Posts Tagged ‘freedom of speech’
“The remedy is worse than the disease”*…
Your correspondent is a co-founder and director of Common Sense Media, an organization devoted to understanding the fraught media environment in which we live, to helping children, their families, and educators navigate it, and to advocating for “common sense” protections for kids. When we began, over 20 years ago, the terrain was largely TV, movies, books, and video games. They remain, of course, but the spotlight moved to social media, and now, to AI.
Advocacy, as it turns out, can be a tricky needle to thread. As Francis Bacon (and following him, a stream of others) observe, sometimes “the cure can be worse that the disease.” And that’s especially true when the “disease” one is fighting is the province of a powerful, richly funded cabal who market their moves as cures, even though, through their lens, disease is the desired state.
By way of one (chilling) example, Joe Wilkins outlines one dimension of the current state-of-play…
The White House and Congress are working on a deal to clamp down on what US citizens are allowed to say online. According to new reporting by Axios, the Trump administration is negotiating with key senators in an effort to shoehorn a massive legislation package which would limit states’ abilities to regulate AI in exchange for placing broad federal limits on digital speech.
Plenty of ink has been spilled about the Trump administration’s push to revoke AI regulation from individual states. Though the White House and its allies frame this as a matter of “safety” and “national security,” the timing is telling, coming as progressive state governments move to restrict the building of AI data centers and hold tech companies liable for harms their AI systems cause.
What makes this deal particularly insidious is the trade-off at its core. Per Axios, congressional lawmakers lead by Republican Marsha Blackburn are essentially offering to surrender their ability to regulate AI in exchange for three federal censorship bills: the Kids Online Safety Act, the NO FAKES Act, and a federal age verification mandate.
While the language around these three measures suggests common-sense cyber regulation, activists say they really amount to a massive censorship regime that is fundamentally anti-democratic.
In a blistering statement, the first amendment group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) warns that “taken together, these bills would fundamentally change the internet as we know it.” That’s especially striking because FIRE is funded by conservative private interests like billionaire Charles Koch, meaning its opposition highlights the degree to which Trump is butting heads against fellow members of the US ruling class.
The Kids Online Safety Act (KORA) for example, would force social media giants to restrict lawful speech based on Federal Trade Commission regulations. FIRE complains that this would give the federal government too much power to hold platforms like Meta accountable for their harms — which, many would argue, is long overdue. But given that just a few corporations own the vast majority of web infrastructure and social media, KORA would give the Trump-controlled FTC major power to bend the internet to its will.
To put this power into perspective, just regulating Meta’s Instagram would impact about 71 percent of US citizens who say they regularly use the app.
It’s a powerful weapon, in other words — and like any weapon, it matters a great deal who wields it. Should the White House and Congress push KORA through, it’s likely it would functionally end the possibility of surfing the internet anonymously, while supercharging Trump’s efforts to criminalize left wing opposition groups in the US.
Whether it passes will depend on some shrewd maneuvering on the Trump administration’s part to secure Congressional support. But it all underscores a frustrating reality of AI regulation in the US: Americans overwhelmingly support stricter regulation on AI — but with the current cabal running the Oval Office, there’s no guarantee that the cure won’t be worse than the disease…
Common Sense Media continues to fight– both overt malignancies and the faux remedies that promise to be as bad or worse. So, I would argue, should we all.
Pending federal bills would fundamentally change the internet as we know it: “Trump Moves to Deeply Censor the Entire Internet,” from @joeonhere.bsky.social in @futurism.com.
A resonant reminder of the poisonous program to be resisted: “The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought.”
And a look at the politicial economics that may drive it.
(Image above: source)
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As we seek sanity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1788, with the ratification of the ninth state (New Hampshire), that the Constitution of the United States came into effect. It was, of course, briskly amended to include what we call the Bill of Rights— the first 10 of 27 amendments (so far).
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”*…
Today we have Substack and social media and blogs. In the old days, we “spoke” in person…
Speaker’s Corner, in Hyde Park in London, is a fabled site of on-going, open public speeches and debate. As Amelia Soth reminds us, that tradition also has a long history in the U.S…
There is nothing in American civic life today like Chicago’s old “Bughouse Square.” From the 1890s to the mid-1960s, it was a hotspot for soapbox speakers: radicals, evangelists, cranks, poets, philosophers, and eccentrics. Anyone with a perspective outside the mainstream gathered there nightly to declaim from their improvised podiums. The ethos, as one newspaper put it, was “free speech and the louder the better.” People actually came to listen, too, in crowds.
Bughouse Square (properly named Washington Square Park) might be the most famous free-speech center, but the practice of soapboxing stretched from sea to shining sea. New York City had its own crew of “peripatetic philosophers.” Hubert Harrison, known as the “Black Socrates,” delivered his critiques of capital right in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Then there was Portia Willis, the “suffrage beauty,” who drew in crowds with her looks and kept them with her wits.
As Mary Anne Trasciatti writes in “Athens or Anarchy? Soapbox Oratory and the Early Twentieth-Century American City,” the soapbox was a particularly democratic mode of public address. Even if you couldn’t get your cause into a meeting hall or a newspaper column, you could still hop on a box, lift your head a few inches above the crowd, and start talking. But that doesn’t mean just anyone could be a successful soapboxer. You had to be a good speaker to keep the crowds listening.
People tried all kinds of tricks to get attention. One soapboxer (wonderfully named Lowlife McCormick) would perform a Houdini-like escape from a straitjacket, which he would then declare to be a metaphor for the bonds of wage labor. Another would catch the crowd’s attention by shouting “I’ve been robbed! I’ve been robbed!” Once he had their ears, he’d finish up with “…by the capitalist system!” A really good soapboxer could draw in so many listeners as to render the streets impassable. One photo shows anarchist Alexander Berkman completely surrounded by a sea of hats.
But the attention soapboxing attracted wasn’t always positive. The 1910s saw a series of vicious “free speech fights” kick off in cities like Spokane, San Diego, and Fresno. Grace L. Miller lays out the history of perhaps the most violent of these struggles in “The I.W.W. Free Speech Fight: San Diego, 1912.” Things started to heat up when a deputy sheriff drove his car into a crowd of people listening to a socialist speaker. One listener reacted by slashing the sheriff’s tire. Within two days, the city passed an ordinance banning street speaking.
In response, the I.W.W. (the Industrial Workers of the World, or the “Wobblies”) urged supporters to ride the rails to San Diego and fight for their right to soapbox:
Come on the cushions; ride up on top;
stick to the brake beams; let nothing stop.
Come in great numbers; this we beseech;
Help San Diego to win free speech.Soapboxers descended on the town en masse. Each would step up on the box, say a word or two, and then get yanked off by the police and carried to jail. There’s even an old Wobbly joke about a speaker who starts his speech with the traditional salutation—“Fellow friends and workers”—and then, when he realizes no one’s coming to arrest him, panics and shouts “Where are the cops?!”
The Wobblies’ goal was to overwhelm the court system with free-speech cases until the city was forced to give up prosecuting soapboxers. Soon the jail was overflowing. But instead of following the legal process, the city discharged the arrestees right into the waiting arms of a vigilante gang, who drove the Wobblies to the county line and viciously beat them with axe handles.
It’s not exactly clear who the vigilantes were, but the gang may have been composed of some of the city’s most prominent citizens. A newspaper editor who was run out of town for his sympathy to the free-speechers wrote of them (as quoted by Miller): “The chamber of commerce and the real estate board are well represented. The press and public utility corporations, as well as members of the Grand Jury are known to belong.”
Yet the vigilantes went too far, and labor organizations called on the state government to intervene. The commissioner sent to investigate declared that the abuses he saw weren’t taking place in Tsarist Russia. At great personal cost, the Wobblies had put the concept of free speech to the test, and won…
When public oratory was a defining feature of civic life: “The Golden Age of the American Soapbox,” from @amelia-soth.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicens’d Printing, to the Parliament of England
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As we speak up, we might ponder another Chicago-related phenomenon, recalling that it was on this date in 1986 that Geraldo Rivera made a “shocking discovery”:
Notorious and “most wanted” gangster, Al Capone, began his life of crime in Chicago in 1919 and had his headquarters set up at the Lexington Hotel until his arrest in 1931.
Years later, renovations were being made at the hotel when a team of workers discovered a shooting-range and series of connected tunnels that led to taverns and brothels making for an easy escape should there be a police raid. Rumors were spread that Capone had a secret vault hidden under the hotel as well.
In 1985, news reporter Geraldo Rivera had been fired from ABC after he criticized the network for canceling his report made about an alleged relationship between John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. It seemed like a good time for Rivera to scoop a new story to repair his reputation.
It was on this day [that] a live, two-hour, syndicated TV special, The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault aired. After lots of backstory, the time finally came to reveal what was in that vault. It turned out to be empty. After the show, Rivera was quoted as saying “Seems like we struck out.”
– source
“If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out”*…
That most quotable (well, after Shakespeare) of wits…
More enduring epigrams in the entertaining infographic “And the Oscar goes to…” (full and larger) from @guardian.
See also “Oscar Wilde Will Not Be Automated, ” from @benjaminerrett.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we chortle, we might recall that it was on this date (which is, by the way, Fibonacci Day) in 1644 that John Milton published Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England. A prose polemic opposing licensing and censorship, it is among history’s most influential and impassioned philosophical defenses of the principle of a right to freedom of speech and expression. The full text is here.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”*…
The [New York] Times is becoming a newsy entertainment outlet, à la Jon Oliver, with a business model more like Netflix or Hulu than catchphrases like All The News That’s Fit to Print might suggest. The Times says so itself, announcing a slew of movie and TV deals with Netflix and Amazon, the Hollywood writing room replaced by the New York newsroom. To quote [the Times‘ media columnist, Ben] Smith in a recent piece slamming one of his colleagues: “The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives, on the web and streaming services.”
The customer always gets what they want: In the case of an ads-driven business model where the advertiser is the true customer, that’s balanced political news alongside frivolous lifestyle stories as a canvas for ads. In the case of subscribers, it’s being flattered by having their own worldviews echoed back at themselves in more articulate form. Nobody actually pays for news, unless your livelihood depends on it, which is why outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg will still flourish, but nothing vaguely resembling news will otherwise remain in a subscription-driven world…
Ideology is like body odor: someone else’s absolutely reeks if strong enough, but you can’t even notice your own. If you remain convinced, in the year 2020 AD, that this or that national outlet remains the megaphone of disinterested chroniclers and selfless truth-seekers, then the BO in question is surely your own. But don’t expect everyone else to put up with the stink.
The Times will triumph financially, dramatically so, and utterly fail as an intellectual institution, at least by its former standards. Sure, the Times staff, like fourth-century Roman emperors intoning the half-remembered tropes of the Roman republic, will speak of ‘objectivity’ and ‘the first draft of history’. But only they and their subscribers will actually believe it. The editorial branding will be august pronouncements about ‘the paper of record’, but the business model is pure Netflix: All The News Fit To Binge.
Advertising-funded journalism is not, as some journalists persist in believing, some ineluctable law of the universe. It’s an entirely contingent artifact of a weird confluence of factors: industrialization and the mass consumer economy, urbanization and burgeoning immigration, plus the secular decline of 19th-century Jacksonian political machines.
As I’ve written before, in century-ago-seeming 2019, and which is doubly correct now, American media is in the process of regressing to 19th (or perhaps even 18th) century models of journalism. Ben Franklin posted under two-dozen different pseudonyms including such bangers as Silence Dogood and Alice Addertongue, and displayed as much nastiness or wit as such modern-day lights like @neontaster or @ComfortablySmug.
Gonzo journalism? Samuel Adams helped organize the Boston Tea Party, and then reported about it after the fact, a level of ‘gonzo’ that even Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson never quite reached. Through almost the end of the 19th-century, the revenue model for most newspapers was subscriptions from party loyalists when a paper like The Press Democrat meant just that: the Democratic paper in that town giving that faction’s version of events (with some anodyne wire-service news mixed in).
We assume that this idiosyncratic late-20th-century form of American journalism is an essential ingredient to liberal democracy, the sine qua non juju that makes civil liberties and accountable government possible. And yet, our Western European peer nations, which one side of the American political spectrum loves to draw comparisons with when they’re not threatening to move there, have an utterly different journalistic culture…
Antonio Garcia-Martinez (@antoniogm) muses on his interview with Martin Gurri (author of The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium)… Into the morbid interregnum? “Twilight of the Media Elites.”
Garcia-Martinez’s full piece is eminently worth reading in full– and best understood in tandem with his conversation with Gurri: “The Prophet of the Revolt.” (For a variation on this diagnosis, see also: “Why Facts Are Overrated.”)
For an argument that yes, the full range of facts and the journalism that reports them do matter, but no, we’re not necessarily doomed to a cacophonous interregnum– that journalistic institutions, while troubled, can be saved– see “The First Amendment in the age of disinformation” by Emily Bazelon (in the New York Times…).
And for a set of painful reminders that this conversation is taking place against an active set of campaigns to widen social and cultural divisions via disinformation, see “The Media Manipulation Casebook.”
* Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
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As we sieve signal from noise, we might recall that it was on this date in 1924, four days before a British General Election, that the [London] Daily Mail published the “Zinoviev letter.” Purportedly a directive from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, to the Communist Party of Great Britain, ordering it to engage in seditious activities, it “predicted” that the resumption of British-Soviet diplomatic relations (by a Labour government) would hasten the radicalization of the British working class. Offensive to many British voters and frightening to others, the letter– now widely-viewed by scholars as a forgery– aided a Conservative landslide.
But historian A. J. P. Taylor argued that the more important impact was on the psychology of Labourites, who in his estimation for years afterwards blamed foul play for their defeat. Though that was accurate, it distracted them from grappling with the broad political forces at work in Britain and postponed what (Taylor argued were) necessary reforms in the Labour Party.
“We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library”*…
The Internet Archive has been saving copies of the web for almost as long as the web has been around. Brewster Kahle, the archive’s founder, studied artificial intelligence at mit in the 1980s. Later he helped found two technology companies — Wide Area Information Server, a system for text-searching databases on remote computers, which was bought by aol, and Alexa Internet, which helped catalog the web and was acquired by Amazon. Kahle launched the Internet Archive in 1996, in a San Francisco attic. Over the years, a few computers have blossomed into one of the largest digital libraries in the world, encompassing 279 billion web pages, 12 million books, and millions more copies of music, films, television shows, and software. (In the lobby, a new arcade machine lets visitors play 500 vintage games from the past 40 years.)…
On the day after the election, Kahle published a blog post addressed to the Internet Archive’s supporters. “I am a bit shell-shocked — I did not think the election would go the way it did,” he wrote. “As we take the next weeks to have this sink in, I believe we will come to find we will have new responsibilities, increased roles to play, in keeping the world an open and free environment.”
The archive had already started backing up copies of every government website that existed during the Obama administration — a practice they began at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. And this January, they released a searchable database containing 520 hours of Trump’s televised speeches, interviews, and news broadcasts.
Still, they were not prepared for the spike in public attention after Trump’s election. A few days after the inauguration, Reuters reported that White House officials had ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to take down its climate change page. People sent messages to the archive, asking if they planned to preserve the information. Similar questions came when the Department of Agriculture abruptly removed thousands of documents from its website, including animal welfare inspection records for some 9,000 labs, zoos, and breeders across the country. “We have all that,” Graham said. Lately the archive has started receiving phone calls from people claiming to have inside information about government websites under threat of getting scrubbed…
More at “Save all- Archiving the Internet in the Trump Era.”
And for an even richer look (and listen) to the Internet Archive and its band of bad-ass librarians (including a fascinating interview with Brewster Kahle), check out “Where to find what’s disappeared online, and a whole lot more: the Internet Archive.”
Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
– Thomas Jefferson
* Carl Sagan
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As we prioritize preservation and access, we might spare a thought for Judith Fingeret Krug; she died on this date in 2009. An American librarian, proponent of freedom of speech , and critic of censorship, Krug became Director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association in 1967. In 1969, she joined the Freedom to Read Foundation as its Executive Director. Krug co-founded Banned Books Week (and here) in 1982. The eighth edition of the Intellectual Freedom Manual, published in 2010 by the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, was dedicated to Krug’s memory.
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