The Merry Month of May
A news round-up
As the Communications Officer for the Free Speech Union, I get to write about all the major free speech news stories each week - everything from censorship, blacklisting, cancel culture and identity politics through to the UK’s new Online Safety Bill, algorithms, online content moderation and blockchain. So for those of you who haven’t yet worked out how to unsubscribe from MyBodyThisPaperThisFire, here’s a selection of the most interesting stories from the Free Speech Union’s May newsletters - and if you like them, please do share this post (and have a think about joining the Free Speech Union, too).
Ricky Gervais vs transactivists: seconds out, round one…
(27 May Newsletter)
The outrage over Ricky Gervais’s new stand-up special for Netflix was, as Ella Whelan pointed out in the Telegraph, “all too predictable”. Particular fury seems to have been roused by a section in which Gervais mocked trans activists. US LGBTQ rights group Glaad denounced the jokes as “dangerous”, the National Centre for Transgender Equality in the US condemned them as “dehumanising” and the Director of Communications at Stonewall, Robbie de Santos, felt it was “disappointing that Ricky has once again chosen to use his global platform to make fun of trans people – punching down is never funny”. In the new woke lexicon, this is apparently the greatest crime a modern comedian can commit – to “punch down” is to make fun of any person or group who is in some way deemed to be less “privileged” than the comedian.
Writing in the Telegraph, Michael Deacon wondered whether critics like de Santos might not have misunderstood at whom Gervais’s jokes were targeted. The supposedly offensive part of the show, as Deacon explains, imagines an exchange between a woman and a hard line transactivist. The woman is nervous about someone with a penis entering the ladies’ loos. “What if he rapes me,” she asks. “What if she rapes you, you fucking TERF whore!” the enraged activist screams back. To be sure, the joke is crude. “But it isn’t bullying,” points out Deacon. “It’s about bullying: the bullying of women by aggressive activists. The sort of activists who hounded Prof Kathleen Stock, the feminist academic, out of her job at Sussex University and constantly send threats and abuse to JK Rowling.” Surely, Deacon concludes, “by mocking bullies on behalf of their victims, Ricky Gervais is actually punching up, not down?”
Then again, was Gervais actually punching anyone at all? It’s certainly interesting the way de Santos’s woke metaphor forces us to personify humour’s intended targets, rendering the comedian either as an abuser (i.e., ‘punching down’ at self-proclaimed victims) or a progressive campaigner (i.e., ‘punching up’ at prosperous white supremacists). But what if Gervais was actually swinging away at an abstract set of ideas? His own explanation of his routine, offered to the Spectator, certainly suggests just such a possibility: “My target wasn’t trans folk, but trans activist ideology. I’ve always confronted dogma that oppresses people and limits freedom of expression.”
The Spectator’s Debbie Hayton certainly felt it was time someone gave it the sort of satirical, no-holds barred thrashing that every other form of political ideology has had to endure since the European Enlightenment. And why not? “Trans activist ideology” is, after all, mixing it with the big boys now – capitalism, feminism, liberalism – having shaken the foundations of our society and challenged the meaning of such fundamental concepts as men and women.
Anthony Horowitz’s brush with cancel culture…
(3rd June Newsletter)
Margaret Atwood made the headlines this week, firing a flamethrower at a specially made, unburnable copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. The gesture’s political connotations weren’t difficult to discern. “Across the United States and around the world”, the book’s publisher, Penguin Random House, explained in an accompanying statement, “books are being challenged, banned and even burned. So we created a special edition of a book that’s been challenged and banned for decades.”
Yet literary censorship is as much about the suppression of ideas prior to publication as it is about their destruction once they’ve been bound and are on peoples’ shelves, desks and coffee tables. Only this week, for instance, renowned author Anthony Horowitz was left “shocked” by notes from his publisher “about things which I could or couldn’t say” (Telegraph). He went on to reveal that they’d told him to rewrite his latest children’s book, Where Seagulls Dare: A Diamond Brothers Case, because there was a concern that jokes related to “the usual -isms” could be “misconstrued in the present climate”.
The process required a “fairly extensive” edit and, perhaps unsurprisingly, left him in a reflective mood. According to the Mail, he told an audience at the Hay Festival this week that “I’m very, very scared by what you’re calling cancel culture. I think what’s happening to writers is extremely dangerous: where certain words are hidden, where certain thoughts are not allowed any more, certain activities obviously to do with gender or to do with ethnicity.” Writers, he added, must “lead the agenda and not be cowed by it. You must be free to write what you want, and to express the views you want to express without the world falling in on you.”
What were the “usual -isms” his publishers had asked him to remove? He didn’t say, although the (presumably now revised) blurb for the book reads as follows:
Private investigators Tim and Nick Diamond haven’t had a case for three months and are down to their last cornflake. So when a glamorous woman comes into their office offering them a pile of cash to find her missing father, they think Christmas had come – only it turns out they’re the turkeys! Before they know it, they are caught up in a case involving bike-riding hitmen, super hackers and a sinister far-right organisation, the White Crusaders.
Whatever the “usual -isms” Horowitz’s publishers were fretting over, it’s good to see they were entirely relaxed about the possibility of Horowitz’s young, impressionable readers encountering right-wing politics as the preserve of bad guys either too stupid to think through the cultural and political implications of their organisation’s branding, or too racist to care. Quite right too. As Horowitz himself puts it, authors shouldn’t have to work in a “culture of fear”; a culture that “limits your ability to express the views that you want to express”, whether those views involve “the usual -isms”, characters like the “White Crusaders”, or whatever else.
Writing about Horowitz’s revelations for Spiked, the author Nick Tyrone suggests that when publishers throw their weight about, it’s almost always the cash nexus – and not woke indoctrination – that’s the motivating factor: “It’s as if they think one of their books getting called bad names online will lead to them going out of business in short order.” What’s so strange about that – and it really is when you think about it – is that “every other form of publishing is almost completely powered by controversy”.
Still, whatever their motivations, the fact that publishers do now engage fairly routinely in acts of literary censorship – what the author Lionel Shriver describes as a “quasi-Soviet phenomenon” – is something that troubles Tyrone. Literature is “extremely important to Western culture”, and it is primarily through the novel that “the complexities of human thought and feeling have been communicated over the past several centuries”. It’s true, as he concedes, that “those ideas are often difficult” – but isn’t the fact that they’re problematic precisely why they “need delving into, not shoving away”?
Education Secretary “hounded” by transactivists
(3 June Newsletter)
FSU General Secretary, Toby Young, was quoted in the Telegraph this week warning that the “intolerant atmosphere on Britain’s campuses is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China”. Small wonder, then, that the FSU “get about a dozen requests for help a week from university students or academics who’ve got into trouble for exercising their lawful right to free speech”.
As if to demonstrate the growing tendency in universities not to argue with positions but to attack the persons who hold them, a few days later the Secretary of State for Education, Nadhim Zahawi, was “hounded” – as both the Telegraph and the Mail put it – by transactivists during a talk he was giving to Warwick University’s Conservative Association. Why? Because according to the protestors, Zahawi is not only “Tory scum” but a “transphobe” to boot.
The latter claim is based on the fact that Zahawi was once asked for a definition of a ‘woman’ and promptly responded that “a woman is an adult human female. Biology was my favourite subject at school. It’s a straightforward answer.” That might appear an uncontentious statement of fact, but not in the world according to radical transactivists, where apparently it constitutes a “transphobic dog-whistle” (The Metro). Protestors also appear to have taken issue with Zahawi’s strident defence of Kathleen Stock, the philosophy professor, during the period last year when she was targeted by transactivists at Sussex University (the Telegraph).
The issue for the FSU in all of this is not whether we agree with the political beliefs espoused by any particular group of activists, but whether the tactics they adopt while campaigning on the basis of those beliefs lead to the curtailment (or denial) of the speech of others. It’s an important point, and one the Education Secretary himself seems keen to uphold. In response to an exclusive from Guido Fawkes that the son of Labour politician Yvette Cooper led the protests at the event, Zahawi took to Twitter to point out that this student’s “right to free speech is vital too”, and that he “made a reasonable point about how schools can help children” which “he was happy to debate”.
None of the other protestors were mentioned, no doubt because the vast majority of them seemed less inclined to debate Zahawi in the way Yvette Cooper’s son had. As the Mail reported, no sooner had Warwick University’s Conservative Society invited Mr Zahawi to campus, than the Warwick Student Union’s society for “Lesbian, Gay, Bi+, Trans, Undefined and Asexual/Aromantic” people began its attempts to have him no-platformed, complaining that he “played a significant role in institutionalised transphobia” and that his presence on campus would “clearly violate Student Union by-laws on equality and diversity”.
On the evening of the talk, dozens of protestors gathered outside the lecture hall where Mr Zahawi was speaking to chant “Tory Scum!”, bang on the doors, and, according to footage seen by the Daily Mail, blast music from a loudspeaker at such volume that it became difficult for those inside the meeting to hear each other. Incidentally, the footage posted by the protestors had been captioned “Sorry?? We cant [sic] really hear you!”, which suggests that some of these student activists might more productively have spent the evening brushing up on their grammar and punctuation in the library. In the end, the Secretary of State had to be ushered away by security guards as he was pursued by activists brandishing rainbow flags.
Chasing your opponents away while denouncing them as “Scum!” was, as Ross Clark noted for the Telegraph, rather an odd way for these protestors to challenge what they’d been describing as “hate”. Ross is all for the right to protest, but he does go on to ask the following, thought-provoking question: would university authorities have taken such a back seat had these, say, been Brexiteer students who verbally assaulted an EU official who had been invited to give a talk? Clark notes with interest that in response to an enquiry from the Telegraph, Warwick declined to comment.
His broader point, though, is that in post-Brexit Britain what is considered to be “hatred” by the Right is all too often glossed as mere “activism” when committed by the Left. Universities must avoid getting drawn down this line of thinking, he argues: “Mob-style shouting on the Left must never be excused on the grounds that the perpetrators supposedly have their hearts in the right place.”
Is Netflix recovering from its “woke mind virus”?
(20 May Newsletter)
Back in April when Netflix reported that it had lost 200,000 subscribers during the first financial quarter of 2022 and expected to lose a further two million subscribers before June, Elon Musk was on hand to offer some valuable context: the problem, he explained, was that Netflix had been infected by a “woke mind virus” that was making the streaming service “unwatchable”. This week, however, Netflix launched what the Daily Mail described as “a crackdown on woke workers trying to silence artists such as Dave Chappelle”.
As is well known, staff at the tech company had previously targeted the likes of comedian Chappelle for jokes about transgender people with the aim of cancelling him. Last year, some of the firm’s activists also staged protest walkouts, and, on one remarkable occasion, even tried to force their way into an executive meeting to make their feelings known. More recently, they published a letter with a list of demands that called on the company to “avoid future instances of platforming transphobia and hate speech, and to account for the harm we have caused”.
Long suffering Netflix bosses, Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, finally appear to have had enough of this sort of thing. The Telegraph, GB News and Metro all ran stories about the streaming service circulating an all-staff ‘culture memo’ in which it was made clear that there would be no “censoring of specific artists or voices” no matter how ‘harmful’ certain employees considered the content in question. “Not everyone will like – or agree with – everything on our service,” it conceded, before emphasising Netflix’s commitment to “supporting the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with, programming for a diversity of audiences and tastes, and letting viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices”.
Is Netflix finally starting to recover from its “woke mind virus” and fight back against millennial authoritarians? Writing for Spiked, Brendan O’Neill doesn’t think so. “Free speech warriors” should calm down, he said. One “positive sounding memo” isn’t enough to be getting excited about. Context (and a good memory) is everything, he adds, because in its past and present editorial choices, its HR actions, its sacking of the actor Frank Langella, “this hyper-woke streaming giant has constantly consolidated the post-traditional, post-reason cult of vulnerability that passes for ‘liberal’ thinking in the 21st century”.
Still, the memo ends rousingly enough for “free speech warriors” of simple tastes. Addressing the company’s hardcore of perennially disgruntled staff, it notes that “you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful”, before offering the following, tacit reminder that what they signed up for when they joined the company was contractual employment and not, as some of them seem to believe, indentured servitude: “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, then Netflix may not be the best place for you.”
Are algorithms the biggest threat to online free speech?
(20 May Newsletter)
Social media platforms will often place ‘viewing constraints’ on content that automated moderation systems have flagged for breaching their ‘community standards’. One of the chief disadvantages of the viewing constraint, however, is that it commits social media companies to a contestable form of censorship. Where a platform asks its users to give explicit consent before viewing a piece of content, for example, it performs an action that is visible to the producers – and consumers – of that content.
According to an article in The Conversation, however, most user-to-user platforms are now capable of deciding what content gets seen, where, when and by whom, without that decision-making process ever becoming visible. It’s only in the past five years that this technique of ‘algorithmic audiencing’ has taken off, which perhaps explains why its interference with online free speech has so far largely gone unnoticed. To put the scale of that ‘interference’ into context, censorship techniques like viewing constraints are only adopted in cases of ‘inappropriate’ content (which makes up a tiny fraction of all content on any given platform), while algorithmic audiencing is now systematically applied to all content hosted by a platform.
As the article’s authors go on to explain, the fact that social media newsfeeds still appear to be ordered chronologically is not because they actually are, but because an algorithm is working away in the background to feed users particular types of content that ‘align’ with their known preferences and tastes. Alignment of that kind is important to social media companies because it keeps users engaged… and engagement can be monetised, “yielding up more user attention on targeted advertising, and more data collection opportunities”.
But is monetisation the only motivating force behind the rise of algorithmic audiencing?
Writing for the Spectator this week, Laura Dodsworth isn’t so sure. (An extended version of that article can be found over on her Substack page.) There are, she said, “growing concerns that the political and ideological preferences of the platforms may also be shaping what we see online”. Although there is a danger that the Online Safety Bill will stifle the freedom of the press once it passes into legislation, the fact is that news companies are “already self-censoring and serving up content that they know will work favourably with social media algorithms”.
Perhaps it could be argued that the motivation in those cases is still largely financial – news companies do, after all, have to turn a profit. But what about the inner logic of the algorithms themselves – is it really all about ‘monetisation’, or might they have been built to pursue other goals too? It’s certainly curious that one social media producer Laura spoke to told her that “environmental protesting is ‘pushed upwards’ on Twitter – ‘XR content takes off like a rocket’ – while immigration and race are pushed down”.
The platforms themselves “insist that this isn’t the case, and there’s currently no way of knowing for sure”. Why? “Because the algorithms remain closely-guarded secrets”; secrets that – for now at least – remain beyond the purview of regulators.
The free press and the threat of financial censorship
(6 May Newsletter)
Anthony Blinken, Washington’s top diplomat, used the occasion of World Press Freedom Day (3 May) to criticise the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong governments for media restrictions and alleged harassment of journalists and dissidents worldwide (Times). Citing data compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based non-profit advocacy group, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called China the biggest threat to press freedom in terms of the number of journalists under detention because of their work.
But is it unfair to single China out like that? A report from the Economist this week made clear that journalists are facing increasing restraints, legal threats and fatal attacks not just in authoritarian countries but in democracies too. “Globally,” it pointed out, “press freedom is in retreat.” Drawing on analysis by UNESCO of data on freedom of expression from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, it estimates that around 85% of people live in countries where press freedom has declined over the past five years.
V-Dem gives each country a score from 0 (least free) to 1 (most free). The global average weighted by population peaked at 0.65 in the early 2000s, and then again in 2011, before falling to 0.49 in 2021. This is the worst score since 1984, when the cold war was raging, and the two sides were propping up dictators on every continent.
Interestingly, though, neither the CPJ nor the Economist mentioned the threat posed to a free press – and, by definition, to free speech – by financial censorship.
Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi published a story this week about how PayPal, the internet payments giant replete with its own founding “mafia,” has recently been selectively de-platforming alternative media sites that publish stories contradicting some of the West’s reporting of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (the New York Post has the story too). Among those to have been banned are MintPress News, a left-wing web-based outlet, and Consortium News, founded by the late Associated Press investigative reporter Robert Parry in 1995 as one of the web’s very first independent, reader-funded news outlets.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, PayPal has form when it comes to limiting or permanently limiting users’ accounts. Only last year, for instance, PayPal division Venmo was sued for blocking payments associated with Islam or Arab nationalities or ethnicities. Even so, silencing news outlets would mark a radical new departure, according to Reclaim the Net. Going after cash, as Taibbi explains,
is a big jump from simply deleting speech and actually has a much bigger chilling effect. This is especially true in the alternative media world, where money has long been notoriously tight, and the loss of a few thousand dollars here or there can have a major effect on a site, podcast, or paper.
So does this mean the global financial system is the new battleground in the fight to defend freedom of speech? Sarah McLellan, writing in Spectator Australia, seems to think so. Citing Jesse Powell, Chief Executive of Kraken Bitcoin Exchange, she argues that “the traditional financial system has essentially been weaponised” and that losing free access to funding streams on account of one’s political views is tantamount to losing free speech.
It’s certainly true, as Ramesh Thakur points out (Spectator Australia), that states have been engaging in financial censorship for some time: in 2019, the Russian government froze bank accounts linked to opposition politician Alexei Navalny; in February 2022, Canada froze the bank accounts of mostly peaceful anti-vaccine mandate protestors with no due process, no appeals process and no court order necessary; and in early 2022, SWIFT took the unprecedented move to cut Russia’s central bank from its global financial messaging service.
But that was all state led. The question is whether financial services companies like payment processors, banks, online platforms and credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard are also now starting to get in on the act of influencing what kind of speech can or cannot exist online.
Johnny the Walrus
An Amazon staffer worked himself up in to tears last week over the online retailer’s decision to sell Johnny and the Walrus, a children’s book that likens being transgender to pretending to be a walrus (Daily Mail). “I’m sorry, I want to preface this…”, the unidentified staffer says, wiping away tears in a video first obtained by Libs of TikTok. “This is really tough content.” The outburst occurred during a meeting in which senior managers discussed how to reassure staff that they understood just how “traumatic” the book’s rip-roaring success (250,000 worldwide sales, according to The Washington Examiner) had been for transgender individuals. “If you’re gender nonbinary,” the meeting’s host makes clear at one point, “this is super triggering … I would understand if you needed to leave.”
The book’s blurb provides a clue as to the type of “traumatic” content the intrepid, cognitively resilient reader might find lurking beneath the triggering dust jacket:
Johnny is a little boy with a big imagination. One day he pretends to be a big scary dinosaur, the next day he’s a knight in shining armour or a playful puppy. But when the internet people find out Johnny likes to make-believe, he’s forced to make a decision between the little boy he is and the things he pretends to be – and he’s not allowed to change his mind.
And that’s it. The most you can say about it politically is that it pokes gentle, allegorical fun at some of the worst excesses of transactivism. But like all successful children’s stories, it’s pulled along by a deeper, underlying message, which is essentially that of self-acceptance.
To reduce the trauma the book is causing, Amazon removed Johnny and the Walrus from its various ‘children’s’ book categories and repositioned it in the ‘politics’ category. Ads for the book on Amazon are also now being rejected by the tech giant on the grounds that they’re not “appropriate for all audiences” – an umbrella term that’s typically used to justify banning advertising for books promoting incest and paedophilia, among other things.
The Daily Signal points out that Amazon, as with every other Big Tech company, never censors, blocks, suppresses or re-categorises content that promotes woke ideas on the basis that it is in some vague, nebulous and never fully explained sort of way too “political” or “inappropriate” for its intended recipients.
For instance, Jacob’s Room to Choose is currently sat at #1,166 in Amazon’s ‘Children’s Prejudice and Racism’ bestseller list. Jacob, as the book’s blurb informs us, likes to wear dresses. One day he’s kicked out of the boys’ bathroom at school for wearing a dress. His friend Sophie, who doesn’t like to wear dresses, experiences something similar in the girls’ bathroom. “When their teacher finds out what happened,” the description goes on, “Jacob and Sophie, with the support [of] administration, lead change at their school as everyone discovers the many forms of gender expression and how to treat each other with respect.” Or how about Jack (Not Jackie), currently occupying position #335 in the ‘Children’s Siblings’ category? Susan has a little sister called Jackie, or at least, she does have a little sister called Jackie, until, one day, Susan realizes that her little sister “doesn’t like dresses or fairies – she likes ties and bugs!” Susan is confused. Disappointed, even. “Will she and her family be able to accept that Jackie identifies more as ‘Jack’?”, asks the Amazon description [spoiler alert: yes]. As if to emphasise just how apolitical the book’s contents really are, the blurb goes on to boast that it’s being “published in partnership with GLAAD [an American non-governmental media monitoring organisation, founded as a protest against defamatory coverage of gay and lesbian people] to accelerate LGBTQ inclusivity and acceptance”.
All great stuff, of course; but if Amazon feels that Johnny and the Walrus is too “political” for children, then what’s so different about these other two page-turners?