Everyone has a right to my opinions
Yesterday lunchtime I was invited back onto TalkRADIO to discuss free speech. [previously] This time my host was Patrick Cristys and the topic of discussion was the government’s bizarre plan to enforce free speech at universities.
Continue reading “Discussing Free Speech at Universities on TalkRADIO with Patrick Christys”
Commenting on the social media banning of Donald Trump, Adam Wagner describes Twitter as a “semi public square”
Twitter banning Trump:
— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) January 9, 2021
If you draw a line it should at least be incitement to violence.
If violence is against democratic system that’s an aggravating factor.
Since Twitter is semi public square, decisions should be subject to appeal before Indpendent body as with Facebook.
In reply, a few people assert that there is no such thing. Twitter is a private company with its own T&Cs that can be enforced as it sees fit. This allows them to dismiss the President’s suspensions as “not censorship” and “not about free speech.”
This might be true in a legal sense but it is certainly not in a moral or social sense, where the term ‘semi-public square’ is useful and instantly understandable.
Semi-public squares are places where there may be no formal right to expression, but where the particular historic, societal or cultural circumstances have created the expectation of that right. In the case of social media, that expectation is actually cultivated by the tech companies themselves.
Continue reading “The Semi-Public Square”This is an edited transcript of my speech to the Leeds Beckett Festival of Politics and International Relations Festival, delivered on 15th November 2016. This first appeared on the Leeds Beckett University Politics and Applied Global Ethics (PAGE) blog. You can listen to the unalloyed version of the speech on SoundCloud or via the player below.
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https://twitter.com/JunaidM2/status/798618037792411648
I want to first set out my views on No Platform policies. In short, I think they’re bad for free speech and they’re bad for the people they seek to protect.
The idea of No Platform is that it seeks to avoid giving someone the credibility of speaking at a prestigious institution. Those who call for No Platform claim it is not a form of censorship, because the person is subjected to the No Platform rule can always take their words elsewhere. Moreover (they say), legal protections for free speech relate to the government, and since the government is not involved in choosing who speaks at a university there is no real issue. Why can’t we choose who does and does not speak on our campus? Continue reading “A Better Debate About No Platform? My Speech At the Leeds Beckett Festival of Politics and International Relations”
Commissioned by and first published on the Free Word Centre blog
In recent months there has been a great deal of discussion and debate on the subject of free speech at universities. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford, and the protests over controversial speakers like Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel, have kept the issue in the headlines, and the publication of Sp!ked Magazine’s Free Speech University Rankings seems to have emboldened free speech advocates to push back against campus censorship. A new campaign, Right2Debate, targets the National Union of Students (NUS) and its No Platform policies that prevent controversial speaker events from going ahead.
As a campaigner with English PEN, I support the campaigns to expand free speech at universities. But in recent weeks I have become increasingly frustrated with the way the debate is evolving. Each side talks over the other, and some of the fundamental questions at the heart of the issue remain unresolved. Campaigners will not succeed in changing minds and changing students’ union policies unless they better understand why anti-free speech policies have developed, and until they offer students alternatives to the banning of offensive speech. Continue reading “Briefing Notes: Free Speech at Universities”
Yesterday evening I left a comment1 on a post by Chris Jarvis on the Bright Green blog. Discussing Peter Tatchell and No Platform, Chris wrote:
Tatchell tacitly endorses the idea that people should not be able to collectively decide the people that they chose to invite to speak at events that they are organising in their own spaces.
No, I replied. In signing the letter, Tatchell is saying that when people chose not to debate people with whom they are disagree, they are making a mistake and harming their own cause. Continue reading “Freedom to Boycott (Part I)”