Penn waxes censorial, FIRE victory in San Antonio, & more!
Bringing you the latest free speech news (9/29/24)
Story of the week
In our hyper-polarized political moment, faculty increasingly find themselves called “unprofessional” for their views on Israel and Gaza. Or on race. Or gender. Or abortion, or immigration, or the police, or COVID-19, or politics more broadly. Often the only thing standing between the angry college administrator — or the disgruntled donor, or the social media mob, or the local legislator coming for that professor’s job — is the time-honored principle of academic freedom.
This week in FIRE’s blog
This is not a test: FIRE opposes FCC’s plan to regulate AI in political ads by Jordan Howell
After more silence from NYU, FIRE files accreditor complaint by
Let your free speech-failing alma mater know: ‘I put my money where my mouth is’ by William Harris
VICTORY: San Antonio agrees to stop hiding comments on government-run animal shelter’s Facebook page by Brennen VanderVeen
But the First Amendment does not allow government agencies to pick and choose which opinions they welcome on their social media pages. When the government opens up a public form — like an online comments section — it must allow all commenters to express themselves freely.
This week in ERI
This week on So to Speak
This week,
host was joined by Jonathan Rauch, senior fellow at Brookings, and , former technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to hash out how, or even whether, social media platforms should moderate “harmful” content.
International free speech stories of the week
First It Was Lynch Mobs. Now Police Kill Pakistanis Accused of Blasphemy (NYT) by Zia ur-Rehman
Apple ‘complicit in Russian censorship by blocking VPNs’ (The Times) by Marc Bennets
Students demand academic freedom after CU bans campus launch of book on military (Prachatai)
Docuseries of the month
I finally got around to watching Peter Jackson’s fantastic “The Beatles: Get Back” documentary. It opens a fascinating window into the relationship of the four musicians and lets viewers see both how playful they could be but also the tension that could sometimes characterize the band’s dynamic. It helps to be knowledgeable about the history of the singular group, but that’s absolutely not a barrier to enjoying this wonderful film. It’s also worth mentioning that the three episodes together run a total of nearly 8 hours, but I would have been happy if it were 18 hours longer!
But isn’t “wokeness” just a broader-based, soul-sucking version of this status game?
Over the past few years, vast numbers of people have traded their relatively sane and moderate prior opinions for extremely fringe concepts (like “defund the police”, multiple genders, “structural racism”, etc.) — for what? Status and belonging.
As a UMD graduate I’m going to push back on FIREs decision about the 10/7 victory dance by SJP. It’s not viewpoint discrimination because they are not allowing any student events that day, and it’s not a free speech issue because it falls under time and place restrictions. There is no constitutional right to have an event on a particular day in a particular place so far as I can see.
And I can’t help but wonder if you’d be feeling differently if a bunch of white supremacists wanted to hold a party on the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder or the Dylan Roof shooting.