Language police impeding free speech

Earlier this year, a video surfaced in which John Hickenlooper once made an innocuous reference to galley slaves. “If I was to describe a scheduler, a political scheduler,” he said, “imagine an ancient slave ship with the guy with the whip, and you’re rowing — we elected officials are the ones that are rowing.”

This was too much for Denver school board member and grievance monger Tay Anderson, who instantly pounced. “[R]eferencing my ancestors pain of being brought over here in chains to a political scheduler is utterly disgusting,” he said, adding that Hickenlooper had “some explaining to do.”

Rather than explain himself, Hickenlooper chose to prostrate himself. He offered his “deepest apologies,” he said, because his comments had been “painful.”

No, they weren’t — and they weren’t a reference to Anderson’s ancestors, either. Hickenlooper’s use of the word “ancient” signaled he was thinking of the rowers (another clue) sometimes pressed into service in the Greek or Roman navies in the manner of the fictional Ben Hur — who by the way was a Jew from Jerusalem.

Or maybe Hickenlooper was thinking of the later Barbary pirates, whose galley slaves were often European. Whatever. His analogy was merely a riff on the familiar expression “slave driver” — a term of wild exaggeration that literally no one who isn’t on an ideological warpath takes as a serious comparison with historical slavery.

Or consider the experience of University of Colorado President Mark Kennedy, who recently provoked similar outrage when he warned the school’s faculty council that “on-campus is declining and online is growing. If we don’t get online right… we have a trail of tears in front of us.”

The historical Trail of Tears involved the forced relocation of perhaps 100,000 Indians from a variety of Eastern tribes to territory farther west, mostly in the 1830s. It was an exercise in cruel greed, and thousands died. A university president would be well advised to steer clear of a casual reference.

Still, the idea that his comment represented “ignorance of these atrocities at best, and willful verbal harm at worst,” as the school’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies proclaimed, is rubbish. As is the idea that they reveal the need for “systemic efforts at the University of Colorado to counter such damaging conceptions of Indigenous history and present issues.”

What damaging conceptions? Kennedy offered a lame analogy involving events of nearly 200 years ago. He no more undermined a proper understanding of indigenous history than Hickenlooper minimized the brutality of slavery.

But of course Kennedy apologized — and for good measure had the quote scrubbed from the university’s account of the meeting.

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Censorship is the greatest ‘online harm’

The UK government is planning a shocking clampdown on free speech online.

As the prime minister this week extended his Covid powers, it was hard to recall the time, not even a year ago, when an election victory heralded the promise of our freedoms being renewed. But while attention has focused on lockdown, the government has been planning another authoritarian clampdown for next year. This will be a programme of internet censorship unequalled in any democracy.

The Online Harms White Paper was created largely by staff in the Home Office, and the government now plans an internet censorship bill of the same name next year. As our Free Speech Union briefing explains, the government’s plans are a profound threat to our freedom of speech.

There are, first, some very strange things about the White Paper. For one, it never defines the problem it claims to deal with: ‘harm’. The charitable explanation is lack of professionalism. Another is that the authors want to outsource the definition to a promised future regulator, meaning to the byzantine interest groups that will demand a wide and ever-expanding definition.

Indeed, the document hints at this, saying that ‘organisations suggested specific harms, for example misogyny’, while listing harmful content that is ‘neither exhaustive nor fixed’. This is a licence to define almost anything as harm. Although the plans also include action against genuine harms, like terrorist activity or child abuse, this could be achieved with a much simpler bill which would not need to infringe freedom of speech.

Elsewhere, its prohibited ‘harms’ include nebulous ‘unacceptable content and activity’, because ‘beyond illegal activity, other behaviour online also causes harm’ (which might even happen ‘indirectly’). White Papers typically address questions of law, but our government seeks to prevent ‘legal harms’, which a regulator will define. This means a quango will compel online companies to prevent users saying things that are legal, a grave infringement on free speech.

The government also wants companies to take ‘reasonable steps’ so that users ‘will not receive recommendations to hateful or inappropriate content’, but it never defines ‘hateful’ or ‘inappropriate’. This includes material promoting self-harm, but it will see lawful content removed.

Perhaps most troubling, the government’s plans contain similarities to aspects of China’s internet surveillance programme. China’s government pushes online influencers to counter ‘disinformation’ by promoting supposedly authoritative content: ours will urge ‘Adult [internet] users [to] act in an acceptable manner’ and force companies to promote ‘authoritative news sources’. China censors ‘rumours’ that might cause ‘social harms’; our government will tackle ‘harmful’ ‘disinformation’, making ‘content… disputed by reputable fact-checking services less visible to users’. This contradicts our government’s claim that ‘the regulator will not be responsible for policing truth and accuracy online’.

This year, the Free Speech Union will outline how a simpler bill can prevent genuine online harms without suppressing freedom of speech. This government is pushing a project created by a Theresa May-era bureaucracy which lost faith in the free exchange of ideas on which democratic society depends. It should drop its internet censorship bill.

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