation landscape remind us, our legal system is equipped to deal with matters of truth and falsity regarding public speech. We do not have to submit to the nihilistic despair of "post truth" America.
What makes this presently a suboptimal solution is that it is restricted to restitution on behalf of individuals rather than the public at large. But our laws can change this if need be - as long as we employ a sufficiently light touch so as to protect private citizens from being targeted while holding accountable public officials and, to some extent, certain private institutions, like news organizations and social media companies. Limiting these remedies to civil penalties (fines, removal of licenses and public accreditations, removal from positions of public trust, etc.) is essential.
Yes, this will court controversy and the usual "slippery slope" paranoia relied upon by extremists. But a healthy democracy and open society has sufficient guardrails and public transparency to ensure adequate salting of the slopes toward authoritarian rule that we inevitably inhabit. Idly standing by and permitting coordinated mass disinformation campaigns involving government officials and private media entities isn't protecting "free speech" or democracy. It's encouraging fascism.
Oh Shakespeare redoux: First eliminate free speech and there will be no lying, then kill all the lawyers and there will be no law suits, murder the doctors and none will be sick, then jail the psychologists and there will be no mental illness, and finally defund the police and there will be no more arrests. There are dangers of free speech, but ignorance, dogma and stupidity are, by far, more dangerous. Liberal Democracies can manage Parler, Twitter and Gab. They cannot survive the stubborn cowardice of enforced newspeak.
"The power to police speech historically, and in our own time, tends to be unbalanced and used to suppress the views of the dissenters, the marginalized, those out of power, and to reinforce the prerogatives of those who have the greatest control."
later...
"A lot of what can manifest itself in censorious impulses among young people is born of a noble instinct, which is to protect people from harm, to drive forward a more equal, inclusive society."
And many of those in power who use or have used power over speech to control their politics and culture believe they are doing so for noble and important reasons. That the reasons behind the arguments for censorship are noble (or appear noble to many) is no more relevant for young people than it is for old oligarchs.
With regard to "censorious impulses" and "noble instincts," this may be true of some, or even many, college students and now former college students. It's certainly not true of the faculty who are training these students in what they cynically call critical thinking. I'll keep saying over and over: if you want to understand why college students and grads hold the attitudes they do--about democracy, free speech, liberalism, conservatism, rule of law, oppression, etc.--resist the urge to focus your attention just on young adults. My colleagues in the "radical" fields are deliberately inculcating a set of anti-democratic viewpoints that are compelling in part because they constitute stigmatized knowledge. Try telling these students that the faculty who taught them they're special because they know the truth were lying to them. That's the project, not fine-tuning their conception of the value of free speech.
"All of our First Amendment jurisprudence, and most of the free-expression jurisprudence around the world deals with infringement on speech by governments."
Not true. Sounds like our "expert" should familiarize herself with the Supreme Court ruling in Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980).
That aside, in my experience the younger generation have completely conflated "censorship" with the First Amendment, to the point that they think the word applies only to government actions. That is, they think it isn't "censorship" unless the government does it.
As the article makes clear, the problem isn't "free speech", but mass disinformation and incitement to violence. We have laws to deal with the latter, but for the former we are generally forced to rely on the imperfect solution offered by personal libel and slander lawsuits.
However, as the recent (and refreshingly effective) lawsuits by Smartmatic and Dominion against various elements of the disinformation landscape remind us, our legal system is equipped to deal with matters of truth and falsity regarding public speech. We do not have to submit to the nihilistic despair of "post truth" America.
What makes this presently a suboptimal solution is that it is restricted to restitution on behalf of individuals rather than the public at large. But our laws can change this if need be - as long as we employ a sufficiently light touch so as to protect private citizens from being targeted while holding accountable public officials and, to some extent, certain private institutions, like news organizations and social media companies. Limiting these remedies to civil penalties (fines, removal of licenses and public accreditations, removal from positions of public trust, etc.) is essential.
Yes, this will court controversy and the usual "slippery slope" paranoia relied upon by extremists. But a healthy democracy and open society has sufficient guardrails and public transparency to ensure adequate salting of the slopes toward authoritarian rule that we inevitably inhabit. Idly standing by and permitting coordinated mass disinformation campaigns involving government officials and private media entities isn't protecting "free speech" or democracy. It's encouraging fascism.