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The Ongoing Challenge to Define Free Speech

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The Ongoing Challenge to Define Free Speech

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This article explores both sides of the free speech debate, while focusing on free speech versus qualifications of hate speech.

The Ongoing Challenge to Define Free Speech. (n.d.). Retrieved September 09, 2020, from https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/the-ongoing-challenge-to-define-free-speech/the-ongoing-challenge-to-define-free-speech/

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ACLU: Students Free Speech in Public Schools

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ACLU: Students Free Speech in Public Schools

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This article and video encourages students to exercise their right to free speech in schools, but also educates them on areas that could get them into trouble.

Students' Free Speech Rights in Public Schools. (2018, March 13). Retrieved September 09, 2020, from https://www.aclu-il.org/en/know-your-rights/students-free-speech-rights-public-schools

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Students' Free Speech Rights in Public Schools

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How the First Amendment Protects Student Speech If you're a public school student, you don't check your constitutional rights at the schoolhouse doors. But whether schools can punish you for speaking out depends on when, where, and how you decide to express yourself. Do I have First Amendment rights in school?

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PBS News Hour: At Mizzou, Yale and beyond, campus protests stir fresh questions about free speech

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PBS News Hour: At Mizzou, Yale and beyond, campus protests stir fresh questions about free speech

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This video discusses protests at college campuses over free speech and expression versus racial and offensive expressions of free speech. It continues to explore the role of the university to intervene and support students, as well as students' rights to have their voices heard in protest and action to be taken.

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At Mizzou, Yale and beyond, campus protests stir fresh questions about free speech

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This cartoon and article from Junior Scholastic challenges students to think about times when free speech might not be appropriate in a school setting.
https://junior.scholastic.com/issues/2017-18/010818/speaking-her-mind.html

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Twitter post: New Trump Rule Ties College Funding to Speech, Faith Rights

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Twitter post: New Trump Rule Ties College Funding to Speech, Faith Rights

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This article, that I found on Twitter, discusses funding by the Trump administration to protect students' rights to free speech on college campus due to religious expression. Colleges can lose educational funding if students' free speech rights are not guaranteed.

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“This right should be reserved for all student religious orgs, & not usurped by university officials based on their own shifting standards," said RFI's @IsmailRoyer to @AssociatedPress on @usedgov rule protecting religious groups on college campuses. READ: https://t.co/bWV2V09gtv

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“This right should be reserved for all student religious orgs, & not usurped by university officials based on their own shifting standards," said RFI's @IsmailRoyer to @AssociatedPress on @usedgov rule protecting religious groups on college campuses. READ: https://t.co/bWV2V09gtv

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“This right should be reserved for all student religious orgs, & not usurped by university officials based on their own shifting standards," said RFI's @IsmailRoyer to @AssociatedPress on @usedgov rule protecting religious groups on college campuses. READ: https://t.co/bWV2V09gtv
— Religious Freedom Institute (@RFInstitute) September 10, 2020

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“This right should be reserved for all student religious orgs, & not usurped by university officials based on their own shifting standards," said RFI's @IsmailRoyer to @AssociatedPress on @usedgov rule protecting religious groups on college campuses. READ: https://t.co/bWV2V09gtv

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“This right should be reserved for all student religious orgs, & not usurped by university officials based on their own shifting standards," said RFI's @IsmailRoyer to @AssociatedPress on @usedgov rule protecting religious groups on college campuses. READ: https://t.co/bWV2V09gtv

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“This right should be reserved for all student religious orgs, & not usurped by university officials based on their own shifting standards," said RFI's @IsmailRoyer to @AssociatedPress on @usedgov rule protecting religious groups on college campuses. READ: https://t.co/bWV2V09gtv

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This political cartoon (2017) by Steve Sack, from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, is criticizing attempts to prevent free speech on college campuses. The "liberal thought police" are preventing free speech on campus in the cartoon, which is Sack's way of criticizing college campus' attempts to control students free expression. By criticizing these attempts to control free speech, Sacks is showing support of free speech.

Sack, S. (2017, April 29). Sack cartoon: Free speech on campus. Retrieved September 09, 2020, from https://www.startribune.com/sack-cartoon-free-speech-on-campus/420783223/

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Washington Post: Opinion Article "Why American needs a hate speech law"

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Washington Post: Opinion Article "Why American needs a hate speech law"

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This article from the Washington Post Opinion section discusses things that Americans are getting away with that other countries prevent. Examples include Russia influencing our social media during the election of 2016 and Americans reposting inaccurate information as a result. It also discusses Americans being allowed to burn religious books, which would never be tolerated in other countries.

Stengel, R. (2019, November 07). Opinion | Why America needs a hate speech law. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-america-needs-hate-speech-law/

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Thousands of protesters march against a planned 'Free Speech Rally" on Aug. 19, 2017, in Boston. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Richard Stengel, a former editor of Time, is the author of "Information Wars" and was the State Department's undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2013 to 2016.

When I was a journalist, I loved Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s assertion that the Constitution and the First Amendment are not just about protecting "free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."

But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?

Charles Lane: Keep government hands off free speech

It's a fair question. Yes, the First Amendment protects the "thought that we hate," but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw.

It is important to remember that our First Amendment doesn't just protect the good guys; our foremost liberty also protects any bad actors who hide behind it to weaken our society. In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Russia's Internet Research Agency planted false stories hoping they would go viral. They did. Russian agents assumed fake identities, promulgated false narratives and spread lies on Twitter and Facebook, all protected by the First Amendment.

The Russians understood that our free press and its reflex toward balance and fairness would enable Moscow to slip its destructive ideas into our media ecosystem. When Putin said back in 2014 that there were no Russian troops in Crimea - an outright lie - he knew our media would report it, and we did.

That's partly because the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era. The amendment rests on the notion that the truth will win out in what Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called " the marketplace of ideas." This "marketplace" model has a long history going back to 17th-century English intellectual John Milton, but in all that time, no one ever quite explained how good ideas drive out bad ones, how truth triumphs over falsehood.

Milton, an early opponent of censorship, said truth would prevail in a " free and open encounter." A century later, the framers believed that this marketplace was necessary for people to make informed choices in a democracy. Somehow, magically, truth would emerge. The presumption has always been that the marketplace would offer a level playing field. But in the age of social media, that landscape is neither level nor fair.

On the Internet, truth is not optimized. On the Web, it's not enough to battle falsehood with truth; the truth doesn't always win. In the age of social media, the marketplace model doesn't work. A 2016 Stanford study showed that 82 percent of middle schoolers couldn't distinguish between an ad labeled "sponsored content" and an actual news story. Only a quarter of high school students could tell the difference between an actual verified news site and one from a deceptive account designed to look like a real one.

Since World War II, many nations have passed laws to curb the incitement of racial and religious hatred. These laws started out as protections against the kinds of anti-Semitic bigotry that gave rise to the Holocaust. We call them hate speech laws, but there's no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is. In general, hate speech is speech that attacks and insults people on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation.

Jamie Kirchick: No, America doesn't need a hate speech law

I think it's time to consider these statutes. The modern standard of dangerous speech comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and holds that speech that directly incites "imminent lawless action" or is likely to do so can be restricted. Domestic terrorists such as Dylann Roof and Omar Mateen and the El Paso shooter were consumers of hate speech. Speech doesn't pull the trigger, but does anyone seriously doubt that such hateful speech creates a climate where such acts are more likely?

Let the debate begin. Hate speech has a less violent, but nearly as damaging, impact in another way: It diminishes tolerance. It enables discrimination. Isn't that, by definition, speech that undermines the values that the First Amendment was designed to protect: fairness, due process, equality before the law? Why shouldn't the states experiment with their own version of hate speech statutes to penalize speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation?

All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I'm all for protecting "thought that we hate," but not speech that incites hate. It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect.

The Post's View: The dark side of regulating speech on Facebook

The Post's View: Free speech doesn't mean Facebook must run dishonest ads

Danielle Allen and Richard Ashby Wilson: The rules of incitement should apply to - and be enforced on - social media

Jonathan Friedman and Soraya Ferdman: Alabama and Texas are putting free speech at colleges in jeopardy

David Ignatius: Why America is losing the information war to Russia

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Opinion | Why America needs a hate speech law

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Richard Stengel, a former editor of Time, is the author of " Information Wars " and was the State Department's undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2013 to 2016.

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The Guardian - Trump Campaign attempts to remove satirical cartoon 

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The Guardian - Trump Campaign attempts to remove satirical cartoon 

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This article describes the attempts of the Trump administration to remove a political cartoon referencing Trump's inaccurate comments about injecting disinfectants to prevent COVID-19. The cartoon was created by Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Nick Anderson, who referred to Trump as an "adolescent wannabe authoritarian".

Trump campaign attempts to remove satirical cartoon from online retailer. (2020, May 28). Retrieved September 09, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/28/trump-campaign-attempts-to-remove-satirical-cartoon-from-online-retailer

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The Atlantic - Social Media Companies "Threaten Democracy"

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The Atlantic - Social Media Companies "Threaten Democracy"

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This video and article discuss the out of control role of social media and seemingly lack of censorship regarding free speech. Social media companies tend to self-regulate, in ways that seem to violate the First Amendment. This video is a part of a series called The Speech Wars, by The Atlantic.

Kelly, E. (n.d.). Social-Media Companies 'Threaten Democracy'. Retrieved September 09, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/596926/free-speech-social-media/

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Today social-media companies such as Facebook and Twitter are the gatekeepers of meaningful freedom of speech. This is problematic, the New York Law School professor Nadine Strossen argues, because these companies often self-regulate in ways that violate the First Amendment.

This video is part of The Speech Wars, a project of The Atlantic, and is supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

About This Series

Short, animated videos from The Atlantic

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Today social-media companies such as Facebook and Twitter are the gatekeepers of meaningful freedom of speech. This is problematic, the New York Law School professor Nadine Strossen argues, because these companies often self-regulate in ways that violate the First Amendment.

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Business Insider - Trump's executive order cracking down on 'online censorship' has nothing to do with free speech

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Business Insider - Trump's executive order cracking down on 'online censorship' has nothing to do with free speech

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This article describes Trump's frustrations with social media platforms for censorship. Trump signed an executive order that threatened social media companies after Twitter fact checked his tweets.

Relman, E. (2020, May 29). Trump's executive order cracking down on 'online censorship' has nothing to do with free speech. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-online-censorship-executive-order-free-speech-first-amendment-2020-5

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday purporting to fight online censorship by empowering federal regulators to strip social media companies' broad authority to moderate speech.

Legal experts say Trump has scant authority to enforce the order, which would circumvent Congress and violate longstanding judicial precedent.

But the unprecedented move could scare social media giants away from even modest moderation of disinformation on their sites - an outcome that serves Trump's political aims.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump says he's battling the nation's social media companies in the name of free speech.

"Big Tech is doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 Election," he tweeted on Wednesday. "If that happens, we no longer have our freedom. I will never let it happen!"

The president has long made unsubstantiated claims that social media platforms are biased against conservatives, and mulled executive action to regulate the companies.

But he took his biggest step towards cracking down on online forums this week after Twitter flagged and fact-checked two of his tweets that contained false information about mail-in voting.

Twitter's incremental but unprecedented move prompted Trump to lash out against the company and threaten to "strongly regulate" or shut down online platforms.

On Thursday, he signed an executive order threatening penalties against social media companies over allegations of bias against conservatives.

The order seeks to empower federal regulators to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives social media companies broad authority to moderate speech on their platforms.

The move was clearly retaliation for Twitter's fact check and, Democrats argue, a distraction tactic as the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage the country.

Shortly after signing the order declaring free speech "the bedrock of American democracy," Trump told reporters that if it were legal for him to unilaterally "shut down" Twitter, "I would do it."

But he declined to delete his own account - his most important and preferred way to communicate with the public - and instead emphasized how much power he has to drive traffic and revenue to the site.

'Not how the Constitution works'

Legal experts say Trump has scant authority to enforce the order, which would circumvent Congress and violate longstanding judicial precedent. But they are concerned the unprecedented move will scare companies away from even modest moderation of disinformation on their sites.

Critics argue the president is attempting to weaponize the Federal Communications Commission and other arms of the federal government to police online speech he disagrees with - the very definition of a First Amendment violation.

"This is not how the Constitution works," Ashkhen Kazaryan, director of civil liberties at the libertarian think tank TechFreedom, told Business Insider on Thursday. "The First Amendment protects Twitter from Trump. It does not protect Trump from Twitter."

First Amendment experts are concerned that Trump's attacks will scare social media giants into framing neutrality as bipartisanship, rather than applying a non-political standard to policing content on their sites.

"Bipartisan is not the same as neutral and I think the risk here is that the political parties are really duking out a political fight with the platforms as the site for a proxy war over what's basically a cultural clash," Hannah Bloch-Wehba, a law professor at Drexel University who specializes in civil liberties and cyber issues, told Business Insider.

Trump's motivation for battling with social media giants over what he considers censorship likely has little to do with free speech.

If the president cared about First Amendment protections online, he would stop violating Twitter users' free speech rights by blocking them from his account - a move the Second Circuit Court of Appeals deemed unconstitutional last year.

Instead, Trump appears to be waging a political war to pressure social media giants to give him full reign to spread his messages, regardless of how truthful they are.

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Trump's executive order cracking down on 'online censorship' has nothing to do with free speech

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday purporting to fight online censorship by empowering federal regulators to strip social media companies' broad authority to moderate speech. Legal experts say Trump has scant authority to enforce the order, which would circumvent Congress and violate longstanding judicial precedent.

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This post is making a point for free speech. It is by a non-profit called Turning Point USA, who describes its mission is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote freedom.  It uses the following hashtags for the post:
#biggovsucks #socialismsucks #pissoff #donttreadonme #feelthebern #shallnotbeinfringed #socialism #turningpointusa #defendthesecond #proamerica #profreedom #proliberty #liberty #maga #kaga #conservative #secondamendment #firstamendment #freespeechforall

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Book - The Case Against Free Speech by P.E. Moskowitz

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Book - The Case Against Free Speech by P.E. Moskowitz

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I found this book on Google Scholar. I have obviously not read the entire book but the summary describes an expose on how conservative forces have hijacked free speech and have used censorship to control the media and public opinion. The book reports on elements of how Americans do not have free speech in many ways, but it apparently also offers suggestions for how to avoid these traps.

Moskowitz, P. E. (2019). The Case Against Free Speech: The First Amendment, Fascism, and the Future of Dissent. United States: PublicAffairs.

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A hard-hitting expose that shines a light on the powerful conservative forces that have waged a multi-decade battle to hijack the meaning of free speech--and how we can reclaim it.
There's a critical debate taking place over one of our most treasured rights: free speech. We argue about whether it's at risk, whether college students fear it, whether neo-Nazis deserve it, and whether the government is adequately upholding it.

But as P. E. Moskowitz provocatively shows in The Case Against Free Speech, the term has been defined and redefined to suit those in power, and in recent years, it has been captured by the Right to push their agenda. What's more, our investment in the First Amendment obscures an uncomfortable truth: free speech is impossible in an unequal society where a few corporations and the ultra-wealthy bankroll political movements, millions of voters are disenfranchised, and our government routinely silences critics of racism and capitalism.

Weaving together history and reporting from Charlottesville, Skokie, Standing Rock, and the college campuses where student protests made national headlines, Moskowitz argues that these flash points reveal more about the state of our democracy than they do about who is allowed to say what.

Our current definition of free speech replicates power while dissuading dissent, but a new ideal is emerging. In this forcefully argued, necessary corrective, Moskowitz makes the case for speech as a tool--for exposing the truth, demanding equality, and fighting for all our civil liberties.

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A hard-hitting expose that shines a light on the powerful conservative forces that have waged a multi-decade battle to hijack the meaning of free speech--and how we can reclaim it.There's a critical debate taking place over one of our most treasured rights: free speech.