Recently in Bristol, the rights and liberties of LGBT+ communities have collided with the traditions and beliefs of, predominantly, faith communities. On social media the narrative has quickly become polarised. At a time when strong leadership feels critical yet absent, politicians and programmers point to one another to take responsibility for regulation. The discourse continues to play out in the everyday and communities who look to statutory and sector agencies for clarity have been left confused, frustrated and wanting. Using scenarios that have arisen within our inner-city community arts centre as case studies, this chapter explores the everyday challenges of intersectionality approaches in defining and defending free speech. Drawing on influences including programmer and activist Richard Stallman’s distinction between ‘free’ and ‘open’, we seek to establish a set of ‘Free Speech Principles’ to assist in navigating intersectional contradictions of the Equality Act 2010. Analysing examples of ‘free speech’ within today’s political and social media landscape and comparing these to historical examples of civil rights movements that have disrupted traditional power structures, it asks if today’s weaponisation of free speech is free at all and explores what might be missing of the human among the law and the algorithm. Finally, it refines the principles of our programmers and lawmakers to provide greater clarity for everyday discourse, hoping to develop a simple toolkit for clarifying how organisations and programmers might respond in order to uphold our collective freedom of expression.
This introduction sets out some of the key critical questions that will be explored in this book, and offers a framing for the broader debate, which focuses on the balancing of free speech rights and the ways in which free speech rights are increasingly invoked to try to defend speech or behaviour that should be critiqued or challenged. The introduction first examines the legal and constitutional right to ‘free speech’, as defended in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the defence of which is critical to democracy and free political expression around the world. It then explores the ways in which ‘freedom of speech’ has often taken on a blurrier, more nebulous meaning, which is as much to do with asserting freedom from criticism as it is with defending the right to freedom from censorship by governments. It then introduces some of the key spaces and concepts around which freedom of speech arguments have coalesced – notably ‘safe spaces’ and ‘no-platforming’ vs. ideas about ‘hate speech’ and ‘political correctness’. The introduction finishes with a more personal reflection on the questions around free speech: who gets to make these claims, whose rights are defended by institutions, and what sort of speech is tolerated within the bounds of free speech and what is seen as off limits.
Many of the recent claims of silencing and censorship from the political right have actually centred on the legitimacy of boycotting. Calls for boycotts, whether effective or not, are frequently derided as attempts to restrict free speech. Yet in America at least, boycotts are protected under the First Amendment, the right to boycott being itself a right to free speech. For those who make such claims of social censorship, often under the mantle of ‘classical liberalism’ or libertarianism, this poses a rather obvious conundrum: is boycotting an example of or a hindrance to ‘free speech’. But the problem is not a new one. The history of the tactic reveals that the befuddlement of the modern ‘classical liberal’ has its historical antecedents. The purpose of this chapter is to compare the reaction to the boycott among late nineteenth-century Anglo-American liberals, and their struggle to condemn such free non-violent actions within their political framework, with the responses of modern-day conservative and libertarian voices. Both are marked by incomprehension and inconsistency, and, just as in the late nineteenth century, contemporary critics often turn to the accusation of ‘irrationality’. Then as now, such claims feed a deep hostility towards the idea of democracy itself.
This chapter examines the use of irony and nonsense in the contemporary political battlefield, from Twitter and Netflix comedy specials to the self-satirising turn of broadsheet journalism. When faced with the conflicting desires of wanting to say something that we suspect will be received as problematic while also escaping censure for it, we can choose not to say it, to say it straight and take the consequences, or to try to fudge it: to say and not-say it. The problem with the latter option is that the contradiction it entails will run the risk of being noticed. One way of navigating contradictory statements is to frame them within irony: we often find humour in paradox, and by asserting something as a joke, or more subtly couching it in an ironic tone, so that you can never be entirely sure what is meant within that style of discourse, the intention behind speech is blurred. A Trumpian technique entails going further still, embracing nonsense in a series of apparently conflicting propositions. Many commentators currently bemoan the ‘postmodernism’ that apparently besets public discourse, seeking to negate and immolate positive assertions about the world. But there is nothing intrinsically postmodern, or even new, about any of this. Since Petronius, Nero’s aesthetic advisor, wrote the Satyricon bemoaning the cultural downfall of Rome while simultaneously revelling in it, playing with illogic and the surreal has been a literary tactic common to times of change.
With a particular focus on the origins of Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park in the mid-nineteenth century, this chapter describes how individuals first carved out this enduring space for public speech and how, from the beginning, it included platforms advocating controversial political and religious opinions. The process of ‘creating’ Speakers’ Corner involved a complex relationship between the forces of authority (including government agencies) and the park’s users. It invited still-relevant questions about access, ownership and use of public space. Nineteenth-century governments vacillated between suppressing controversial speakers in Hyde Park or tolerating them as a form of democratic safety valve. Indeed, despite its popular image as a site of free speech, Speakers’ Corner has always been tightly controlled from above, whether tacitly through the belittling of what is said there, or explicitly through official regulation. In this regard, this chapter concludes that the key lesson from the history of Speakers’ Corner is not to focus on the preservation of the site in its current state, but to continue the struggle to protect individual rights to speak, listen and debate in public spaces.
In 2017 a right-wing student organisation, Nova Portugalidade, invited the controversial figure Jaime Nogueira Pinto to speak at the famously left-wing Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the New University of Lisbon. Nogueira Pinto is perhaps best known nationally for his defence of the dictator António Salazar on the television programme The Greatest Portuguese, as well as publishing polemical texts on Portuguese colonialism and Islam. The ensuing withdrawal of a platform for Nogueira Pinto by the Faculty’s director, in response to pressure from the students’ association, resulted in protests, counter-protests and threats of violence, and opened up a national conversation on the pros and cons of ‘no-platforming’ that elicited comment from public figures up to and including the President of the Republic. The Portuguese case is indicative of the way that extremist politics is dependent, in nascent culture wars, on mainstream media and politics to amplify its message. Among the reasons for the transformation of a local dispute between students into a national controversy was the role played by right-wing pundits writing in Observador, a national newspaper, and by the extreme-right party, PNR (National Renovator Party), in attracting the attention and comment of mainstream media and pundits.
Jordan Peterson is a central figure in the so-called ‘culture wars’. Lumping together 'postmodern neo-Marxists', feminists, queer theorists and transgender rights activists as the ‘social justice warrior' blob he stands against, Peterson has become a poster boy of the transnational far right. This chapter tackles Peterson’s conceptualisation of his enemies head-on, arguing that he identifies something real: unity among diverse critical traditions in our opposition to ‘free speech’. ‘Postmodern neo-Marxists’ may be an oxymoron, given the well-documented animosity between these two intellectual movements. But what postmodernists (or poststructuralists), Marxists, feminists, and gender and queer theorists share in common is a belief that the ways in which we theorise, explain and act in our world must stem from actual social practices rather than abstract, ahistorical principles. Whereas the ‘alt-right’ depicts a right to free speech as a universal principle, endogenous to ‘Western civilisation’, in practice it has always and everywhere been strictly limited. And so it goes today – not least in the culture wars, where, for example, women of colour calling out racism are routinely ‘shut down’ for ‘incivility’. A guide to free speech politics in the age of Peterson, this chapter shows how inescapably raced, classed and gendered the exclusionary practice of ‘free speech’ really is, and what this tells us about liberalism’s inadequacy in responding to neo-fascism.
‘Intellectual freedom’ is considered one of the core values of librarianship, and is the equivalent of free speech/free expression in other domains. However, intellectual freedom has always been equated with the professional ‘neutrality’ of libraries, and while there has always been a tension in the profession between intellectual freedom and social responsibility, the recent increase in politicisation of free speech has made the purported neutrality of libraries and intellectual freedom a site of political and cultural debate. In 2018 the American Library Association approved changes to an interpretation of its room-booking policy to explicitly allow hate groups to use public library spaces, setting off a major debate within librarianship over freedom of speech and no-platforming. The debate essentially revolved around hate groups gaining legitimacy or credibility by using public library spaces to proclaim their message, the question of supporting hate groups’ rights over the rights of users and staff who may feel targeted by hate speech, and the question of how the public library can or should adjudicate between competing rights. The language change was eventually reversed, but this has only postponed a resolution of the underlying contradictions within the library profession. This chapter begins by laying out the basic positions on the room-booking policy, but then broadens out to situate ‘intellectual freedom’ within librarianship’s hegemonic liberalism and offer a radical alternative vision for libraries in today’s highly polarised political culture. It then suggests that libraries need to abandon a pretence of neutrality and opt instead for a commitment to social justice. This commitment would enable libraries to escape from the paradox which a commitment to an abstract, neutral, intellectual freedom has placed them in.
This chapter is a framing/scene-setting essay that sets the issue in the historical context of debates on the 'limits' of free speech, using examples from the work of Index on Censorship over the past fifty years as a dedicated freedom of expression and anti-censorship organisation that works globally. This includes setting the challenges of freedom of expression in the context of threats from authoritarian regimes, abuse of 'hate speech' legislation by certain countries and groups and the way 'freedom of speech' has been co-opted by the far right as a fig-leaf to excuse hateful views. The chapter considers the challenges that this presents for non-partisan champions of freedom of expression.
This chapter discusses how the initial media response to the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015 was framed in terms of an absolutist interpretation of the Republican value of free speech. In such an absolutist interpretation, free speech is perceived as an end in itself, sacred, undivided, uncompromised, and does not and should not yield to ethical responsibility. However, Charlie Hebdo itself does not subscribe to an idea of absolute freedom of expression. For Philippe Val, editor from 1992 to 2009 and responsible in 2006 for the publication of the Muhammad caricatures, freedom of speech is synonymous with democracy, achieved thanks to the joint efforts of civil society in overthrowing blasphemy laws. Caroline Fourest, a Charlie Hebdo journalist, likewise posits that the absence of any blasphemy laws in France enables debate about religion, and maintains that in a secular society all beliefs are equal, or in other words there is no one religion or faith that is more sacred than another. Laïcité in this sense establishes a certain equality of treatment that is overseen by the Republic. This chapter argues that the question of Islamophobia in France is intricately and deceptively linked to the issue of laïcité, and that an absolute understanding of free speech is not compatible with laïcité. Furthermore, this chapter demonstrates how Charlie Hebdo itself weaponised and constrained laïcité, while itself becoming a tool for free speech absolutists.