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Will Free Speech and Human Rights Survive the Worldwide Pandemic?
When (if) the worldwide COVID pandemic subsides, what toll will it have taken on free speech and human rights around the globe? Have governments, both democratic and authoritarian, taken advantage of it to consolidate their power? Have civil liberties been sacrificed in order to try to restore public health safeguards? What explains the extreme impact of the disease on disadvantaged minorities? Join the next international dialogue sponsored by the Free Speech Project at Georgetown and the Project on the Future of the Humanities jointly run by Georgetown and Blackfriars Hall at Oxford, as academic experts, human rights activists, and a field worker for Catholic Relief Services explore these and related issues.
This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.
On Monday morning, Justice Clarence Thomas all but endorsed a fringe legal theory that would sharply limit social media companies’ ability to moderate content on their own platforms, stripping them of their own First Amendment rights to dissociate with speech they dislike. This radical idea has no basis in the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence but it is popular among Republicans who accuse social media companies of censoring conservative speech. Thomas appears to have waded into the fever swamps of right-wing paranoia and come out with the conviction that courts and Congress must bring Big Tech to heel by jettisoning basic constitutional principles. This view would seem to conflict with the justice’s belief that c
This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.
Australia’s Facebook newsfeed lost half its namesake Wednesday when the social media giant banned all access to and sharing of Australian news on its site.
Facebook’s news block was enacted overnight, but the decision to do so had been brewing for quite a while. In 2020, Parliament proposed new regulation requiring Facebook and Google to compensate local news sources for linking to their stories and headlines. Most lawmakers supported the bill, which they hope will revitalize Australia’s local news deserts. The idea is that ad dollars that had been lost over the years to Facebook and Google would now funneled be back to local media companies.
This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.
When a police officer recently asked the Cleveland Plain Dealer to remove his name from articles about a crime he committed years ago on the job, editor Chris Quinn wasn’t sure what to do. Ever since the Ohio newspaper began its “right to be forgotten” program in 2018, one of the first in the country, Quinn and a committee of editors have considered hundreds of petitions like this one. Eighty percent of the time, Quinn said, they grant the requests, deciding that forever preserving the story online does more harm to the subject than it provides value to the community.
This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.
If you entered the virtual “corridor” of the invite-only and iOS-only app Clubhouse over the weekend, you would see discussion rooms titled, in Chinese, “young people on both sides of the strait free-style chat,” “the Silicon Valley investor living room,” “are there internment camps in Xinjiang?” and “is now the best time to go back to China?” Inside those rooms, thousands from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other Chinese-speaking diaspora throughout the world had been queuing patiently for hours, even days, for a chance to speak their mind for a few short minutes, while others listened quietly and tentatively. Most rooms had been running nonstop for days. Moderators from one time zone would hand a room