Tag Archives: Freedom of expression

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS FREE SPEECH.

17 Friday Feb 2023

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( Seven minute read)

Freedom of speech is the right to say whatever you like, about whatever you like, whenever you like.

This has never existed nor will it.

Every word written or spoken, has a consequence whether you like it or not.

It is through speaking and listening, and reading that human beings become who they are.

Whatever you think about free speech, social media networks are promisingly now to be the custodians of free-spoken, censorship-resistant and crowd-curated content, free of corporate and political interference.

But do they live up to this promise?

As there is no central point of failure, all of these plugged-in entities must agree on the contents of the ledger. There’s no central point of censorship. in fact, many decentralised networks in recent years have been developed in response to moderation practices.

But what content is being monetised and who benefits?

With no single arbiter in charge of moderating content or banning problematic users it’s almost impossible for any single node in the network to meddle with the ledger without the updates being rejected.

It isn’t a new phenomenon for speech to be controlled by corporations — the average person has a far greater likelihood of getting a message out to people today than they did before the Internet — but now the same handful of companies control speech everywhere.  This includes platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube, but we’ve also seen drastic actions taken by web hosting companies like Amazon (as with Parler), or payment service companies like Mastercard and Visa.

There are always malicious people, such as violent extremists, terrorists and child pornographers, who should not be allowed to post at will. So in practice, every decentralised network requires some sort of moderation. But in the 21st century, when fewer and fewer companies have oligopolies over avenues of user-submitted speech, these restrictions have shifted from a free-speech issue to one of corporate control. As such, each server sets its own rules.

They have the power to disable, silence or suspend user access and even to apply server-wide moderation.

Braking these rules result in an immediate user ban and removal of the content. If a user wants to appeal a decision, the verdict comes from a randomly-selected jury of users. But since all content is recorded on the blockchain, it continues to be accessible to those with the technical know-how to retrieve it raising a host of moral and legal obligations which are unavoidable.

It’s not difficult to see how ratcheting up platform liability could cause even more vital speech to be removed by corporations whose sole interest is not in “connecting the world” but in profiting from it.

One of the reasons that this issue is so difficult to solve is that our interests in freedom of speech usually do not extend to speech by the other side.

Is it indeed the case that we as a society cannot tolerate intolerance, lest that very intolerance destroy us?

Or should we only restrict speech when it violates others’ liberties.?

As for platforms, they know what they need to do, because civil society has told them for years. They must be more transparent and ensure that users have the right to remedy when wrong decisions are made. Most important, they should ensure that the decisions they make about speech are in line with global human rights standards, rather than making the rules up as they go.

Down the centuries people have died for the sake of free speech. Problematic language, including hate speech, disinformation, and propaganda have been around throughout human history.

But, in recent decades, they have been amplified, and, most would agree, fundamentally transformed by the advent of the internet and the rise of social media.

Triggered by the evolution of our newest technology of communication, call into question the whole edifice of freedom of speech and press. Most powerful communications technology magnifies these harms exponentially, beyond anything we have encountered before. Some argue that, if it is left unchecked, the very existence of democracy is at risk.

The right to express opinions without government restraint—is a democratic ideal that dates back to ancient Greece.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Traditionally, freedom of speech has been justified as necessary for democratic government and as an essential individual right.

Your voice matters.

You have the right to say what you think, share information and demand a better world. You also have the right to agree or disagree with those in power, and to express these opinions in peaceful protests. It is central to living in an open and fair society; one in which people can access justice and enjoy their human rights.

The problem.

Governments have a duty to prohibit, hateful, inciteful speech, but many abuse their authority to silence peaceful dissent by passing laws criminalizing freedom of expression. This is often done in the name of counterterrorism, national security or religion.

On the other hand government can’t censor or restrict expression, just because some segment of the population finds the content offensive.

Shared beliefs, diminish, economic, social and political decisions cannot be made by a society without increased freedom of expression.

Defining what types of speech should and shouldn’t be protected by law has fallen largely to the courts.

While freedom of speech pertains mostly to the spoken or written word, it also protects some forms of symbolic speech. Symbolic speech is an action that expresses an idea.  For example artistic freedom.

You don’t feel free to speak if you are going to be shouted down or subject to torrents of abuse.

There used to be a simple restriction of free speech, it was not permitted to incite hatred or violence.

What is free speech?

I think that no society has or could have complete freedom of speech.

I define free speech specifically as being able to say whatever you like without punishment from the state.

Freedom of speech means that the government may not punish you for speaking your mind.

Free speech is a two way thing and declining to engage in an action, rather than being compelled not to, means choice = freedom.

Free speech does differ between societies is a fundamental point, especially in light of recent events.

There is no conception that captures all of our intuitions about things we are and aren’t free to say; leaving us all free to say absolutely everything we want. In the end all societies can only choose to protect some speech, while necessarily banning others—whether through the law or social pressure—to achieve that goal.

For example we allow people to be rude or mean on Twitter, we allow friends to tell their friends they respect them less when they’ve said things they don’t like.

It’s fine to say that the words ‘free speech’ just mean some or other conception, e.g. the libertarian conception.

If so, I don’t think the concept ‘free speech’ is useful as a way of thinking about experienced freedom in speech.

Patterns of speech we (i.e. our laws and courts) decide what counts, as threats, incitement, harassment, abuse, hate speech, and so on, are not permitted. In practice this means stuff like racist speech is forbidden, homophobic and sexist speech is becoming forbidden, as well as all the obviously unpleasant harassment and abuse mentioned above.

On our modern values, these older prohibitions seem silly whereas current prohibitions stop genuinely dangerous speech.

Democracy and free speech are both overrated, both needlessly promote a cycle of collective competition of popularity and productivity and demote personal independence and responsibility, paralyzing academic and political exchange in multiculturalism societies.

There is no coherent, cohesive thing we can point to and call ‘free speech’.

Freedom of expression in the age of the internet––communication without borders––is a frequent subject of debate both on a political and legal level. However, the theoretical underpinnings have generally been confined to legal and philosophical analysis which are not entirely satisfying, because they cannot explain freedom of speech beyond the individual.

People have a right to information that affects their lives. Freedom is also the freedom to take the consequences.

It ultimately comes down to simply living our lives to our choosing.

“If you can pollute the physical environment, you can pollute the cultural and mental environment”.

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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY SAY’S: TO ANCHOR OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CORONA VIRUS THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS AND WILL BE VITAL.

27 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Communication., CORONA VIRUS., COVID-19, Democracy, DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disconnection., Fake News., Freedom of the Press., Honesty., Human values., International solidarity., Life., Lock Down., Modern Day Communication., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Political Trust, Post - truth politics., Reality., Robot citizenship., Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Internet., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Truth, Truthfulness., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, What Needs to change in the World, World Leaders, World Politics

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(Four-minute read) 


At the moment rightly so we are all preoccupied with the consequences of our own individual lives and all indicator point to world disaster on a scale not seen by most of us. 

However, if and when we return to a semblance of normal the freedom of the press will be in jeopardy when the blame game starts, which is inevitable. 

Why will it be?

Because the present pandemic marks the emergence of a new model of watchdog function, one that is neither purely networked nor purely traditional but is rather a mutualistic interaction between the two.

What globalization, technological integration and the general flattening of the world have done is to super empower individuals to such a degree that they can actually challenge any hierarchy—from a global bank to a nation-state—as individuals.

The fear that the decentralized network, with its capacity to empower individuals to challenge their governments or global banks, is not a democracy, but could lead to anarchy.

But the alternative is to give the government a veto over what its citizens are allowed to know.

There should be relentless exposure of politician or businessman, every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life if we are to change the world for a better future.

False news forces us to ask how comfortable we are with the actual shape of democratization created by the Internet. It circumvents the social and organizational
frameworks of traditional media, which played a large role in framing the
balance between freedom and responsibility of the press.

Many of the problems can be laid at the feet of the Internet—fragmentation of the audience and polarization of viewpoints.

We cannot afford as a polity to create classes of privileged speakers and
press agencies, and underclasses of networked information producers whose products we take into the public sphere when convenient, but whom we treat as susceptible to suppression when their publications become less palatable.

Doing so would severely undermine the quality of our public discourse.

The risk is that the government will support its preferred media models and that the
incumbent mass media players will, in turn, vilify and denigrate the newer
models in ways that make them more vulnerable to attack and shore up the
the privileged position of those incumbents in their role as a more reliable ally watchdog.

Clarifying that the freedom of the press extends to “every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion” and that liberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer and individual bloggers. 

Social distancing must not be allowed to turn into ruling distancing.

 Long live WikiLeaks. 

An uncomfortable fact is that a free press in a democracy can be messy at the best of times with governments around the world underestimated the coronavirus the political exploitation of the outbreak is now a reality. 

Capturing the treatment of television is less comprehensive as it is a visual medium.

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S : WE HAVE NEVER HAD FREEDOM AND WHAT WE HAVE NOW IS AN ILLUSION.

07 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in Freedom, Humanity., Life., Social Media., The world to day., Unanswered Questions.

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These days our Freedoms (which so many died for) are being eroded to the point where there is no such thing as Freedom in our Lifetime.In this post I am going to try to express what exactly personal Freedom is these days.

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I am not going to exam the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights which has over 30 Articles, or what is left of free speech, or the Black freedom struggle, or woman’s struggle for freedom.  Or the idea of free speech which is a view of freedom that is inseparable from the
political arena, flawed in theory and politicised in practice.

⌈ Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, language, or any other status. We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination. These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible.

Universal human rights are often expressed and guaranteed by law, in the forms of treaties, customary international law, general principles and other sources of international law. International human rights law lays down obligations of Governments to act in certain ways or to refrain from certain acts, in order to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals or groups.⌉

All of which are impossible to implement, and has never been implemented anywhere historically – not even today, in liberal societies.

The freedoms that we once had are now dissolving because of the Internet, and the need for blanket surveillance due to fear mongering politics over terrorists plots ever since 9/11.

Our every move is tracked, we are under surveillance around the clock, our buying habits are logged, our preferences are hacked, and most of us don’t raise an eyebrow.

It is a mistake to think of a search engine as an oracle for anonymous queries they can set off a chain reaction that can have troubling consequences both online and offline. All this is because being online increasingly means being put into categories based on a socioeconomic portrait of you that’s built over time by advertisers and search engines collecting your data—a portrait that data brokers buy and sell, but that you cannot control or even see.

Our background and our relationships are becoming inescapable features of our human existence.

So what is freedom.

In the modern sense freedom is achieved by one’s individual nature, or inner voice.  A sovereign self – a monological consciousness that fundamentally excludes the other.

However one can still be imprisoned by an oppressive internal forced liberation from an interior force.

So how can one reconcile two seemingly opposed senses of freedom?

One sense views freedom as bound and situated, while the other sense views freedom as liberation from such bonds.

What is required is a notion of self hood that recognizes and embraces both senses of freedom –  to see the self not as an isolated and detached entity from the social world, but one that is deeply enculturated and dialogical while simultaneously liberated.

These are the limits, the boundaries, of what allow us to be free and for things to be meaningful.

So instead of viewing boundaries as something that disables our freedom, we should recognize that boundaries are what might actually enable our freedom.

The received ideas of our present-day institutions are composed of the religious, philosophical, economic, and political status quo.

The goal for each of us is to break free of these ideologies and re describe our world as a whole. This sense of freedom, which I referred to earlier as freedom-within-boundaries, is what ultimately makes possible a freedom-from-oppression.

If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.

As Charles Taylor puts it, this sovereign and self-determining freedom characteristic of the modern individual “demands that I break the hold of all such external impositions, and decide for myself alone.

In this view, individuals could exercise their gifts and powers only by
participating in the common life.

That is to say, our freedom is contingent upon the greater public world.

Modern thought (especially evident in the political philosophy of Rousseau) externalized the source of oppression onto authoritative forces such as society, church, law, and government.

This is no longer true due to the indebtedness of the world.

At the expense of eliminating fundamental characteristics that make us human we are now confronting a world with unlimited new possibilities but having no meaningful boundaries.

Modern Social media come to see others as a part of – Us/Selfies.

Unfortunately this unchecked freedom is leading us to a void in which nothing would be worth doing, nothing would deserve to count for anything.

Life is dialogical by its very nature.

To live means to engage in dialogue, to question, to listen, to answer, to agree, to return to your own position, enriched. We need to identify with others in order to open ourselves up to new ways of being without forgetting where we come from to achieve any freedom.

In the past our background was essential to our identity. These days one’s uniqueness is maintained through continuous exposure to novelty  in a consumer culture that thrives on the latest fad.

Is it this quantity of novelties that appears to take precedent over quality of relationships. So where do we turn for redescription of Freedom, to open us up to new and fresh ways of being human?

That can enable us to break free from our own pasts and increase our level of sensitivity and sympathy to those without freedom?

Is it severance from the status quo.

I fear that if you were to ignore you background, and try to break from your own past, “You would be crippled as a person, because you would be repudiating an essential part out of which you evaluate and determine the meanings of things. Our background, often times inarticulate and unformulated, carries the values and traditions that constitute who we are. This background is no longer not just our personal past and memories, but it may also be the lineage, tradition, and culture from which we have emerged.

Instead of dropping our historicity, we should be interested in owning up to the background and tradition that gives significance to our identity.

Meaningful freedom can only be achieved through enculturation.

Therefore, our freedom is bound in a sense, or situated in the environment that has shaped us, because that is likely to be the most meaningful environment to us.

Perhaps it is only in a bounded space that we can move about freely.

Fusion of horizons’ between ourselves and others..we must always have a horizon in order to be able to transpose ourselves into a situation.

Background is what initially provides persons with the possibility for understanding anything at all. Our background, or tacit knowledge of the world, is the horizon out of which things have meaning for us. It gives us our “referential context of significance.” A liberating freedom, which occurs when our world is enlarged not downloaded on to a data base.

Our identity is formed by the web of relationships that surround us.  Therefore, it is precisely ourselves, which implies our background, that we must bring into the other’s situation.

The fundamental significance of language and conversation, and its ability to bring us closer to understanding one another is now rapidly diluted by technology.

We are not born precocial and fully hard-wired creatures.

Instead, we are born as incomplete beings, needing enculturation and society for healthy maturation.

Our biological need for one another requires certain physiological signals, that are not possible on the Web. Through facial expressions, infants learn to not only replicate another’s face, but to empathically feel what the face exhibits.

Biologists consider this skill of emotional matching to have been “crucial for escape from predation, foraging, hunting, and mass migrations” before spoken language entered our evolutionary history.

In spite of the modern liberating sense of freedom which may encourage isolation and detachment, we should also note that it can promote a healthy release from oppressive external forces. These forces can manifest in a variety of forms, everything from an abusive relationship to a manipulative religious group.

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Emphasis on a socially dependent self can lead to passivity in daily life or submission to totalitarian regimes.

By being sympathetic we are capable of being liberated from ourselves.

On the other hand egocentrism shouldn’t be overcome at the expense of forgetting ourselves. So freedom is one that respects the boundaries of selfhood, instead of annihilating it.

Although we may be transported into the sandals of the Buddha, we still need to come back to our point of departure in order to be enriched.

Because in recognizing the necessity of one’s interpersonal relationships, social and moral commitments, culture, tradition, memories, and of course, biology as constitutive of one’s experience of liberation.

Freedom doesn’t necessarily mean fleeing to a new land. It can also mean discovering the oceanic depth of a single, bounded situation. And this entails having new eyes. Remember, “Life is immense!”

We are free to become authentic only after we accept our boundary, which is our finitude.

Death is the ultimate boundary of human existence, it is only by facing up to this limit that we are capable of becoming truly authentic Free.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls;
Where the words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening
thought and action–
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake.

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–Guru Rabindranath Tagore
National Poet, Freedom Fighter

Modern day freedom-is freedom within boundaries.

Are there reasonable and legal limits to free expression ?

30 Tuesday Sep 2014

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Now this is an interesting and complex question.

Far too big a subject to be addressed by my comparatively little brain or written about in a few hundred words. However we all know that stifling free expression is counterproductive.

So is Freedom of expression still a universal human right?

Is it the 
lynch pin
 of
 democracy?

The Internet is by its very nature border less, but it is still intimately connected to the physical world, and as such to the territories of sovereign nation states.

Therefore, states can significantly influence the free flow of information, expression and free speech.

An open and free Internet is a key means by which individuals can exercise their right to freedom of opinion, expression, association and assembly. However, these freedoms in our present world cannot on one hand be absolute and on the other they have to be absolute.

Freedom of information is a fundamental element of freedom of expression, with the Internet a key instrument for the exercise of the right to freedom of expression.

This is the Quandary.

Because when you turn to Google with a question, the search engine must decide, at that moment, what “answers” to give, and in what order to put those answers.

Is it commercializes something that is not commerceable? And if so is there a compelling argument that computerized decisions should be considered speech?

Computers as you know make trillions of invisible decisions each day.

Gone are the days of waiting for the evening news to present events occurring on the battlefield. Gone are the days of relying on professional journalists, or embedded reporters, to paint the day-to-day picture of the world.

Gone are the days that the Internet was merely an alternative communicative channel.

What will its impact be on free speech?

I believe in the long run it is going to be the down fall of free speech and expression.

Cyberspace today is an important part of living as a private and public individual in the modern world. It is a way of speaking and listening; an essential part of being human, but is it turning into a privatized “wild west”, where individuals’ expressions and information retrieval is not subject to arbitrary restrictions with no judicial review or democratic legitimacy.

Should non human or automated choices be granted the full protection of Free Speech?

Is it time for states to grant these expressions the same protection, which we apply to expressions in the physical world ?

Self-regulation is a dangerous path when applied to public sphere communication.

My answer is –  No Cyberspace should not be allocated such a high status.

Why?

Because Extremists –often claim to speak for whole communities.

Because if we are not careful the potential result is that we get a homogenised, sanitised universal culture that either gives offense to none or is controlled by the most vocal and powerful group whatever the rest of the populace may want or believe.

In July 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Committee confirmed the central role of freedom of expression in human rights, making it clear that it can only be limited in the most exceptional circumstances, and calling for the first time for unrestricted public access to official information.

Now we all know that there cannot be a democratic society without the fundamental right to freedom of expression but the internet is allowing new means for humans to express themselves. Hong Kong as I write is expressing all over social net works its unwillingness to have Beijing puppets put up for election.

Because in today’s world, we have delegated many of our daily decisions to computers. On the drive to work, a GPS device suggests the best route; at your desk, Microsoft Word guesses at your misspellings, and Facebook recommends new friends.

In the past few years, the suggestion has been made that when computers make such choices they are “speaking,” and should enjoy the protections of the First Amendment. Free Speech.

Because the internet connectives which the internet provides to humans today makes it possible for soldiers in Iraq to post their thoughts and reflections regarding an upcoming or recently accomplished mission, to include pictures and video, on a blog in Iraq and within seconds this news from the front can be read by thousands if not millions of people world-wide.

Everyone has the right to associate freely through and on the Internet, for social, political, cultural or other purposes. There are efforts by a number of states including Russia, China and Iran to increase state control of the internet within their territories.

The Internet is a space for the promotion, protection and fulfillment of human rights and the advancement of social justice. While governments have an important obligation in protecting and furthering internet freedom, the very nature of the Internet means that civil society, the private sector and academia also need to be involved in discussions on internet governance not just Governments.

Free speech is essential to a free society because, when you deny people ‘an opportunity to act like normal political parties’, there’s nothing left for them to do but punch your lights out. Just look at what is happening with a culture like ISIS  that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity. It is a barbarous society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast if left alone.

Another growing causes for concern is that diverse voices of the non-religious are either not being heard or are not equally valued: Religious voices are claiming their right to freedom of expression but at the cost of non-religious voices being silenced.

The ability to freely speak your mind is widely seen as a natural right, in other words a government (or any other institution) can’t grant you this right, only take it away. A liberal society is one which is content to call ‘true’ (or ‘right’ or ‘just’) whatever the outcome of undistorted communication happens to be, whatever view wins in a free and open encounter.

If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all.

We live, in ‘interesting’ times, from Islam and Israel to global warming and gay marriage.

Within the EU,internet there is no specific (foreign) policy agenda for internet freedom.

So the question I started out with might sound like a fanciful question, a matter of philosophy or science fiction but a world where real, primal, universal rights — like freedom of expression is where I want to live.

Everyone has the duty to respect the human rights of all others in the online environment.

     How about You!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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