Free speech update: Social media censorship and more blasphemy
It’s been a month or so since the last free speech update, so it’s time for another overview of recent free speech news.
Social media censorship
In just the past few weeks, there have been a number of efforts to silence internet speech, with both platforms and users being targeted. Here’s what happened:
At a UK parliamentary committee hearing, TikTok’s UK director of public policy Elizabeth Kanter admitted that the platform had previously censored some content, “specifically with regard to the Uighur situation.” That “situation,” if you weren’t already aware, is that China has been forcing Uighurs into reeducation camps. She added that the “content moderation guidelines” that led to this censorship are “absolutely not our policy now."
Turkey announced it was fining social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, 10 million lira each for their failure to comply with its new social media law that requires removal of “offensive” content, among other things.
A Cambodian newspaper publisher will spend a year and a half in jail after being convicted of “incitement” for posting critical comments about Prime Minister Hun Sen on Facebook.
On Nov. 11, Journalist William Yang (who is a good follow on these issues) tweeted that he and others were unable to post “Taiwan” in the comments of a World Health Organization Facebook post. “China” and similar terms were blocked as well. WHO admitted that it was using Facebook tools to block the terms because it wanted to combat ”cyberattacks by online activists.” Sure. As Mike Masnick pointed out at Techdirt, it’s shameful that, for political reasons, WHO is trying to limit discussion of Taiwan, one of the few governments to actually handle COVID-19 well.
The Solomon Islands government is planning to ban Facebook entirely because of posts containing “abusive language against ministers and the prime minister” and “defamation of character.” As of Tuesday, the ban was not yet in place.
Blasphemy
Last month, I wrote about my frustration that most of the debate we see about blasphemy is incredibly narrow, usually focusing on cartoons and little else, leaving behind the many stories that don’t fit into this framework, a point also made by Kenan Malik at The Guardian. Here’s just a sample of these important stories:
A Polish court just delayed the trial of three LGBT activists facing charges of “offending religious feelings by insulting an object of religious worship.” The basis for the charges? They posted Catholic imagery with rainbows incorporated into them. Poland’s then-interior minister, Joachim Brudziński, said before about the case: “All that nonsense about freedom and ‘tolerance’ does not give anyone the right to insult the feelings of the faithful.”
Mubarak Bala, president of Humanist Association of Nigeria, has now spent over 200 days in prison without a trial after allegedly blaspheming Islam. He has “also been denied access to his wife and baby based on security reports that they could be attacked by fanatics.”
There have been a number of incidents in Pakistan lately. This month, a bank manager was shot to death by a security guard, who accused the manager of insulting Islam. The victim’s family deny the claim. He is one of dozens who have been killed in Pakistan due to blasphemy-related violence in recent years. On the same day as the bank manager’s murder, a student at Kohat University of Science and Technology was violently attacked by his classmates after being accused of blasphemy. The student was expelled on his classmates’ orders. The next day, Pakistan’s government Twitter account shared this comment from Prime Minister Imran Khan: “Blasphemy in garb of freedom of expression is intolerable.” That really speaks for itself.
In my post last month on the failures of public debate about blasphemy, I wrote — not favorably — about a piece in Politico by Farhad Khosrokhavar. Khosrokhavar’s piece explicitly blamed blasphemy for violence in France, an awful argument for a number of reasons. Politico later took down the article after complaints. This was the wrong call. Khosrokhavar is far from alone in his belief that blasphemers share the blame for violent responses to their speech, and no one who holds that view will stop believing it because a supporting argument was pulled from circulation. What might help instead? Sharing the stories of the many people — dissidents, religious minorities, activists, writers, and more — who have suffered violence, imprisonment, and death sentences because of the theory that blasphemy is too dangerous to go unpunished.