Tena cataloged examples of organized campaigns using waves of complaints to shut down targeted accounts by exploiting Twitter\u2019s automated system for suppressing abusive accounts. Authoritarian governments and political parties have mastered the art of using such campaigns to silence opponents.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny organized group can now make Twitter work for them censoring the people they target, to make it label their tweets as \u2018sensitive\u2019 or \u2018potentially offensive\u2019, to delete all of them, to hide, suspend, and close the accounts they may see fit. It\u2019s enough to launch an organized attack to denounce the targeted accounts as \u2018sensitive\u2019, \u2018offensive\u2019, \u2018harming\u2019, \u2018spam\u2019, and Twitter will obligingly censor it,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
Tena\u2019s advice for resisting censorship campaigns on Twitter included blocking and refusing to engage with a \u201cpotential denouncer\u201d who might be an advance scout for a banning mob, which is the exact opposite of how people romping through a digital playground for limitless free speech ought to behave. We are being taught to fear speaking openly with one another.<\/p>\n
Another blow was struck against free speech when Twitter announced<\/a> it would begin reviewing verified statuses based on the content of the user\u2019s tweets. The \u201cblue checkmark\u201d was originally intended to protect against spoof accounts by verifying that high-profile users are who they claim to be. Suddenly it became a mark of prestige and ideological approval.<\/p>\n Many questions were raised<\/a> about the criteria used by Twitter to decide who gets, or loses, the blue checkmark. Some people were ruthlessly subjected to summary judgment, while others with long histories of spewing venomous hatred were left untouched<\/a>. Accounts with the blue checkmark seal of approval were responsible for some spectacular online meltdowns<\/a> in 2017, featuring outbursts of extreme rhetoric.<\/p>\n Pro-life group Live Action complained<\/a> that Twitter is suppressing their content for political reasons, under cover of the excuse that images of children in the womb are \u201cinflammatory.\u201d Twitter demanded major changes to Live Action\u2019s content before their account would be restored. \u201cIn other words, we have to remove practically all of our pro-life content before Twitter says it will allow us to advertise again,\u201d founder Lila Rose wrote<\/a> in December.<\/p>\n Other social media companies were criticized<\/a> for being far too willing to accommodate the censorship demands of authoritarian regimes. As the end of 2017 approached, Chinese regulators bluntly informed<\/a> Google and Facebook they would have to comply with the communist nation\u2019s elaborate censorship rules and ideological controls if they want access to China\u2019s 751 million Internet users.<\/p>\n The standard response is that limited access to a huge but tightly controlled market is better than none at all, especially when control-freak countries like China have their own social media platforms standing by to pick up the slack if the likes of Facebook, Google, and Twitter are locked out.<\/p>\n On the other hand, acquiescence is giving the captive populations of these authoritarian regimes the illusion of more freedom and global knowledge than they actually possess, and sustained commerce with ugly regimes is infecting Western companies with authoritarian values.<\/p>\n Facebook, for example, is growing<\/a> very comfortable with stealthy censorship supposedly triggered by automatic systems that protect other users from viewing objectionable material or \u201cmisinformation.\u201d Google and its YouTube subsidiary have been accused<\/a> of suppressing conservative videos on more than one occasion<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some of this censorship is justified in the name of combating \u201cfake news\u201d from both domestic sources and foreign provocateurs seeking to undermine the American political system. Of course, \u201cwhat is truth?\u201d is among the oldest questions asked by mankind. Judgments of what constitutes \u201cfake news\u201d are often highly subjective. Accusations of deliberate misinformation ring from both sides of the partisan divide. Social media services have been criticized<\/a> for partnering with partisan \u201cfact-checking\u201d units.<\/p>\n Censorship is often a matter of subtle manipulation, rather than outright banning. Google, for example, recently talked about quietly reducing<\/a> how often articles from Russian news organizations are listed in news feeds instead of delisting them completely. Naturally, the Russians complained this was unfair, but whatever one thinks of their state-controlled \u201cnews services,\u201d the notion of stealth censorship is disturbing, and it is not limited to suspected foreign saboteurs. Twitter, for example, has engaged in the practice of \u201cshadow banning<\/a>,\u201d which involves rendering tweets invisible to other readers without the author being aware he or she has been censored.<\/p>\n Beyond the Internet, the idea that \u201chate speech\u201d is not protected by the First Amendment gained currency, in part because a generation of students graduated from the tutelage of left-wing academics and carried this poisonous idea into the mainstream. Much as \u201cfake news\u201d tends to be a highly subjective designation, \u201chate speech\u201d lies in the ear of the beholder. No more convenient mechanism for suppressing disfavored ideas has ever been devised than simply declaring them \u201chateful\u201d and demanding the dissidents be muzzled.<\/p>\n The current generation of college students is dangerously hostile to free speech. A survey published<\/a> in September found that only 39 percent of undergraduates believe the First Amendment protects whatever they deem \u201chate speech.\u201d Over half of them believed shouting down speakers they disagree with is acceptable behavior. About twenty percent believed physical violence is acceptable for silencing speakers who make \u201coffensive and hurtful statements.\u201d<\/p>\n Another report found<\/a> that 32 percent of colleges now have at least one policy that \u201cclearly and substantially\u201d restricts free speech, while fewer than eight percent have absolutely no policies that threaten the First Amendment rights of students.<\/p>\n In December, Northwest Vista College President Ric Baser became the latest academic to argue that \u201chate speech does not equal free speech,\u201d in an op-ed with precisely that title. Baser argued that it\u2019s \u201cdisingenuous\u201d to claim that suppressing hate speech imperils \u201cdiversity of thought.\u201d In other words, the elites will decide how much free speech the rest of us really need.<\/p>\n The American Civil Liberties Union is having second thoughts<\/a> about whether free speech is one of the civil liberties in need of unwavering protection. Members of the media complain that President Donald Trump is trying to intimidate them into silence with public attacks<\/a> and legal threats<\/a>. Left-wing groups have turned<\/a> on each other in speech-suppression showdowns.<\/p>\n Gangs of masked thugs stand<\/a> ready to silence disfavored speakers with street violence, convinced that their righteousness and the allegedly fascist desires of their opponents justify assault and vandalism. Sensing their political usefulness, left-wing media outlets have romanticized<\/a> and even glamorized them.<\/p>\n Just about every point on the political spectrum has developed a limited appetite for freedom of speech. Contrary to early hopes that the Internet would be an untameable frontier where free speech could flourish as never before, it seems to have made censorship easier in many ways. It has certainly enabled a form of online harassment and intimidation that never existed before.<\/p>\n Lives and careers can be destroyed in a matter of hours after controversial remarks are made. Vicious and sustained campaigns of intimidation, including threats of assault and rape, have been waged<\/a> online against women who oppose trendy left-wing positions like gun control. CNN even targeted<\/a> and threatened a Reddit user who made a GIF the network didn\u2019t like.<\/p>\n Another element of the free speech crisis is the growing sense that arguments are \u201cwon\u201d by silencing the opposition. This conviction is fueled by recent successful efforts to rule certain positions, such as opposition to same-sex marriage, beyond the pale. Many other groups aspire to elevate their own ideals to sacred tenets that cannot be questioned in respectable company. There is no easier way to manufacture \u201cconsensus\u201d than to make dissent unspeakable. It is a shortcut to political power that many are eager to take.<\/p>\n Transgenderism is shaping <\/a>up to be one of the great new menaces to freedom of speech, as long lists of politically correct pronouns are formulated and angry demands to silence \u201cgender-normative\u201d speech are made. As with other crusades against freedom of expression, transgenderism was incubated in campus petri dishes before being unleashed into public space, where baffled citizens can suddenly find themselves charged <\/a>with the crime of using the wrong pronoun. <\/p>\n There are also disturbing signs of foreign governments and ideologies exerting censorious pressure on American soil. Islamic law is the most notorious example \u2014 it is effectively impossible to violate Islamic blasphemy laws in American media space, and radical Islamic terrorism remains <\/a>a difficult topic for government officials to discuss frankly \u2014 but there are others. <\/p>\n Tiananmen Square veteran Wang Dan, for instance, warned<\/a> in November 2017 that the Chinese government is \u201cextending its surveillance of critics abroad, reaching into Western academic communities and silencing visiting Chinese students.\u201d Blacklists and threats against family living in China are among the instruments of oppression Wang described. <\/p>\n Can anyone doubt that authoritarian governments will use their influence with Western social media companies in the future to demand more censorship beyond their borders, much as they presently threaten to lock the companies out of their captive markets if demands for content control are not met?<\/p>\n All around the world, there is a retreat from the principle of free speech, justified with everything from appeals for social unity to the belief that sheltered groups must be protected from words that would \u201coppress\u201d them. It is hard to think of any place where freedom of speech became more robust in 2017.<\/p>\n There have been hopeful signs, however. A Rasmussen poll in August found<\/a> 73 percent of Americans still believe freedom of speech is an ideal worth dying for, and 85 percent thought that protecting free speech is more important than making sure no one is offended. Facebook abandoned<\/a> its effort to tag certain news items as \u201cdisputed\u201d because there was a potent backlash: it turned out people were more <\/em>likely to believe stories tagged as fake news without any further explanation.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the vital question is not what percentage of Americans believe that but what percentage of Google, Facebook, and Twitter executives believe it and if they are willing to stand up to the demands of authoritarians with billion-dollar markets under their thumbs.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/strong> <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>Original Article<\/p>\n [contf] [contfnew] [contfnewc] [contfnewc] <\/p>\n The post Hayward: The State of Free Speech in 2017<\/a> appeared first on News Wire Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Free speech remained in a perilous state in 2017, as Big Tec..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50837,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech"],"yoast_head":"\n![](\"http:\/\/www.breitbart.com\/t\/assets\/i\/BB-logo-highres.jpg\"\/){kind=logo}
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