Diversity of Thought Matters

14 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Censorship, Identity Politics, Tyranny

Tags

ActBlue Charities, Black Lives Matter, Censorship, George Floyd, Identity Politics, Inequality, Joe Biden, Poverty, racism, STEM, Thomas Sowell, UC-Berkeley, Viewpoint Diversity, ZeroHedge

Here is an extraordinary letter written last week by a UC-Berkeley history professor to his colleagues. I link to a reprint on ZeroHedge because it was easier to read on my phone than the original source. The letter is anonymous, but it’s authenticity has been verified by well-known colleagues of the author outside the UC system, including Thomas Sowell of Stanford. In the first instance, it is a reaction to recent departmental and university communications, but the issues are much broader. The author, a self-described person of color, is embittered by the tyranny of groupthink that has characterized the reaction to George Floyd’s murder, the “soft bigotry of low expectations’ for blacks, and the virtual beatification of a man with a long and brutal rap sheet. The letter is an ominous warning that basic freedoms are at risk, not to mention intellectual integrity. Here are some salient points from the letter:

“I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.“
“The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence.“
“… consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black. … Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries.
“I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.“
“The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is. … No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence.“
“… our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.“
… our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors. … And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species.”
“My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. … The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.“

There is much more in the letter. Some will dismiss the letter based on the author’s decision to remain anonymous, but one can hardly find fault with that in today’s suffocating intellectual environment. There are many others who remain silent because they either fear the consequences, distain the questions, or wish to be polite. My only other reservation about the letter is the author’s failure to acknowledge George Floyd’s efforts to reform, which were obviously in vain. Those efforts and his murder should not elevate Floyd to an heroic status. Nevertheless, his victimhood qualifies him as a legitimate symbol of police brutality, if not racism.

While much of academia has been swallowed whole by vapid identitarianism and scientism over science and rational thought, the history professor has managed to survive in what might be the hottest bed of leftist extremism in the country at UC-Berkeley. I hope the professor has a long and influential career.

Scorning the Language of the Left

12 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Censorship, Leftism, Political Correctness

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Abortion, Boy George, Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, Check Your Privilege, Cisgender, Climate Change, Donald Trump, Gender, Harper's, Hate Speech, Identitarian, Israel, Lefty Lingo, LGBTQ, Lionel Shriver, Microaggession, Patriarchy, Phobic, Privilege, Progressive Speech, Pronouns, Queer, Safe Space, STFU, Sustainability

It’s hard not to ridicule some the language adopted by our lefty friends, and it can be fun! But it’s not just them. We hear it now from employers, schools, and otherwise sensible people too eager to signal their modernity and virtue. Lionel Shriver dissects some of this “Lefty Lingo” in an entertaining piece in Harper’s. It’s funny, but it aroused my contempt for the smugness of the “wokescenti” (a term Shriver attributes too Meghan Daum) and my pity for those “normals” simply desperate to project progressive sophistication.

Here are a few of Shriver’s observations:

“Privilege”: makes you incapable of understanding that which you criticize.

“Whereas a privilege can be acquired through merit—e.g., students with good grades got to go bowling with our teacher in sixth grade—privilege, sans the article, is implicitly unearned and undeserved. The designation neatly dispossesses those so stigmatized of any credit for their achievements while discounting as immaterial those hurdles an individual with a perceived leg up might still have had to overcome (an alcoholic parent, a stutter, even poverty). For privilege is a static state into which you are born, stained by original sin. Just as you can’t earn yourself into privilege, you can’t earn yourself out of it, either. … . it’s intriguing that the P-bomb is most frequently dropped by folks of European heritage, either to convey a posturing humility (“I acknowledge my privilege”) or to demonize the Bad White People, the better to distinguish themselves as the Good White People.

Meanwhile, it isn’t clear what an admission of privilege calls you to do, aside from cower. That tired injunction ‘Check your privilege’ translates simply to ‘S.T.F.U.’—and it’s telling that ‘Shut the fuck up’ is now a sufficiently commonplace imperative to have lodged in text-speak.”

“Cisgender”: “Cis-” is a linguistic shell game whereby the typical case is labelled cis-typical.

“Denoting, say, a woman born a woman who thinks she’s a woman, this freighted neologism deliberately peculiarizes being born a sex and placidly accepting your fate, and even suggests that there’s something a bit passive and conformist about complying with the arbitrary caprices of your mother’s doctor. Moreover, unless a discussion specifically regards transgenderism, in which case we might need to distinguish the rest of the population (‘non-trans’ would do nicely), we don’t really need this word, except as a banner for how gendercool we are. It’s no more necessary than words for ‘a dog that is not a cat,’ a ‘lamppost that is not a fire hydrant,’ or ‘a table that is actually a table.’ Presumably, in order to mark entities that are what they appear to be, we could append ‘cis’ to anything and everything. ‘Cisblue’ would mean blue and not yellow. ‘Cisboring’ would mean genuinely dull, and not secretly entertaining after all.”

“Microaggression“: Anything you say that bothers them, even a little.

“… a perverse concoction, implying that the offense in question is so minuscule as to be invisible to the naked eye, yet also that it’s terribly important. The word cultivates hypersensitivity.”

“_____-phobic”: the typical use of this suffix in identity politics stands “phobia” on its head. To be fair, however, it started with a presumption that people hate that which they fear. Maybe also that they fear and hate that which they don’t care for, but we’ll just focus on fear and hate. For example, there is the notion that men have deep fears about their own sexuality. Thus, the prototypical gay-basher in film is often compensating for his own repressed homosexual longings, you see. And now, the idea is that we always fear “otherness” and probably hate it too. Both assertions are tenuous. At least those narratives are rooted in “fear”, but it’s not quite the same phenomenon as hate, and yet “phobic” seems to have been redefined as odium:

“The ubiquitous ‘transphobic,’ ‘Islamophobic,’ and ‘homophobic’ are also eccentric, in that the reprobates so branded are not really being accused of fearfulness but hatred.”

“LGBTQ“: Lumping all these “types” together can be misleading, as they do not always speak in unison on public policy. But if we must, how about “Let’s Go Back To ‘Queer'”, as Shriver suggests. The LGBs I know don’t seem to mind it as a descriptor, but maybe that’s only when they say it. Not sure about the trannies. There is a great Libertarian economist who is transsexual ( Dierdre McCloskey), and somehow “queer” doesn’t seem quite right for her. Perhaps she’s just a great woman.

“The alphabet soup of ‘LGBTQ’ continues to add letters: LGBTQIAGNC, LGBTQQIP2SAA, or even LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA. A three-year-old bashing the keyboard would produce a more functional shorthand, and we already have a simpler locution: queer.”

“Problematic”, “Troubling” and “Inappropriate”: I’m sure some of what I’ve said above is all three. I must confess I’ve used these terms myself, and they are perfectly good words. It’s just funny when the Left uses them in the following ways.

“Rare instances of left-wing understatement, ‘problematic’ and ‘troubling’ are coyly nonspecific red flags for political transgression that obviate spelling out exactly what sin has been committed (thereby eliding the argument). Similarly, the all-purpose adjectival workhorse ‘inappropriate’ presumes a shared set of social norms that in the throes of the culture wars we conspicuously lack. This euphemistic tsk-tsk projects the prim censure of a mother alarmed that her daughter’s low-cut blouse is too revealing for church. ‘Inappropriate’ is laced with disgust, while once again skipping the argument. By conceit, the appalling nature of the misbehavior at issue is glaringly obvious to everyone, so what’s wrong with it goes without saying.”

Here are a few others among my favorites:

“Patriarchy“: This serves the same function as “privilege” but is directed more specifically at the privilege enjoyed by males. Usually white, heterosexual males. It seeks to preemptively discredit any argument a male might make, and often it is used to discredit Western political and economic thought generally. That’s because so much of it was the product of the patriarchy, don’t you know! And remember, it means that males are simply incapable of understanding the plight of females … and children, let alone queers! Apparently fathers are bad, especially if they’re still straight. Mothers are good, unless they stand with the patriarchy.

“Hate Speech“: This expression contributes nothing to our understanding of speech that is not protected by the Constitution. If anything its use is intended to deny certain kinds of protected speech. Sure, originally it was targeted at such aberrations as racist or anti-gay rhetoric, assuming that always meant “hate”, but even those are protected as long as they stop short of “fighting words”. There are many kinds of opinions that now seem to qualify as “hate speech” in the eyes of the Identitarian Left, even when not truly “hateful”, such as church teachings in disapproval of homosexuality. There is also a tendency to characterize certain policy positions as “hate speech”, such as limits on immigration and opposition to “living wage” laws. Hypersensitivity, once more.

“Sustainability“: What a virtue signal! It’s now a big game to characterize whatever you do as promoting “sustainability”. But let’s get one thing straight: an activity is sustainable only if its benefits exceed its resource costs. That is the outcome sought by voluntary participants in markets, or they do not trade. Benefits and costs “estimated” by government bureaucrats without the benefit of market prices are not reliable guides to sustainability. Nor is Lefty politics a reliable guide to sustainability. Subsidies for favored activities actually undermine that goal.

There are many other Lefty catch phrases and preferred ways of speaking. We didn’t even get to “safe space”, “social justice”, and the pronoun controversy. Shriver closes with some general thoughts on the lefty lingo. I’ll close by quoting one of those points:

“The whole lexicon is of a piece. Its usage advertises that one has bought into a set menu of opinions—about race, gender, climate change, abortion, tax policy, #MeToo, Trump, Brexit, Brett Kavanaugh, probably Israel, and a great deal else. Reflexive resort to this argot therefore implies not that you think the same way as others of your political disposition but that you don’t think. You have ordered the prix fixe; you’re not in the kitchen cooking dinner for yourself.”

Snopes Attacks Satire In Ominous Self-Satirization

12 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by pnoetx in Censorship, Free Speech

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Babylon Bee, Censorship, Chick-Fil-A, Deplatforming, Donald Trump, Facebook, Fact-Checking, Fake News, Kim Lacapria, Linda Sue Grimes, Publix, Satire, Snopes.com, Tea Party, The Onion, The Squad

Snopes.com began as an investigator of urban legends and rumors, exposing myths in an exercise that was useful and often fascinating. More recently, despite its founder’s weak argument to the contrary, Snopes has fully revealed its bias against certain political viewpoints, along with a tendency to avoid reporting some actual facts as facts when it suits itself. Lately this has reached a pathetic level, with the site drawing amused reaction to its confusion over the satiric nature of The Babylon Bee. The Bee is a truly funny site similar to The Onion, but it bills itself as “Christian Satire”. If you find that off-putting or think it means the humor must be cornpone, think again. Of course, there is no doubt that the Bee’s humor often pokes fun at the Left, which probably explains Snopes’ motives.

Snopes itself has not been above a bit of fibbing. Its “political fact-checker”, Kim Lacapria, is a former leftist blogger, known to have maligned the Tea Party as “Teahadists”, a funny mischaracterization of the unquestionably peaceful movement as violent. She’s not exactly a person you’d trust as an impartial arbiter of political “fact”. Linda Sue Grimes wrote an informative article with several prominent examples of bias by Snopes. There have also been reports of sordid personal and financial exploits by one of Snopes’ founders, much of which stands up to scrutiny.

In its latest misadventure in fact-weaving, Snopes’ has charged that the Bee published a story “intended to deceive” readers, and it claimed the Bee had done so in the past. The story was entitled “Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her To Go Back To Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said ‘My Pleasure“. It was inspired by an incident in which the same Georgia lawmaker apparently had too many items in the express checkout at a Publix grocery store. She claimed that an angry white man told her to “go back to where you came from”. However, the Publix clerk with whom she had the altercation, who happens to be Cuban, denies having said any such thing, though he did admit to calling her a bitch. The lawmaker’s allegation seems suspiciously coincidental, having come in the immediate wake of Donald Trump’s controversial tweet that the quartet of federal lawmakers known as “The Squad” should “go back to where they came from”.

Apparently, the humor in the Bee’s article was just a bit too subtle for Snopes, whose “woke” employees have particularly vivid imaginations. The Bee article was funny precisely because it ridiculed those who hear racial “dog whistles” everywhere. The idea that a Chinese employee working a drive-through at Chick-Fil-A would say such a thing is unlikely to say the least. Anyone who has ever visited a Chick-Fil-A knows it. Too many of those with whistles in their ears haven’t had the pleasure.

Has the Bee intended to deceive its readers in the past? Perhaps Snopes was referring to an article entitled “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication“. Snopes went to the trouble of calling that story false and bringing it to Facebook’s attention. Facebook actually issued a warning to the Bee (for which FB later apologized). But here’s the thing, in Grimes’ words:

“Debunking a piece of satire renders the debunker as functionally illiterate, appearing too ignorant to understand that a piece of satire does not function to relay information as a news report would.”

It’s actually much worse than that. If Snopes wants to to assess the objective truth of claims, that’s one thing, but it has drifted into the assessment of literary and authorial intent. That’s ominous for the cause of free discourse, especially to the extent that social media sites rely on Snopes as a filter to deplatform certain voices or silence points of view. Snopes has no business attempting to draw distinctions between satire and “fake news” or any intent to deceive, because it’s bound to get it wrong and already has. They might as well fact-check stand-up comics whose routines might confuse a few dimwitted members of the public, and Snopes just might do so if the comic doesn’t support its preferred political narrative. Snopes’ role is not to protect the unsophisticated from satire, and apparently its fact-checkers feel no compulsion to debunk the satire produced by The Onion, for example. The Bee’s pointed satire often serves the purpose of exposing the Left for its congenital stupidity, but that is anything but an effort to deceive, as much as Snopes might wish it was so.

Behold Our Algorithmic Overlords

18 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by pnoetx in Automation, Censorship, Discrimination, Marketplace of Ideas

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Algorithmic Governance, American Affairs, Antitrust, Behavioral Economics, Bryan Caplan, Claremont Institute, David French, Deplatforming, Facebook, Gleichschaltung, Google, Jonah Goldberg, Joseph Goebbels, Mark Zuckerberg, Matthew D. Crawford, nudge, Peeter Theil, Political Legitimacy, Populism, Private Governance, Twitter, Viewpoint Diversity

A willingness to question authority is healthy, both in private matters and in the public sphere, but having the freedom to do so is even healthier. It facilitates free inquiry, the application of the scientific method, and it lies at the heart of our constitutional system. Voluntary acceptance of authority, and trust in its legitimacy, hinges on our ability to identify its source, the rationale for its actions, and its accountability. Unaccountable authority, on the other hand, cannot be tolerated. It’s the stuff of which tyranny is made.

That’s one linchpin of a great essay by Matthew D. Crawford in American Affairs entitled “Algorithmic Governance and Political Legitimacy“. It’s a lengthy piece that covers lots of ground, and very much worth reading. Or you can read my slightly shorter take on it!

Imagine a world in which all the information you see is selected by algorithm. In addition, your success in the labor market is determined by algorithm. Your college admission and financial aid decisions are determined by algorithm. Credit applications are decisioned by algorithm. The prioritization you are assigned for various health care treatments is determined by algorithm. The list could go on and on, but many of these “use-cases” are already happening to one extent or another.

Blurring Private and Public Governance

Much of what Crawford describes has to do with the way we conduct private transactions and/or private governance. Most governance in free societies, of the kind that touches us day-to-day, is private or self-government, as Crawford calls it. With the advent of giant on-line platforms, algorithms are increasingly an aspect of that governance. Crawford notes the rising concentration of private governmental power within these organizations. While the platforms lack complete monopoly power, they are performing functions that we’d ordinarily be reluctant to grant any public form of government: they curate the information we see, conduct surveillance, exercise control over speech, and even indulge in the “deplatforming” of individuals and organizations when it suits them. Crawford quotes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg:

“In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. . . . We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.”

At the same time, the public sector is increasingly dominated by a large administrative apparatus that is outside of the normal reach of legislative, judicial and even executive checks. Crawford worries about “… the affinities between administrative governance and algorithmic governance“. He emphasizes that neither algorithmic governance on technology platforms nor an algorithmic administrative state are what one could call representative democracy. But whether these powers have been seized or we’ve granted them voluntarily, there are already challenges to their legitimacy. And no wonder! As Crawford says, algorithms are faceless pathways of neural connections that are usually difficult to explain, and their decisions often strike those affected as arbitrary or even nonsensical.

Ministry of Wokeness

Political correctness plays a central part in this story. There is no question that the platforms are setting policies that discriminate against certain viewpoints. But Crawford goes further, asserting that algorithms have a certain bureaucratic logic to elites desiring “cutting edge enforcement of social norms“, i.e., political correctness, or “wokeness”, the term of current fashion.

“First, in the spirit of Václav Havel we might entertain the idea that the institutional workings of political correctness need to be shrouded in peremptory and opaque administrative mechanisms because its power lies precisely in the gap between what people actually think and what one is expected to say. It is in this gap that one has the experience of humiliation, of staying silent, and that is how power is exercised.

But if we put it this way, what we are really saying is not that PC needs administrative enforcement but rather the reverse: the expanding empire of bureaucrats needs PC. The conflicts created by identity politics become occasions to extend administrative authority into previously autonomous domains of activity. …

The incentive to technologize the whole drama enters thus: managers are answerable (sometimes legally) for the conflict that they also feed on. In a corporate setting, especially, some kind of ass‑covering becomes necessary. Judgments made by an algorithm (ideally one supplied by a third-party vendor) are ones that nobody has to take responsibility for. The more contentious the social and political landscape, the bigger the institutional taste for automated decision-making is likely to be.

Political correctness is a regime of institutionalized insecurity, both moral and material. Seemingly solid careers are subject to sudden reversal, along with one’s status as a decent person.”

The Tyranny of Deliberative Democracy

Crawford takes aim at several other trends in intellectual fashion that seem to complement algorithmic governance. One is “deliberative democracy”, an ironically-named theory which holds that with the proper framing conditions, people will ultimately support the “correct” set of policies. Joseph Goebbels couldn’t have put it better. As Crawford explains, the idea is to formalize those conditions so that action can be taken if people do not support the “correct” policies. And if that doesn’t sound like Gleichschaltung (enforcement of conformity), nothing does! This sort of enterprise would require:

“… a cadre of subtle dialecticians working at a meta-level on the formal conditions of thought, nudging the populace through a cognitive framing operation to be conducted beneath the threshold of explicit argument.

… the theory has proved immensely successful. By that I mean the basic assumptions and aspirations it expressed have been institutionalized in elite culture, perhaps nowhere more than at Google, in its capacity as directorate of information. The firm sees itself as ‘definer and defender of the public interest’ …“

Don’t Nudge Me

Another of Crawford’s targets is the growing field of work related to the irrationality of human behavior. This work resulted from the revolutionary development of experimental or behavioral economics, in which various hypotheses are tested regarding choice, risk aversion, an related issues. Crawford offers the following interpretation, which rings true:

“… the more psychologically informed school of behavioral economics … teaches that we need all the help we can get in the form of external ‘nudges’ and cognitive scaffolding if we are to do the rational thing. But the glee and sheer repetition with which this (needed) revision to our understanding of the human person has been trumpeted by journalists and popularizers indicates that it has some moral appeal, quite apart from its intellectual merits. Perhaps it is the old Enlightenment thrill at disabusing human beings of their pretensions to specialness, whether as made in the image of God or as ‘the rational animal.’ The effect of this anti-humanism is to make us more receptive to the work of the nudgers.”

While changes in the framing of certain decisions, such as opt-in versus opt-out rules, can often benefit individuals, most of us would rather not have nudgers cum central planners interfere with too many of our decisions, no matter how poorly they think those decisions approximate rationality. Nudge engineers cannot replicate your personal objectives or know your preference map. Indeed, externally applied nudges might well be intended to serve interests other than your own. If the political equilibrium involves widespread nudging, it is not even clear that the result will be desirable for society: the history of central planning is one of unintended consequences and abject failure. But it’s plausible that this is where the elitist technocrats in Silicon Vally and within the administrative state would like to go with algorithmic governance.

Crawford’s larger thesis is summarized fairly well by the following statements about Google’s plans for the future:

“The ideal being articulated in Mountain View is that we will integrate Google’s services into our lives so effortlessly, and the guiding presence of this beneficent entity in our lives will be so pervasive and unobtrusive, that the boundary between self and Google will blur. The firm will provide a kind of mental scaffold for us, guiding our intentions by shaping our informational context. This is to take the idea of trusteeship and install it in the infrastructure of thought.

Populism is the rejection of this.”

He closes with reflections on the attitudes of the technocratic elite toward those who reject their vision as untrustworthy. The dominance of algorithmic governance is unlikely to help them gain that trust.

What’s to be done?

Crawford seems resigned to the idea that the only way forward is an ongoing struggle for political dominance “to be won and held onto by whatever means necessary“. Like Bryan Caplan, I have always argued that we should eschew anti-trust action against the big tech platforms, largely because we still have a modicum of choice in all of the services they provide. Caplan rejects the populist arguments against the tech “monopolies” and insists that the data collection so widely feared represents a benign phenomenon. And after all, consumers continue to receive a huge surplus from the many free services offered on-line.

But the reality elucidated by Crawford is that the tech firms are much more than private companies. They are political and quasi-governmental entities. Their tentacles reach deeply into our lives and into our institutions, public and private. They are capable of great social influence, and putting their tools in the hands of government (with a monopoly on force), they are capable of exerting social control. They span international boundaries, bringing their technical skills to bear in service to foreign governments. This week Peter Theil stated that Google’s work with the Chinese military was “treasonous”. It was only a matter of time before someone prominent made that charge.

The are no real safeguards against abusive governance by the tech behemoths short of breaking them up or subjecting them to tight regulation, and neither of those is likely to turn out well for users. I would, however, support safeguards on the privacy of customer data from scrutiny by government security agencies for which the platforms might work. Firewalls between their consumer and commercial businesses and government military and intelligence interests would be perfectly fine by me.

The best safeguard of viewpoint diversity and against manipulation is competition. Of course, the seriousness of threats these companies actually face from competitors is open to question. One paradox among many is that the effectiveness of the algorithms used by these companies in delivering services might enhance their appeal to some, even as those algorithms can undermine public trust.

There is an ostensible conflict in the perspective Crawford offers with respect to the social media giants: despite the increasing sophistication of their algorithms, the complaint is really about the motives of human beings who wish to control political debate through those algorithms, or end it once and for all. Jonah Goldberg puts it thusly:

“The recent effort by Google to deny the Claremont Institute the ability to advertise its gala was ridiculous. Facebook’s blocking of Prager University videos was absurd. And I’m glad Facebook apologized.

But the fact that they apologized points to the fact that while many of these platforms clearly have biases — often encoded in bad algorithms — points to the possibility that these behemoths aren’t actually conspiring to ‘silence’ all conservatives. They’re just making boneheaded mistakes based in groupthink, bias, and ignorance.”

David French notes that the best antidote for hypocrisy in the management of user content on social media is to expose it loud and clear, which sets the stage for a “market correction“. And after all, the best competition for any social media platform is real life. Indeed, many users are dropping out of various forms of on-line interaction. Social media companies might be able to retain users and appeal to a broader population if they could demonstrate complete impartiality. French proposes that these companies adopt free speech policies fashioned on the First Amendment itself:

“…rules and regulations restricting speech must be viewpoint-neutral. Harassment, incitement, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress are speech limitations with viewpoint-neutral definitions…”

In other words, the companies must demonstrate that both moderators and algorithms governing user content and interaction are neutral. That is one way for them to regain broad trust. The other crucial ingredient is a government that is steadfast in defending free speech rights and the rights of the platforms to be neutral. Among other things, that means the platforms must retain protection under Section 230 of the Telecommunications Decency Act, which assures their immunity against lawsuits for user content. However, the platforms have had that immunity since quite early in internet history, yet they have developed an aggressive preference for promoting certain viewpoints and suppressing others. The platforms should be content to ensure that their policies and algorithms provide useful tools for users without compromising the free exchange of ideas. Good governance, political legitimacy, and ultimately freedom demand it.

The EU Chokes the Free Flow of Information

14 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by pnoetx in Censorship, Free Speech

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Brexit, Catarina Midoes, Censorship Machines, Cory Doctorow, crony capitalism, Electronic Frontier Foundation, European Copyright Directive, European Union, Facebook, Fair Use, Google, Link Tax, Mark Zuckerberg, Scott Shackford, Stan Adams, Takedown Notice, Warren Meyer

The European Union wants to force me to pay “news sites” for links with “snippets” of content I might quote on this blog, and it wants the WordPress platform to flag and censor anything that might qualify as copyright infringement. The EU also wants search engines like Google and platforms like Facebook to pay for links and “snippets” or else censor them. Most members in the EU Parliament apparently think the best way to regulate information services is to choke off the flow of information. As Warren Meyer says, if you weren’t for Brexit, this single EU action might well convert you (though British statists have their own designs on censorship, Brexit or not). And if you think government involvement won’t ruin the internet, think again.

These restrictive demands are the essence of two controversial provisions of the so-called European Copyright Directive (ECD) passed by the EU Parliament on March 26th. My summary here leaves out lots of detail, but be assured that administering the Directive will require a massive regulatory apparatus:

The Link Tax: If you link to a source and quote a “snippet” of text from that source, you will have to obtain a license from the source, or else the link you use may be blocked. Keep in mind the rule applies despite full attribution to the original source! It remains to be seen how these licenses will be negotiated, but it will almost certainly impose costs on users.

Censorship Machines: Platforms will be required to monitor and assess everything posted for possible copyright infringement. That will require the development of automated “filters” to flag and remove material that might be in violation. That’s a stark change in the treatment of speech on platforms that, heretofore, have not been required to police their users. The responsibility was on those holding copyrights to go after unauthorized use with takedown notices.

Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote an informative position paper on the ECD a week before the vote. He has been an active and articulate opponent of the legislation. Here are some of his comments (his emphasis):

“… text that contains more than a ‘snippet’ from an article are covered by a new form of copyright, and must be licensed and paid by whoever quotes the text …[the ECD] has a very vague definition of ‘news site’ and leaves the definition of ‘snippet’ up to each EU country’s legislature. … no exceptions to protect small and noncommercial services, including Wikipedia but also your personal blog. The draft doesn’t just give news companies the right to charge for links to their articles—it also gives them the right to ban linking to those articles altogether, (where such a link includes a quote from the article) so sites can threaten critics writing about their articles.”

The ECD seems intended as a gift to large news organizations, but it will discourage the free exposure now given to those news sites on the internet. It’s therefore not clear that the ECD will generate much incremental cash flow for news sites or other content providers. However, collecting the new license revenue will come at some expense, so it won’t be of much help to smaller “rights holders”. Therefore, the rule is likely to benefit large platforms and news outlets disproportionately, as they are in a better position to negotiate licenses for the use of material.

As for censorship machines, perhaps rights holders prefer a shift in the burden of policing the use of copyrighted material away from themselves and to the platforms. Some might suggest that it will achieve efficiencies, but that seems unlikely. These filters are costly and are likely to suffer from an excess of false positives. Moreover, the ECD creates risks that demand conservatism on the part of the platforms, so their censorship machines will systematically side against users. There is also a reasonable possibility that filters will be used to control political speech.

All of this is contrary to the doctrine of fair use, as codified and practiced in the U.S. This involves four conditions giving fairly broad latitude to users, described at the last link by Stan Adams:

“The relevant statutory provision (17 U.S.C. § 107) describes four factors to consider when determining whether a particular use of a work is “fair”: the purpose and character of the use; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the work as a whole; and the effect of the use on the potential market for, or value of, the original work.”

Copyright protection has never been absolute nor intended to guarantee perfect exclusivity. Ever lend a book to a friend? Ever heard a cover band perform pop hits? Ever offered a quote to forward a written argument? All of this falls broadly under fair use, and much of it serves to promote the economic interests of rights holders, as opposed to infringing on the market for their original work. The EU, however, has no provisions for fair use in its copyright laws (though EU countries may have limitations and exclusions to copyright protection).

It’s bad enough that Europeans will suffer the consequences of this ill-considered piece of legislation, but can the platforms be counted upon to apply their censorship machines only to select geographies? Adams encapsulates the difficulties the ECD presents to users elsewhere:

“… the rest of the world must rely on private companies to ensure that the EU’s misguided copyright policies do not restrict freedoms enjoyed elsewhere in the world.”

Internet regulations in Europe and the U.S. seem to be following different cronyist disease vectors. The ECD favors large news organizations at the expense of social media platforms, and ultimately consumers and the cause of free speech. The large tech platforms are of course equipped to survive, but perhaps not small ones. In the U.S., we have Mark Zuckerberg begging for regulation of Facebook, including the regulation of speech. That’s a spectacularly bad idea for public policy. It too would disadvantage smaller competitors in the social media space. Ultimately, in Europe and the U.S, these steps will come at the expense of consumers, possibly in higher monetary costs, but definitely in restrained trade in online services and in the marketplace of ideas. So goes the cause of free speech when government has the power to regulate the flow of information.

For further reading on the ECF, see Catarina Midoes: “Is this blog post legal (under new EU copyright law)?” She discusses how different factions view the ECD, gives additional perspective on the controversial provisions, and discusses some potential unintended consequences. Also see Scott Shackford’s “Hide Those Meme’s Folks…”

Preserve the Separation of Google and State

28 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by pnoetx in Antitrust, Censorship, Privacy

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Anti-Competitive, Antitrust, Biased Search Results, China, Do the Right Thing, European Union, FICO Score, Google, Government Monopoly, J.D. Tuccille, Limited government, Liu Hu, Personal Information, Privatized Authoritarianism, Social Credit Score, Surveillance, Unenumerated Rights

Little did we suspect that Google’s collection of personal data and manipulation of search results was mere practice for the job of censoring, curating, and providing behavioral surveillance for repressive governments (more on search manipulation here and here). Actually, some of us have expressed trepidation that our own individual liberty might face such a vulnerability, with Google working in concert with our own government:

“As a firm like Google attains the status of an arm of the state, or multiple states, it could provide a mechanism whereby those authorities could manipulate behavior and coerce their citizens, making the internet into a tool of tyranny rather than liberty. ‘Don’t be evil’ is not much of a guarantee.”

Now, however, the company is working with the government of mainland China to implement a version of its search engine that meets the needs of the Communist regime. J.D. Tuccille calls this “Privatized Authoritarianism”. Search results from Google’s Chinese utility might come back blank, or certain sites might be banned, or at least banned from the first page of results (e.g., Wikipedia, the BBC).

Not only that, the Chinese government is building a system of “social credit scores” for its citizens, essentially a one-number report card like the FICO credit score in the West. This one, however, is driven by more than financial transactions; it’s intended to account for a variety of behaviors including one’s record in criminal and civil matters, anything reflecting one’s “trustworthiness”, general comportment, and alignment with official doctrine. The country is building a gargantuan network of surveillance cameras with visual recognition technology and artificial intelligence that will be used to generate inputs to the social score. And Google’s Chinese search platform?

“… users’ interest in pursuing forbidden paths of inquiry will certainly become part of their permanent record. That’s no joke in a country that’s rapidly modernizing the hoary old mechanisms of the police state with a modern ‘social credit’ system that can effectively place people under house arrest with nary a trench coat in sight.

‘A poor Chinese social credit score can lead to bans from travel, certain schools, luxury hotels, government positions, and even dating apps,’ notes the Brookings Institution. Liu Hu, an investigative journalist, incurred the Chinese government’s wrath for exposing corruption among Communist Party officials. He’s among millions who have been punished with a tanked social credit score that prevents him from easily working or even leaving his hometown.”

Political search activity is one thing. What happens if you search for information on foreign news sources? Certain medications or certain disfavored goods? Movies? Books? Sex? What are the consequences of actually clicking on a particular link in a search result? Could the governments place “honey pots” into search results? Could the system be used by the government to entrap citizens? You bet it could!

The Chinese government is everything a liberal should hate, classical or otherwise. But they do what they do. Google, which takes pride in its “do the right thing” mantra, is most certainly not doing the right thing by contributing to this intrusive effort. And it could happen here in the West. In fact, it is probably already happening here to some degree.

Google was fined $2.7 billion by the European Union in 2017 for biasing its search results in favor of its own services. That ruling was made on traditional antitrust grounds: the bias in search results was judged to have anti-competitive effects on the searched-for service markets. But apart from a direct connection to some other form of commerce, traditional antitrust arguments are difficult to make against a free search engine. The company has a high market share but by no means a monopoly over search results, at least in the U.S.

Still, a partnership between Google and government is potentially troublesome, and more so than run-of-the-mill corporatism, though there is that, too. Many individuals are blasé about managing their privacy on social media, while many others seek a level of anonymity to those outside of their social circle. The latter may be wise, but it won’t do them much good if the government gains access to their on-line behavior. The real issue is ownership of our personal information, and that is an unsettled area of the law. Google acquires that information for free in exchange for providing a free search engine. But can Google or any other company with an online platform legally use your personal data as it likes? No, at least not in principle, but that’s no guarantee that the data won’t be used in ways to which you’d object. If anyone should have rightful monopoly rights over the use of individual data, it’s the individual. But strict data privacy might mean we’ll have to pay to use the search engine.

Government has a monopoly on force, but one can hardly bring antitrust action against government, Google partnership or not. That monopoly on force is why our constitutional rights are so critical. Those rights are primarily unenumerated in the U.S. Constitution, while the powers of the federal government are explicitly limited and enumerated. Individual liberty, including the right to privacy, must be respected and protected by our institutions. That should include data privacy. As the reach of government social programs grows, however, participation requires that personal data is increasingly shared with the government. That’s another good reason to keep government small!

Does Google Dominance Threaten Choice, Free Speech and Privacy?

29 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by pnoetx in Censorship, Free Speech, monopoly

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aaron M. Renn, Alan Reynolds, Alex Tabarrok, Amazon, Anti-Competitive, Antitrust, Bing DuckDuckGo, Censorship, City Journal, Cloudflare, Digital Advertising, Edge Providers, Eric Schmidt, Free Speech, Free State Foundation, Google, ISPs, Julian Assange, Michael Horney, Net Neutrality, Regulatory Capture, rent seeking, Ryan Bourne, Scott Cleland, Scott Shackford, Tyler Cowen, Whole Foods

I’ve long been suspicious of the objectivity of Google search results. If you’re looking for information on a particular issue or candidate for public office, it doesn’t take long to realize that Google searches lean left of center. To some extent, the bias reflects the leftward skew of the news media in general. If you sample material available online from major news organizations on any topic with a political dimension, you’ll get more left than right, and you’ll get very little libertarian. So it’s not just Google. Bing reflects a similar bias. Of course, one learns to craft searches to get the other side of a story, but I use Bing much more than Google, partly because I bridle instinctively at Google’s dominance as a search engine. I’ve also had DuckDuckGo bookmarked for a long time. Lately, my desire to avoid tracking of personal information and searches has made DuckDuckGo more appealing.

Google is not just a large company offering internet services and an operating system: it has the power to control speech and who gets to speak. It is a provider of information services and a collector of information with the power to exert geopolitical influence, and it does. This is brought into sharp relief by Julian Assange in his account of an interview he granted in 2011 to Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt and two of Schmidt’s advisors, and by Assange’s subsequent observations about the global activities of these individuals and Google. Assange gives the strong impression that Google is an arm of the deep state, or perhaps that it engages in a form of unaccountable statecraft, one meant to transcend traditional boundaries of sovereignty. Frankly, I found Assange’s narrative somewhat disturbing.

Monopolization

These concerns are heightened by Google’s market dominance. There is no doubt that Google has the power to control speech, surveil individuals with increasing sophistication, and accumulate troves of personal data. Much the same can be said of Facebook. Certainly users are drawn to the compelling value propositions offered by these firms. The FCC calls them internet “edge providers”, not the traditional meaning of “edge”, as between interconnected internet service providers (ISPs) with different customers. But Google and Facebook are really content providers and, in significant ways, hosting services.

According to Scott Cleland, Google, Facebook, and Amazon collect the bulk of all advertising revenue on the internet. The business is highly concentrated by traditional measures and becoming more concentrated as it grows. In the second quarter of 2017, Google and Facebook controlled 96% of digital advertising growth. They have ownership interests in many of the largest firms that could conceivably offer competition, and they have acquired outright a large number of potential competitors. Cleland asserts that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FTC essentially turned a blind eye to the many acquisitions of nascent competitors by these firms.

The competitive environment has also been influenced by other government actions over the past few years. In particular, the FCC’s net neutrality order in 2015 essentially granted subsidies to “edge providers”, preventing broadband ISPs (so-called “common carriers” under the ruling) from charging differential rates for the high volume of traffic they generate. In addition, the agency ruled that ISPs would be subject to additional privacy restrictions:

“Specifically, broadband Internet providers were prohibited from collecting and using information about a consumer’s browsing history, app usage, or geolocation data without permission—all of which edge providers such as Google or Facebook are free to collect under FTC policies.

As Michael Horney noted in an earlier Free State Foundation Perspectives release, these restrictions create barriers for ISPs to compete in digital advertising markets. With access to consumer information, companies can provide more targeted advertising, ads that are more likely to be relevant to the consumer and therefore more valuable to the advertiser. The opt-in requirement means that ISPs will have access to less information about customers than Google, Facebook, and other edge providers that fall under the FTC’s purview—meaning ISPs cannot serve advertisers as effectively as the edge providers with whom they compete.”

Furthermore, there are allegations that Google played a role in convincing Facebook to drop Bing searches on its platform, and that Google in turn quietly deemphasized its social media presence. There is no definitive evidence that Google and Facebook have colluded, but the record is curious.

Regulation and Antitrust

Should firms like Google, Facebook, and other large internet platforms be regulated or subjected to more stringent review of past and proposed acquisitions? These companies already have great influence on the public sector. The regulatory solution is often comfortable for the regulated firm, which submits to complex rules with which compliance is difficult for smaller competitors. Thus, the regulated firm wins a more secure market position and a less risky flow of profit. The firm also gains more public sector influence through its frequent dealings with regulatory authorities.

Ryan Bourne argues that “There Is No Justification for Regulating Online Giants as If They Were Public Utilities“. He notes that these firms are not natural monopolies, despite their market positions and the existence of strong network externalities. It is true that they generally operate in contested markets, despite the dominance of a just few firms. Furthermore, it would be difficult to argue that these companies over-charge for their services in any way suggestive of monopoly behavior. Most of their online services are free or very cheap to users.

But anti-competitive behavior can be subtle. There are numerous ways it can manifest against consumers, developers, advertisers, and even political philosophies and those who espouse them. In fact, the edge providers do manage to extract something of value: data, intelligence and control. As mentioned earlier, their many acquisitions suggest an attempt to snuff out potential competition. More stringent review of proposed combinations and their competitive impact is a course of action that Cleland and others advocate. While I generally support a free market in corporate control, many of Google’s acquisitions were firms enjoying growth rates one could hardly attribute to mismanagement or any failure to maximize value. Those combinations expanded Google’s offerings, certainly, but they also took out potential competition. However, there is no bright line to indicate when combinations of this kind are not in the public interest.

Antitrust action is no stranger to Google: In June, the European Union fined the company $2.7 billion for allegedly steering online shoppers toward its own shopping platform. Google faces continuing scrutiny of its search results by the EU, and the EU has other investigations of anticompetitive behavior underway against both Google and Facebook.

It’s also worth noting that antitrust has significant downsides: it is costly and disruptive, not only for the firms involved, but for their customers and taxpayers. Alan Reynolds has a cautionary take on the prospect of antitrust action against Amazon. Antitrust is a big business in and of itself, offering tremendous rent-seeking benefits to a host of attorneys, economists, accountants and variety of other technical specialists. As Reynolds says:

“Politics aside, the question ‘Is Amazon getting too Big?’ should have nothing to do with antitrust, which is supposedly about preventing monopolies from charging high prices. Surely no sane person would dare accuse Amazon of monopoly or high prices.“

Meanwhile, the proposed Amazon-Whole Foods combination was approved by the FTC and the deal closed Monday.

Speech, Again

Ordinarily, my views on “speech control” would be aligned with those of Scott Shackford, who defends the right of private companies to restrict speech that occurs on their platforms. But Alex Tabbarok offers a thoughtful qualification in asking whether Google and Apple should have banned Gab:

“I have no problem with Twitter or Facebook policing their sites for content they find objectionable, such as pornography or hate speech, even though these are permitted under the First Amendment. A free market in news doesn’t mean that every newspaper must cover every story. A free market in news means free entry. But free entry is exactly what is now at stake. Gab was created, in part, to combat what was seen as Facebook’s bias against conservative news and views. If Gab or services like cannot be accessed via the big platforms that is a significant barrier to entry.

When Facebook and Twitter regulate what can be said on their platforms and Google and Apple regulate who can provide a platform, we have a big problem. It’s as if the NYTimes and the Washington Post were the only major newspapers and the government regulated who could own a printing press.

In a pure libertarian world, I’d be inclined to say that Google and Apple can also police whom they allow on their platforms. But we live in a world in which Google and Apple are bound up with and in some ways beholden to the government. I worry when a lot of news travels through a handful of choke points.“

This point is amplified by Aaron M. Renn in City Journal:

“The mobile-Internet business is built on spectrum licenses granted by the federal government. Given the monopoly power that Apple and Google possess in the mobile sphere as corporate gatekeepers, First Amendment freedoms face serious challenges in the current environment. Perhaps it is time that spectrum licenses to mobile-phone companies be conditioned on their recipients providing freedoms for customers to use the apps of their choice.“

That sort of condition requires ongoing monitoring and enforcement, but the intervention is unlikely to stop there. Once the platforms are treated as common property there will be additional pressure to treat their owners as public stewards, answerable to regulators on a variety of issues in exchange for a de facto grant of monopoly.

Tyler Cowen’s reaction to the issue of private, “voluntary censorship” online is a resounding “meh”. While he makes certain qualifications, he does not believe it’s a significant issue. His perspective is worth considering:

“It remains the case that the most significant voluntary censorship issues occur every day in mainstream non-internet society, including what gets on TV, which books are promoted by major publishers, who can rent out the best physical venues, and what gets taught at Harvard or for that matter in high school.“

Cowen recognizes the potential for censorship to become a serious problem, particularly with respect to so-called “chokepoint” services like Cloudflare:

“They can in essence kick you off the entire internet through a single human decision not to offer the right services. …so far all they have done is kick off one Nazi group. Still, I think we should reexamine the overall architecture of the internet with this kind of censorship power in mind as a potential problem. And note this: the main problem with those choke points probably has more to do with national security and the ease of wrecking social coordination, not censorship. Still, this whole issue should receive much more attention and I certainly would consider serious changes to the status quo.“

There are no easy answers.

Conclusions

The so-called edge providers pose certain threats to individuals, both as internet users and as free citizens: the potential for anti-competitive behavior, eventually manifesting in higher prices and restricted choice; tightening reins on speech and free expression; and compromised privacy. All three have been a reality to one extent or another. As a firm like Google attains the status of an arm of the state, or multiple states, it could provide a mechanism whereby those authorities could manipulate behavior and coerce their citizens, making the internet into a tool of tyranny rather than liberty. “Don’t be evil” is not much of a guarantee.

What can be done? The FCC’s has already voted to reverse its net neutrality order, and that is a big step; dismantling the one-sided rules surrounding the ISPs handling of consumer data would also help, freeing some powerful firms that might be able to compete for “edge” business. I am skeptical that regulation of edge providers is an effective or wise solution, as it would not achieve competitive outcomes and it would rely on the competence and motives of government officials to protect users from the aforementioned threats to their personal sovereignty. Antitrust action may be appropriate when anti-competitive actions can be proven, but it is a rent-seeking enterprise of its own, and it is often a questionable remedy to the ills caused by market concentration. We have a more intractable problem if access cannot be obtained for particular content otherwise protected by the First Amendment. Essentially, Cowen’s suggestion is to rethink the internet, which might be the best advice for now.

Ultimately, active consumer sovereignty is the best solution to the dominance of firms like Google and Facebook. There are other search engines and there are other online communities. Users must take steps to protect their privacy online. If they value their privacy, they should seek out and utilize competitive services that protect it. Finally, perhaps consumers should consider a recalibration of their economic and social practices. They may find surprising benefits from reducing their dependence on internet services, instead availing themselves of the variety of shopping and social experiences that still exist in the physical world around us. That’s the ultimate competition to the content offered by edge providers.

What Part of “Free Speech” Did You Not Understand?

27 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by pnoetx in Censorship, Free Speech

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Antifa, Censorship, Eugene Volokh, Fighting Words, First Amendment, Free Speech, Harry A. Blackmun, Hate Speech, Imminent Lawless Action, John Daniel Davidson, New York University, prior restraint doctrine, Reason.com, Robby Soave, The Federalist, Ulrich Baer

The left has adopted an absurdly expansive definition of “hate speech”, and they’d like you to believe that “hate speech” is unconstitutional. Their objective is to establish a platform from which they can ostracize and ultimately censor political opponents on a variety of policy issues, mixed with the pretense of a moral high ground. The constitutional claim is legal nonsense, of course. To be fair, the moral claim may depend on the issue.

John Daniel Davidson writes in The Federalist of the distinction between protected and unprotected speech in constitutional law. The primary exception to protected speech has to do with the use of “fighting words”. Davidson describes one Supreme Court interpretation of fighting words as “a face-to-face insult directed at a specific person for the purpose of provoking a fight.” Obviously threats would fall into the same category, but only to the extent that they imply “imminent lawless action”, according to a major precedent. As such, there is a distinction between fighting words versus speech that is critical, discriminatory, or even hateful, all of which are protected.

Hate speech, on the other hand, has no accepted legal definition. In law, it has not been specifically linked to speech offensive to protected groups under employment, fair housing, hate crime or any other legislation. If we are to accept the parlance of the left, it seems to cover almost anything over which one might take offense. However, unless it qualifies as fighting words, it is protected speech.

The amorphous character of hate speech, as a concept, makes it an ideal vehicle for censoring political opponents, and that makes it extremely dangerous to the workings of a free society. Any issue of public concern has more than one side, and any policy solution will usually create winners and losers. Sometimes the alleged winners and losers are merely ostensible winners and losers, as dynamic policy effects or “unexpected consequences” often change the outcomes. Advocacy for one solution or another seldom qualifies as hate toward those presumed to be losers by one side in a debate, let alone a threat of violence. Yet we often hear that harm is done by the mere expression of opinion. Here is Davidson:

“By hate speech, they mean ideas and opinions that run afoul of progressive pieties. Do you believe abortion is the taking of human life? That’s hate speech. Think transgenderism is a form of mental illness? Hate speech. Concerned about illegal immigration? Believe in the right to bear arms? Support President Donald Trump? All hate speech.“

Do you support the minimum wage? Do you oppose national reparation payments to African Americans? Do you support health care reform? Welfare reform? Rollbacks in certain environmental regulations? Smaller government? You just might be a hater, according to this way of thinking!

The following statement appears in a recent proposal on free speech. The proposal was recommended as policy by an ad hoc committee created by the administration of a state university:

“… Nor does freedom of expression create a privilege to engage in discrimination involving unwelcome verbal, written, or physical conduct directed at a particular individual or group of individuals on the basis of actual or perceived status, or affiliation within a protected status, and so severe or pervasive that it creates an intimidating or hostile environment that interferes with an individual’s employment, education, academic environment, or participation in the University’s programs or activities.“

This is an obvious departure from the constitutional meaning of free expression or any legal precedent.

And here is Ulrich Baer, who is New York University‘s vice provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity (and professor of comparative literature), in an opinion piece this week in the New York Times:

“The recent student demonstrations [against certain visiting speakers] should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship. … Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good. …

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community.“

How’s that for logical contortion? Silencing speakers is an effort to protect free speech! As noted by Robby Soave in on Reason.com, “... free speech is not a public good. It is an individual right.” This cannot be compromised by the left’s endlessly flexible conceptualization of “hate speech”, which can mean almost any opinion with which they disagree. Likewise, to “invalidate the humanity of some people” is a dangerously subjective standard. Mr. Baer is incorrect in his assertion that speakers must balance the “inherent” value of their views with an obligation to be “inclusive”. The only obligation is not to threaten or incite “imminent lawless action”. Otherwise, freedom of speech is a natural and constitutionally unfettered right to express oneself. Nothing could be more empowering!

Note that the constitution specifically prohibits the government from interfering with free speech. That includes any public institution such as state universities. Private parties, however, are free to restrict speech on their own property or platform. For example, a private college can legally restrict speech on its property and within its facilities. The owner of a social media platform can legally restrict the speech used there as well.

Howard Dean, a prominent if somewhat hapless member of the democrat establishment, recently tweeted this bit of misinformation: “Hate speech is not protected by the first amendment.” To this, Dean later added some mischaracterizations of Supreme Court decisions, prompting legal scholar Eugene Volokh to explain the facts. Volokh cites a number of decisions upholding a liberal view of free speech rights (and I do not use the word liberal lightly). Volokh also cites the “prior restraint doctrine”:

“The government generally may not exclude speakers — even in government-owned ‘limited public forums’ — because of a concern that the speakers might violate the rules if they spoke.“

If a speaker violates the law by engaging in threats or inciting violence, it is up to law enforcement to step in, ex post, just as they should when antifa protestors show their fascist colors through violent efforts to silence speakers. Volokh quotes from an opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Backmun:

“… a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse rights of speech after they break the law than to throttle them and all others beforehand. It is always difficult to know in advance what an individual will say, and the line between legitimate and illegitimate speech is often so finely drawn that the risks of freewheeling censorship are formidable.”

Who Brought the Melting Pot To the Pow Wow?

11 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by pnoetx in Censorship, Free Speech

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bollywood, Censorship, Chinese New Year, Cinco de Mayo, Cultural Appropriation, Cultural Exchange, Delta Blues, Eugene Volokh, Exclusivity, Fighting Words, Flower Drum Song, Hate Speech, Huckleberry Finn, Intellectual Property, Jewish Community Center, Mardi Gras Indians, Moon Festival, Native Americans, Neverland, Peter Pan, Pow Wow, Rivalrous goods, Separate But Equal, The Grateful Dead, The King and I, Ugg-a-Wugg, Washington Redskins

Chris Rock

I ran into a Chinese colleague in a break room at work and mentioned that I’d seen her engaged in a “pow wow” with a senior staffer, and she asked, “Pow wow?” I tried to explain the Native American origins of the term for a gathering or meeting, and I think she liked that, but I joked that my use of the term might represent “cultural appropriation” (CA). A second colleague who’d entered the kitchen glanced at me with a raised eyebrow. Knowing them well, I’m not sure either of them knew what I meant. As it happens, describing the pow wow as a celebration is more accurate, so my use of the term to describe a meeting was too narrow. In fact, in modern usage by Native Americans, it is a celebration of culture, but meetings take place at these events as well.

CA occurs when aspects of one culture are used in some way by others. It is criticized for trivializing the traditions or symbols of the source culture or because it robs it’s members of intellectual property (IP) rights. I can think of examples of cultural trivialization, such as the “Ugg-a-Wugg” song from the musical Peter Pan. Such complaints strike me as hyper-sensitive, but perhaps the umbrage taken by Native Americans to this song is understandable. Nevertheless, I stand more strongly behind the right of free expression. This song, which is rarely performed today out of respect for Native Americans, was part of a larger Neverland fantasy that has great appeal. And after all, the Indians were good guys in the story!

Works such as Peter Pan and Huckleberry Finn are historical and reflect the times in which they were created. As such, some argue that they should be left in their original form. And I agree, in general. However, in the case of a musical that is performed publicly again and again by various professional and amateur groups, I am sympathetic to the notion that potentially offensive elements can be excised if the changes do not do great damage to the story. If it is not in the public domain, the owners of the story’s rights have the final say.

The IP argument is flawed to the extent that IP arguments are always flawed: ideas are non-rivalrous and non-exclusive. Moreover, even IP rights recognized under U.S. law are limited to individual “property”; they do not extend to the traditions and symbols of various cultures that coexist in society.

Another area emphasized by critics of CA has to do with historical grievances against a dominant culture, often without regard to current circumstances. Apparently, such grievances place the minority culture off-limits. Under this view, cultural exchange is fundamentally bad, which is fundamentally absurd. It has the faint ring of “separate but equal” — paradoxical given the avowed desire among critics of CA for an end to racial and social division.

While European colonialists certainly exploited the native inhabitants in many lands, today’s liberal order in the West is attractive to members of different cultures around the globe.They adopt similar institutions and practices at home, and some of them bring their cultures to us. We all gain in the exchange.

Strong condemnation of CA has been all the rage on college campuses over the past few years (see several of the links here). It reflects a hyper-sensitivity about the normal mixing of cultures. Cultural exchange tends to elevate appealing aspects of all cultures into the larger society. Should we really condemn any of the following harmless activities?

Yoga classes at the Jewish Community Center?
Cinco de Mayo celebrations by non-Mexicans?
Caucasians celebrating the Chinese New Year or Moon Festival?
St. Patrick’s Day celebrations by non-Irish, non-Catholics?
Flower Drum Song or The King and I?
Caucasians playing Delta Blues?
African American Mardi Gras Indians?
Caucasians watching Bollywood movies?
The Grateful Dead at the Pyramids?
Caucasians cooking “ethnic” foods?

I grant that respect dictates avoiding use of another group’s sacred symbols. Beyond that, it is difficult to conceive of any objections to activities like those above. They are all forms of cultural cross-pollination, even if they seem to trivialize in some cases. This sometimes involves cultural interpretation by “others” that might not be accurate, but that is always the case when cultures mix. People incorporate or adapt features of other cultures that they enjoy, which is hardly a sin.

Curious about pow wow, I found the following qualification in the Wikipedia entry for pow-wow:

“…the term has also been used by non-Natives to describe any gathering of Native Americans, or to refer to any type of meeting among non-Natives (such as military personnel). However, such use may be viewed as cultural appropriation, and disrespectful to Native peoples.“

Well, well, well! Pow wow is used in conversational english to lend an air of informality or lightness to certain proceedings. It may simultaneously convey a serious diplomatic purpose and an opportunity to resove differences. Sometimes, non-Natives might even use the term to sound clever, like using the French term soirée rather than “party”. Or perhaps they are amused by the image of corporate managers seated akimbo around a camp fire, passing a peace pipe. Or any pipe. Trivial? Maybe, but if that possibility outrages Native Americans, it strikes me as an over-reaction. After all, the joke is partly on “the suits”, and there isn’t much the Indians can do about it under the law.

I have always been fascinated by American Indian history and culture. I do not use the term pow-wow in disrespect. I use it because it’s colorful and I like it. The cross-pollination of language and culture is borne out of the utility of a particular word or practice. It can hardly be bad that a few shards of Native American language and culture are incorporated into broader American society.

My sister has a beautiful scarf bearing the profile of an American Indian in full head dress. She has always had an interest in the art and culture of the American southwest, which has benefitted from the heavy influence of Indians who are native to that region. So it was unsurprising to me that she would be drawn to the beauty of the scarf. It is a work of art and she does not wear it out of disrespect for American Indians.

Certain acts of CA are thought to intersect with racism, however. How about the Washington Redskins football team name? The team logo and merchandise use Native American symbols. The same goes for the Atlanta Braves and other teams. However, the term Redskin almost certainly has overtly racist origins as a description of an enemy thought to be savage, much as “Nips” was a derogative used by Allied soldiers in World War II as a term for the Japanese. Defenders of the team claim that “Redskin” is not meant to trivialize or denigrate Native Americans, but instead to recognize their honor and ferocity in battle. The team owner and many fans insist that the tradition of the team name should continue in tribute to American Indians. Nevertheless, the name is understandably objectionable to Native Americans today as a crude description of their genealogy. My friend John Crawford tells me of a proposal to change the team logo to a red-skinned potato, but apparently the idea was rejected by the U.S. Patent Office.

In all of these matters, free speech outweighs all other considerations. While cultural appropriation is sometimes regarded with hostility, that does not give the aggrieved special rights to prevent it. The same is true of racism, however regrettable it is. Even so-called hate speech is protected under the U.S. Constitution, short of “fighting words”. Critics of cultural appropriation can seek to educate, influence, boycott and to shame those believed to have run afoul of their standards. In most cases, however, I think the best advice is to chill out.

Social Media Content Control

06 Friday May 2016

Posted by pnoetx in Censorship, Marketplace of Ideas

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Blacklisting, Block & Report Spam, Censorship, Community Standards, Content Neutrality, Content Standards, Gizmodo, Marketplace of ideas, Mobbing, News Curators, Social Media

Do social media and networking platforms unfairly restrict speech and content by users expressing certain political views? Is the “marketplace of ideas” subject to entry barriers imposed by the platforms themselves? Twitter has been in the news recently for a “Block & Report Spam” feature whereby complaints can trigger a suspension. Some claim that leftists are gaming the system to take down certain posters. Twitter claims to never filter or moderate content proactively, but the system seems to invite abuse by activists at either end of the political spectrum.

Facebook admits that it attempts to enforce a set of “community standards” that cover the general areas of safety, respect (covering hate speech and nudity), security, and intellectual property. There is ample evidence, however, that enforcement of these standards is “arbitrary and capricious“. Examples range from inconsistent treatment of “Death to Israel” posts, images of buttocks, sculptures or drawings of body parts vs. actual body parts, and a variety of gay-themed images. These cases and many others are likely a consequence of different moderators responding to complaints differently in attempts to interpret and enforce rules that are vague by necessity. In addition, decisions to censor or suspend users are sometimes reversed by committee at higher levels, only to be made again later. And there have been allegations that content from advertisers is treated with a “lighter touch” than from non-advertisers. Perhaps the organization is simply trying to find a fair way to moderate the complicated social thicket, but the effort seems largely misplaced. A broader policy of content neutrality and allowing users to censor their feeds for themselves, as they are empowered to do, would avoid many of the inconsistencies.

Facebook also admits to employing contractors as “news curators”. This, and the mysterious disappearance of certain “trending topics” having a conservative bent, have led to strong complaints of blacklisting and censorship. The curators’ instructions from Facebook are described by Gizmodo:

“They were also told to select articles from a list of preferred media outlets that included sites like the New York Times, Time, Variety, and other traditional outlets. They would regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart, but were never explicitly told to suppress those outlets…. News curators also have the power to “deactivate” (or blacklist) a trending topic—a power that those we spoke to exercised on a daily basis. A topic was often blacklisted if it didn’t have at least three traditional news sources covering it, but otherwise the protocol was murky—meaning a curator could ostensibly blacklist a topic without a particularly good reason for doing so.“

This has the potential to create a bias in favor of certain viewpoints. If a trending topic comes from a source or involves a viewpoint that is not in favor, “news curation” amounts to a distasteful cover for outright political censorship. The Facebook system is also vulnerable to the sort of “mobbing” by activists that has been problematic for Twitter. Some of the complaints against unfair treatment by Facebook undoubtedly have merit. Such bias could have an influence sufficiently great to alter election outcomes.

Some forms of censorship on these platforms may be justified, such as preventing threats, abuse or harassment. As well, the platforms are required to comply with laws that are more restrictive in certain countries. Nevertheless, whatever the content standards, and whatever political bias might be created, the platforms are operated by private entities. They can do whatever they want, as much as anyone might hate it. The accusers are entitled to complain, of course, but they should bear in mind that these platforms are not exactly an open marketplace or a public square, however tempting it is to think of them that way. They could be open and free, given a more enlightened approach by the organizations that run them, but as things stand they are not. Positive action remains an option for those who object: agitate, package your content more carefully, or get off the platform and find an on-line community to your liking.

Sacred Cow Chips

Category Archives: Censorship

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