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We have to say a few more words about freedom of speech, even if it gets slightly silly and doesn't have so much to do with the media as such.
Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who died in a car accident in October 2021, had always been controversial. He lived with police protection and survived several assaults. His drawing Muhammad as a Roundabout Dog (2007) caused the biggest controversies. Depicting profet Muhammed with the body of a dog was not even a particularly original idea (which may have been a contributing reason why Moderna Museet declined to acquire it), when two years before Jyllandsposten had published the twelve cartoons that caused so much acrimony among some Muslims. So, understandably, Vilks' drawing itself has become a symbol for freedom of expression, and those failing to offer their unwavering support criticised for being soft on political extremism. Frans Josef Petersson nails it, this is merely a fight over symbols:
Indeed, the dividing line in the debate doesn’t have to be drawn between the principled right-wing liberal who stands up for freedom of speech, and the leftist coward who doesn’t dare to stand up against political extremism. It can also be drawn between those who believe that art should [be] made a tool in symbolic political struggles, and those who don’t.
https://kunstkritikk.com/watch-out-for-art-hatred/
The case of Charlie Hebdo and the attacks against them is of a similar nature. It is easy enough to argue for the principle of unrestrained free speech even as it offends someone, even as it ridicules some group of people or their sacred symbols. Maybe there are people who don't care for symbols of any kind and are not easily offended, but I think they are a minority. Iconoclasm against symbols of repression is not at all uncommon. Think about the debates about monuments to slave owners in southern US states, or the fate of all those giant Lenin statues after the Soviet union collapsed. For some, the flag of their nation is fetischised as something that must be saluted and absolutely not desecrated, neither put on fire nor shat upon (as did Nathalie Vaxberg in a performance, maybe Israeli laws have changed since but at the time it wasn't a crime). My point is simple: before criticising others for being upset by having their favourite symbol vandalised or made fun of, do some introspection and see if you hold anything so dear that it would upset you were someone to draw a caricature of it or perform obscene acts with it.
There are a few aspects of freedom of expression that need to be disentangled. It is possible to uphold the rights of free speech and still find that a few persons misuse it to say stupid, unnecessarily provokative things, embarrassing mostly for themselves, and that one would very much have prefered the person to shut up. Indeed, freedom of expression must include the right to say things which are bad taste and upsetting; as is often remarked it is useless if it only entails the right to say comfortable things everybody agrees with. It is also possible, kind of, to uphold the rights of free speech in law, yet argue that no-one deserves police protection from the angry mobs if they choose to use their freedom to its fullest extent, or conversely, to argue that anyone who is threatened should have police escort.
Clearly there are pieces of information, as well as disinformation, hate speech, mean-spirited parodies, outright doxing, and so on, that can be spread with a view to harm innocent persons. Slander and threats is not protected speech anywhere insofar as I know. The debate is about whether to ban the ugliest expressions that are still within the law, and where to allow them or not.
Censorship acceptance has been prepared the slippery slope way by introducing measures against something really awful that everyone agrees should be banned, such as child abuse material or propaganda videos by terrorist organisations. Restrictions are introduced against these types of material with promises that the censorship will not be expanded to other categories. However, the way it usually works is that social media posts or other uploaded content needs to be scanned for the material, preferably by automated algorithms lest human moderators be burnt out from overexposure to some of the most disgusting sides of human nature.
Automated content scanning is not fault-free, nor is direct moderation by a human. Content may be taken down for apparently violating some standard even if it doesn't. For example, if the policy is to stop misinformation about vaccinations a heavy-handed ban might catch polemics against the viewpoints of vaccine skeptics simply because these skeptics were quoted.
The dilemma is real. However, more censorship leads to more monitoring and privacy intrusions. When the mechanisms are in place censorship can be expanded to whatever those in control of the information faucets prefer to hide.
Standards vary across the world and change over time. In the 80's there was this invention that a warning label be slapped onto records with "explicit" lyrics. Frank Zappa appeared as witness in an entertaining court process in a case involving Tipper Gore and other defenders of decency.
A news show such as Democracy Now takes great care to bleep out any foul words, or coyly refer to one-letter-words, and always warn the audience against "graphic and disturbing images". The symbolic violence of a pejorative word is censored while real physical violence is shown, often repeating the same clip for several days. Even if I wouldn't call it a double standard it is puzzling. Most of all, the obsession with symbols can be a dangerous distraction from structural problems, although Democracy Now have done their part in explaining structural problems including racism and inequality.
American prudishness sets the standards on the big social media platforms that the rest of the world has to accept (or try to negotiate if not just lock them out), for some it's too much and for others not enough. Some want to free the nipple, others want the hair covered. For some reason this is a debate many journalists like to stoke, but again one cannot escape the suspicion that it is another distraction or that the debate is not framed in the most constructive way.
Left_adjoint recently posted an essay making the point that "free speech absolutists" and "pragmatic antifascists" share a common fear concerning social media: "what happens when dangerous, bad faith, people get their hands on the power of these platforms?" Free speech absolutists worry that if you censor those whose ideas you don't accept, let's say fascists, then the censorship will eventually strike other people who's views differ from the consensus; whereas pragmatists worry more that the ideas the fascists or bigots promote are so dangerous in and of themselves that it is better to stop them than granting them the right of free speech.
gemini://inconsistentuniverse.space/essays/thecentralweb.gmi
The writer sympathises with both positions and argues for a solution that may be unexpected, though maybe less so here on gemini. Centralisation being identified as the root cause of the problems on the web, the proposed solution is decentralisation and self-hosting. That way, presumably, we don't have to deal with the problem of scale, and dealing with one or two abusive individuals in a group of three hundred or less should be manageable. Remember the Dunbar number, the way we evolved to cope with relatively small groups, not mass societies of thousands and millions of anonymous fellow citicens.
I suspect, however, that individuals with nefarious intent could cause a great deal of harm to small online communities before anyone comes to grips with them. Moreover, small scale networks can't replace the big global networks, that's not their purpose, although they might serve as a backup plan of sorts when the big players fall. I do think important information can percolate through these channels, and not any slower than on the web. But as long as only a small minority of the population has access to it, these isolated individuals will not have a great deal of influence in the rest of the world.
Part nine (se above)
Part eleven (internet censorship)
Part twelve (conspiratorial thinking)
The Oxymoronist Media Guide is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
This part first published on October 27, 2021