First posted on OpenDemocracy
The government has responded to grassroots pressure for libel reform, but its proposals do not go far enough towards genuinely safeguarding free speech on the internet and ensuring that powerful corporations cannot silence their critics.
During a panel event on Defamation Reform earlier this year, the lawyer Paul Tweed said that the recent focus on Libel Tourism was the result of “the most successful lobbying campaign since that conducted by the tobacco industry”. Those of us at English PEN, Index on Censorship and Sense About Science who had done some of that lobbying gleefully re-tweeted Tweed’s back-handed compliment.
We’re lobbying for libel reform in the UK because we believe the law is not fit for purpose in the 21st Century. The high cost of fighting an action in the High Court is coupled with a law that seems to prioritise reputation over free expression. The truth of the matter and the harm caused are presumed in favour of the claimant. And because the law has not been updated to reflect the invention of the Internet, each web-page is treated as a ‘publication’ as if it were a book printed in the country where it is read. All this has created the phenomenon of Libel Tourism, where foreign libel claimants take advantage of the English Courts’ claimant-friendly jurisdiction.
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Originally posted at Liberal Conspiracy.
I was in the House of Commons Committee Room 9 earlier this week, listening to the 5th sitting of the Defamation Bill Committee (on behalf of English PEN and the Libel Reform Campaign). During the exchanges, Denis MacShane brought to light a case where the Citizens Advice Bureau and others have been threatened with libel action for discussing and criticising civil recovery schemes, specifically the practices of a company called Retail Loss Prevention.
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Following my recent defence, on TV and on news websites, of the rights people have to say offensive things, a few people have asked my opinion of the banned advert placed by Fathers4Justice.
The advert ran earlier this year in the i Paper (the low cost digest of the Independent). It called for the supermarket M&S to boycott Mumsnet, because the web forum carried messages which “promote gender hatred”. The text on the advert is actually worded quite politely (“Fathers4Justice are writing to all advertisers this Father’s Day to inform them…”) but the image is of a baby boy with words like ‘deadbeat’ and ‘rioter’ scrawled over his body.
The advert has now been banned by the ASA, which means Fathers4Justice cannot use it in future adverts.
Is this not an infringement of free expression? If I have argued in the past for the right of people to say insensitive things or use hyperbole, what’s the difference here?
First, an ASA ban is not quite the same as a legal prohibition. Fathers4Justice can presumably continue to make similar claims on their own websites and publicity materials. Nevertheless, an ASA ban a form of censorship.
Second, the ASA have ruled on the claims that Mumsnet promote hatred, not on the shocking imagery in the advert. Scrawling the word ‘rapist’ on a baby is certainly shocking and offensive, but that is not what has been banned.
Instead, the ASA have ruled that the advert was misleading. Mumsnet do not promote gender hatred in the way Fathers4Justice claimed.
Nevertheless, part of me wants this sort of thing to be refuted in other ways. Mumsnet is an extraordinarily influential organisation (25,000 daily posts to the forums is a lot of traffic, and founder Justine Roberts was on Question Time a few weeks ago), and I wonder whether such bizarre claims from a famously odd organisation such as Fathers4Justice could not have been fought via discussion and debate. A few cutting blog posts, that demonstrate the falsity of the advert’s assertions, would surely spread like wildfire, discrediting Fathers4Justice, and burnishing Mumsnet.
There is also a free speech issue on the other side of the fence. An Internet forum is not a newspaper. The thousands of postings that go up every day are not the editorial voice of the platform provider. The nature of the discussions (parenthood, domestic issues, child-rearing) are emotive and one might expect a degree of angry venting to take place. That’s a feature, not a bug, of such websites. Mumsnet should not be held responsible that such content arises… Especially as they have a clear policy to remove posts that violate their comments policy. If sponsors like M&S were to withdraw sponsorship of the site, it would presumably wither and die. A valuable platform for free expression and useful ideas would disappear.
Aside: Note the names of the two organisations involved in this argument: Fathers4Justice and Mumsnet. Two portmanteaus, no spaces between what should be separate words. Creations of the digital space.
Veronica Connolly says she is being “persecuted for being a Christian” after refusing to pay her TV licence in protest at the BBC’s decision to show Jerry Springer The Opera.
Rubbish. Mrs Connolly is using the language of political correctness to claim victimisation, when she is actually engaging in a deliberate act of civil disobedience. She is being prosecuted for the act of not paying for her licence. The authorities are not deliberately going after her because of the underlying beliefs.
Stewart Lee’s show is challenging and satirical and surely not for everyone, but the BBC’s public service remit means it should be showing controversial programmes and films. If the corporation sought to avoid offending anyone its output would become stale and anodyne.
If you don’t like a particular show then don’t watch it.
This issue does raise questions about the license fee, which is really a form of tax. If you don’t agree with the behaviour or the programming of, say, BSkyB (linked as it is to Rupert Murdoch) you can always choose the Virgin TV package instead. And if you can’t stand Richard Branson then you can withdraw from taking that service and just take the FreeView Channels, or pay for LoveFiLM and Netflix, or go and look at YouTube. But there is no way to ‘opt out’ of funding the BBC because anyone with a TV must pay the licence fee.
Of course – There’s no way of ‘opting out’ of British war-mongering or ill-advised spending decisions either. That’s the point of the system of taxes and democracy – you change the spending decisions indirectly, by participating in the political process.
The issue of the licence fee is that, in the 21st century, we tend to think that we have some kind of choice over the media we consume. We can get films, TV series and and music via the Internet, and can ‘unbundle’ the articles in a newspaper so we can read the sports sections without buying the political sections (or vice versa). The bundled, all or nothing approach of the licence fee – which is a special sort of tax, whatever the nomenclature – seems a little at odds with the rest of the media ecosystem. As a fan of the BBC, this vexes me.
I do also have some sympathy with the argument put forward by Mrs Connolly’s lawyer, who says that a TV set is no longer a luxury but a “primary organ of communication”. Indeed. Might our right to receive and impart information include the right to access a TV and the Internet?
Here’s my interview on Al Jazeera, discussing the #TwitterJokeTrial and free speech online: