Twitter’s Free Speech Strategies

This conversation is two years old, but it is a fascinating look into the strategies Twitter was using to navigate the two challenges of allowing free expression and preventing harm. Jack Dorsey is at the table along with Vijaya Gadde, who serves as Twitter's global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety at Twitter. It's important to note that Dorsey recently stepped down as CEO of Twitter, replaced by Twitter's chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal, who has sent signals that he will not be as accommodating to free speech as Dorsey.

Continue ReadingTwitter’s Free Speech Strategies

Barack Obama Channels John Stuart Mill When Discussing Free Speech on Campus

“The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas."

University of California president Clark Kerr

Here's an excerpt from Edwin Chemerinsky's excellent 2017 book, Free Speech on Campus (p. 71):

Concerns about a culture of intolerance on college campuses led President Obama to tell Rutgers graduates in 2016 that democracy and education require a willingness to listen to people with whom you disagree:

I know a couple years ago, folks on this campus got upset that Condoleezza Rice was supposed to speak at a commencement. Now, I don’t think it’s a secret that I disagree with many of the foreign policies of Dr. Rice and the previous administration. But the notion that this community or country would be better served by not hearing from a former Secretary of State, or shutting out what she had to say—I believe that’s misguided. . . .

If you disagree with somebody, bring them in and ask them tough questions. Hold their feet to the fire. Make them defend their positions. If somebody has got a bad or offensive idea, prove it wrong. Engage it. Debate it. Stand up for what you believe in. Don’t be scared to take somebody on. Don’t feel like you got to shut your ears off because you’re too fragile and somebody might offend your sensibilities. Go at them if they’re not making any sense. Use your logic and reason and words. And by doing so, you’ll strengthen your own position, and you’ll hone your arguments. And maybe you’ll learn something and realize you don’t know everything. And you may have a new understanding not only about what your opponents believe but maybe what you believe. Either way, you win. And more importandy, our democracy wins.

Chemerinsky writes (p. 64):

We believe there is no middle ground. History demonstrates that there is no way to define an unacceptable, punishment-worthy idea without putting genuinely important new thinking and societal critique at risk. Universities contribute to society when faculty are allowed to explore the frontiers of knowledge and suggest ways of thinking that may be considered crazy, distasteful, or offensive to the community. When people ask the censor to suppress bad ideas in higher education, many important and positive ideas never have the chance to flourish, and many dangerous or evil ideas are allowed to thrive because they are not subjected to evaluation, critique, and rebuttal. In our view, no belief should be treated as sacrosanct. Nullius in verba remains vital: we must be willing to subject all ideas to the test.

In 2020, Chemerinsky was invited to talk at Claremont McKenna College. Four key points to his talk were reported at the school website:

Free speech: “To me, the core principle (of free speech) is that all ideas and views can be expressed no matter how offensive, even deeply offensive. … The government cannot prohibit speech or create liability for speech on the grounds that it’s offensive.”

Hate speech: “Hate speech is very hurtful. But most of all, the reason why hate speech is protected in the United States is that it stresses an idea. The Late Justice John Marshall Harlan said ‘to censor your words is to censor your ideas. We can’t cleanse the English language to please the most squeamish among us.’”

Campus culture: “Colleges and universities can have time, place, and manner restrictions with regard to speech, as long as they leave it open at alternative places for communication. Government can have time, place, and manner restrictions. For colleges and universities, the government can have it to restrict the disruption of campus activities and to protect safety. Colleges and universities have a moral duty towards the safety of the students and faculty.”

Speech we detest: “We don’t need freedom of speech to protect the speech we like. We need freedom of speech to protect the speech we detest. I am dubious to let the government decide what message to express. Freedom of speech is based on a faith—a faith that we would all be better off in the academic institution, where all our ideas and views will be expressed.”

Continue ReadingBarack Obama Channels John Stuart Mill When Discussing Free Speech on Campus

The Day Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed his Mind About Free Speech

Here is an illustration of why it is vitally important that we (sometimes) change our minds. This is an excerpt from the famous dissent of Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1919 case of Abrams v The United States:

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises.

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system, I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

Continue ReadingThe Day Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed his Mind About Free Speech

Princeton University Gets an Education: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”

Sixty Princeton Students have carefully responded to the declaration of Princeton Dean Amaney Jamal decrying Kyle Rittenhouse’s not-guilty verdict. Here is an excerpt from "Let Students Think for Themselves," published by The National Review:

[Jamal] lamented with a heavy heart the “incomprehensib[ility] . . . of a minor vigilante carrying a semi-automatic rifle across state lines, killing two people, and being declared innocent by the U.S. justice system.” Furthermore, she situated the verdict within the context of the racism embedded “without a doubt . . . in nearly every strand of the American fabric,” thus implying that defenders of a not-guilty verdict are defenders of racism.

Along with 60 of our peers, we sent a letter of concern to the university president, Christopher Eisgruber. We criticized neither the embarrassing factual errors polluting Jamal’s statement nor her position on the trial’s outcome. Rather, we vehemently objected to the fact that she took advantage of her official position to broadcast her own stance on a controversial public issue — a maneuver that can only harm, not aid, a culture of bold, open truth-seeking.

An academic institution committed to truth-seeking and open inquiry should foster an environment in which students feel welcome — even encouraged — to speak up on controversial issues about which reasonable people of goodwill disagree. But as Princeton students and frequent critics of the ideological orthodoxy that pervades our campus, we’ve witnessed our peers retreat from conversations, opportunities, and even friendships out of fear that their deeply held beliefs will cost them academically, socially, and professionally.

A university hinders its truth-seeking mission when it — unintentionally or otherwise — prompts students to think twice before expressing unpopular but reasonable points of view. This can occur when officials violate the basic institutional neutrality required for the university to be a home for the free marketplace of ideas. When an educational institution adopts official stances on controversial issues not directly connected to its core mission, it suggests parameters around an otherwise liberated discourse. This effect is enhanced when such pronouncements are morally tinged; in these cases, the university would appear to have decided that such parameters are morally requisite. By implication, those who defy them are morally suspect.

The “basic neutrality” ideal isn’t new. The most famous defense of the principle was offered by faculty at the University of Chicago during the height of the Vietnam War. Chicago’s Kalven Committee made the point succinctly: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” The Kalven Report, long celebrated, is still operative at the University of Chicago. Universities everywhere should consider adopting the report’s guidance, as well as the university’s famed Free Speech Principles, which Princeton formally did in 2015.

Continue ReadingPrinceton University Gets an Education: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”