Tag: censorship

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folly ideological culture media and media people

It’s a Disgrace

Crying Children

State-​powered Puritanism is alive and well in the west. And freedom of speech is in its death throes.

Or so it seems in Great Britain. And the U.S. isn’t far behind, suggests Brendan O’Neill.

O’Neill, editor of the London-​based Spike, recounts recent absurd assaults on freedom of speech, so frequent now in Britain as to be routine.

Consider the case of the malevolent hashtag. A hashtag is a label with a pound sign that Twitter-​folk use to flag and meta-​comment on their tweets. A soccer fan named Stephen Dodds thumbed the hashtag “#DISGRACE” to bemoan how Muslims attending a game were conspicuously praying during halftime. His tweet provoked an Internet uproar. Good. But Dodds was also reported to the police, who investigated his open hashtaggery for two weeks (!!).

And how about the case of the svelte-​model-​adorned subway ad that dares ask British ladies if they’re “beach-​body-​ready”? Uh oh. A direct psychic assault on those who will never be “beach-​body-​ready” in the super-​model sense of the word. After feminists vandalized the ads, something called Advertising Standards Authority lurched to investigate — not the vandals, no: the blatantly anti-​blobby sentiment.

Few opinions or postures fail to offend somebody.

What offends me is that we should ever be subject to arbitrary, government-​backed assaults on our rights launched to satisfy persons especially thin-​skinned and/​or especially eager to stomp on the rights of others.

As with all fake rights, foisting a fake right to not-​be-​offended can only violate genuine rights. #DISGRACE.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Crying Children

 

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Common Sense First Amendment rights tax policy too much government

Feinstein No Einstein

Anarchy and Chaos

Government’s job is to protect our lives and liberties. But how best to accomplish this? Should books be banned? Websites blocked?

Diane Feinstein thinks so.

Sen. Feinstein (D‑California) wants to ban The Anarchist Cookbook from the Internet. The book, which came out in 1971 with lots of radical ideas, including notoriously unreliable instructions for making bombs, is now a website. Perhaps the quality of  the “cookbook” has helped us survive against the anarchist threat these last five decades.

Today, the threat is not anarchist but Islamist terrorism. So of course Sen. Feinstein also wants the Al Qaida magazine Inspire “off the Internet.”

Government censorship, anyone? Free speech, Senator?

Now, I don’t approve of the bombing and murdering of innocents for any cause. So I am not at one with deadly anarchists or deadly jihadists. Count me as among their enemies.

But, at the risk of being called a “liberal,” I don’t think we should defend ourselves against anarchists or jihadists or other terrorists just any old way. For both moral and strategic reasons, we ought not be killing innocents by drone strike, along with those simply declared guilty, without any lawful process at all.

Likewise, we ought not abridge our own cherished principles and the rule of law.

Including the First Amendment.

After all, that’s what government is supposed to be protecting in the first place.

The fact that Feinstein seems so comfortable with simply “banning” books and magazines and websites suggests an illiberal, unAmerican attitude. An attitude that threatens to do more damage to the homeland than any “cookbook” or pro-​terrorist magazine or website ever will.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Anarchy and Chaos

 

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Common Sense crime and punishment folly general freedom media and media people too much government

At Least We’re Not Turkey

Merve Büyüksaraç

Whenever I feel discouraged by the steady drumbeat of domestic assaults on liberty — from Obamacare to parents being accused of “child neglect” for letting their kids return from a playground by themselves — I try to remind myself:

Things Could Be Worse.

World history provides plenty of support for this dictum, but so does a glance at the newspaper. Like the story of how a single satiric Instagram post “could end up sending a former Miss Turkey to jail.”

An Istanbul prosecutor has been threatening to imprison Merve Büyüksaraç for up to two years for the heinous deed of insulting an official. Last summer she excerpted a satirical piece called “The Master’s Poem” that originally appeared in the magazine Uykusuz. Uykusuz has a habit of mocking Turkish politicians, including President Erdoğan.

“I shared it because it was funny to me,” she says. “I did not intend to insult Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.” Regardless of her motive, her post should not have put her at legal risk.

Buyuksarac is popular on social media — 15,000 followers on Instagram, double that on Twitter — a presence that makes her a target. The Turkish government doesn’t care whether she is an ardent dissident. They obviously just want to intimidate others with a readership who are inclined to ruffle the feathers of the powerful even a little.

So yes, things could be worse. Lots worse. They could also be a lot better. That’s what we have to fight for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights too much government

Leahy versus the Internet

A censor’s work is never done. So, in a civilization where everybody salutes freedom of speech, censors must be especially clever, seeking new ways to hide their goals.

The latest camel’s rump under the tent? A bill to censor entire Internet domains on the grounds of alleged violations of rights that have not been prosecuted. Pending in the Senate and sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy, it’s called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).

The bill would create two blacklists in response to accusations of copyright violation or sales of counterfeit goods. One would consist of sites to which Internet service providers would be required to block access.

The second would consist of sites to which ISPs would be merely encouraged to block access.

Any chance the government might pressure ISPs to ensure the “voluntary” censorship of disapproved domains … including domains with just a few pages of dubious legality but many pages of criticism of government?

Sounding the alarm, the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already gives copyright holders a means of taking action against copyright violations. The Foundation argues that Leahy’s bill would enable the U.S. to join the ranks of the “profoundly anti-​democratic regimes that keep their citizens from seeing the whole Internet.”

The Foundation’s message: “Tell Your Senator: No Website Blacklists, No Internet Censorship!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom ideological culture

Facebook’s Secret Shame

Facebook has had some bad press lately.

The popular social networking site got in trouble in recent months for the ever-​more-​cavalier way it treats users’ privacy. People complain that their data has been unilaterally exposed in ways they never expected when they first signed up for the service, and that privacy settings have devolved into a confusing, hard-​to-​tweak labyrinth.

Facebook seems to be adjusting its privacy practices in response to the bad publicity. But there’s another lamentable Facebook practice that has, unfortunately, received less sustained attention: Its willingness to shut down a user’s Facebook page solely because somebody else is offended by the viewpoint expressed on that page.

The “somebody else,” in the case I’m referring to, is the government of Pakistan, which banned Facebook because of a page encouraging people to display images of the prophet Muhammad in protest of threats of violence against the show South Park, which had made fun of making threats against people who display images of Muhammad.

“In response to our protest, Facebook has tendered their apology and informed us that all the sacrilegious material has been removed from the URL,” gloated Najibullah Malik, who represents Pakistan’s Orwellian “information technology ministry.”

It’s dangerous to cave in to demands for censorship. The folks at Facebook were faced with the loss of a large market, but they should have let the anti-​censorship page remain published and let Facebook users in Pakistan pressure their government to lift the ban.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights too much government

You Go, Google

A few weeks back I asked what was going on with Google’s pledge to stop helping the Chinese government censor search results for sensitive topics like Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square. Google was presumably using its threat of withdrawal from the Chinese market as a negotiating chip to wrest privileged status from the Chinese authorities.

But the hope was naive. It was unlikely in the extreme that China would give up its program of censoring mainland culture and especially politics. It wants to control the dialogue and thwart political dissent. So I told Google, “Google, ya gotta go. Stop enabling Chinese censorship. Do as you promised and provide a desperately needed and inspiring example of refusing any longer to cooperate with tyranny.”

I feared Google would retreat from its public commitment. But now Google agrees that for the Chinese government, “self-​censorship is a non-​negotiable legal requirement.” So Google is redirecting Chinese users of its search engine (Google​.cn) to its Hong Kong search engine (Google​.com​.hk), where results are not currently censored because of the “one country, two systems” policy that has been at least roughly followed since China took over Hong Kong in 1997.

Whether citizens on the mainland will be able to get uncensored search results from the Hong Kong Google search engine is an open question at best. But any censorship of those results will now be perpetrated by China without Google’s active cooperation. Good for Google.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.