Fourteen years ago, at a human rights conference in Oslo, I met Julian Assange. From the moment I encountered the wraithlike WikiLeaks founder, I sensed that he might be a morally dubious character. My suspicions were confirmed upon witnessing his speech at the conference, in which he listed Israel alongside Iran and China as part of a “rogue’s gallery of states” and compared the Guantánamo Bay detention facility to a Nazi concentration camp.
Nothing Mr. Assange has said or done in the intervening 14 years has altered my initial impression of him as a man unhealthily preoccupied with the shortcomings of democracies and suspiciously uninterested in the crimes of dictatorships.… Seguir leyendo »
Durante años, los defensores de la libertad de expresión se han quejado de que las universidades protegen a los estudiantes de discursos incómodos a expensas de la libertad de expresión. Ahora que la retórica es dolorosa para los judíos (los chivos expiatorios más convenientes de la historia), los administradores de las universidades se sienten, de repente, comprometidos con la libertad de expresión.
Cuando a las presidentas de Harvard, el Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts (MIT, por sus siglas en inglés) y la Universidad de Pensilvania se les preguntó en una audiencia del Congreso sobre el antisemitismo en los campus si «instar al genocidio de los judíos» violaba los códigos de conducta de sus instituciones, Sally Kornbluth, del MIT, explicó que podría constituir acoso «si va dirigido a individuos, no como declaraciones públicas».… Seguir leyendo »
The testimony of three university presidents before a House committee last week provoked outrage after they suggested that calls on their campuses for Jewish genocide might not have violated their schools’ free speech policies. One of them, Liz Magill, was forced to step down on Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania, where I am a faculty member.
But their statements shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Congress could have assembled two dozen university presidents and likely would have received the same answer from each of them.
This is because the value of free speech has been elevated to a near-sacred level on university campuses.… Seguir leyendo »
Cuando Toni Morrison ganó el premio Nobel de Literatura en 1993, era profesora en la Universidad de Princeton y, tras recibir la noticia, que pidió le confirmaran por fax para asegurarse de que no se trataba de una broma, se fue al aula a impartir su seminario sobre africanismo americano. Ahora hay un edificio que lleva su nombre, frente al que paso camino de mis clases, el Toni Morrison Hall.
Su novela Beloved, publicada en 1987, fue polémica desde su aparición por su forma osada de entrar en el tema de la esclavitud. Sethie, esclava en una plantación de Kentucky, prefiere dar muerte a su propia hija para que no tenga que vivir en cautiverio, como ella misma.… Seguir leyendo »
In the course of the next few days, Priti Patel will make the most important ruling on free speech made by any home secretary in recent memory. She must resolve whether to comply with a US request to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges.
The consequences for Assange will be profound. Once in the US he will almost certainly be sent to a maximum-security prison for the rest of his life. He will die in jail.
The impact on British journalism will also be profound. It will become lethally dangerous to handle, let alone publish, documents from US government sources. Reporters who do so, and their editors, will risk the same fate as Assange and become subject to extradition followed by lifelong incarceration.… Seguir leyendo »
Earlier this month, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted misinformation about coronavirus vaccines for the fifth time, Twitter permanently suspended her personal account. (It left her official congressional account intact.) The next day, Facebook suspended her account for 24 hours for the same post.
These bans are part of social media platforms’ shift in policy, which began in late 2020 as the companies began applying the same rules to elected officials that they do to other users. Many noticed the change a year ago, after the Capitol insurrection, when Twitter, Facebook and YouTube permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s accounts for the potential to incite violence.… Seguir leyendo »
Trump decidió dónde iba a echar el resto antes de abandonar la Casa Blanca, ha sido en la sección 230 de la Ley de 1996 de Decencia en las Comunicaciones. No estamos hablando de una norma cualquiera; es la ley fundacional de Internet en EE UU, y actúa como escudo legal para plataformas como Facebook o YouTube protegiéndolas de dos maneras: en primer lugar, de ser demandadas por contenidos publicados por sus usuarios, y en segundo, al dejarles eliminar contenidos susceptibles de objeción. En otras palabras, se trata de la ley que las exime de responsabilidad legal por los contenidos que los usuarios publican en ellas.… Seguir leyendo »
The British courts will soon be deciding the fate of the Australian journalist Julian Assange, a man who has been unjustly charged as a criminal. Assange committed no crime. He is a champion of the cause of freedom.
The UK will say whether it will accept or deny the request for the extradition of Assange to the US, where he will face 18 charges brought against him by the government of that country. If he is extradited, Assange, 49, could be tried and sentenced to up to 175 years in prison, the equivalent of a life sentence.
Peut-on encore penser librement dans le plus prestigieux journal américain ? Bari Weiss, 36 ans, journaliste à la rubrique «Opinion» du New York Times, vient d’en claquer la porte en dénonçant le «harcèlement» dont elle aurait été victime. En cause ? Ses idées jugées dérangeantes par une partie de la rédaction du média ouvertement progressiste et anti-Trump. Elle déplore avoir été ostracisée pour avoir tenté d’élargir le spectre idéologique du journal à des points de vue conservateurs, mission pour laquelle elle avait précisément été embauchée trois ans auparavant. Weiss, qui a longtemps travaillé au Wall Street Journal, avait été recrutée dans le quotidien new-yorkais juste après l’élection de Donald Trump, alors que sa direction entamait une profonde autocritique pour ne pas avoir su anticiper la victoire du milliardaire.… Seguir leyendo »
Few social media platforms have propelled President Trump’s political career like Twitter has. Conceivably, that's precisely the reason why its decision on 26 May to flag two of his posts as containing misleading statements related to the upcoming election, drew his ire. Just two days later, an executive order was signed, demanding immediate action from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to re-examine platform liability, allegations of political bias and federal ad spend on online platforms.
The stand-off between Donald Trump and Twitter accentuates two key issues in the global debate about the impact of Big Tech on human rights and democracy: freedom of expression and platform liability.… Seguir leyendo »
The Trump administration is making it harder to find government information about climate change on the web. If you searched Google for the words “climate change” a little over six months ago, one of the first hits would have been the Environmental Protection Agency’s website.
But that was before April 28, when the agency began systematically dismantling its climate change website, which had survived Democratic and Republican administrations and was a leading source of information on a global problem that the president, as a candidate, labeled “a hoax”.
If you search those words today, a link to the E.P.A. site may not appear until the second or third search results page, and sometimes not even then, depending on your browser settings.… Seguir leyendo »
En las fotografías, a la izquierda aparece una recreación de la bandera de los Estados Confederados de América, obra del artista Garyck Arnzten. Y a la derecha, una imagen del linchamiento de Jesse Washington, en Waco, Texas, en 1916.
Jesse era un peón agrícola afroamericano de 17 años de edad a quien un jurado acababa de declarar culpable de la muerte de la mujer de su patrón. Tras el veredicto, una multitud enloquecida se lo llevó a rastras a la plaza mayor, donde le golpearon, le acuchillaron, le castraron, le colgaron de un árbol sobre una hoguera y le quemaron vivo.… Seguir leyendo »
The gun attack in Dallas, Texas, at a contest to draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, evokes memories of the January shootings at the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Two gunmen were killed and a security guard injured at the Muhammad Art Exhibit, organised this weekend by the American Freedom Defense Initiative. Coincidentally, the French magazine will pick up a Freedom of Expression Courage honour in New York tomorrow, awarded by the literary group PEN. When six writers pulled out of the ceremony in protest, Salman Rushdie accused them of cowardice and condoning terrorism. The six argue that the award validates “selectively offensive” racist and anti-Islamic material.… Seguir leyendo »
It was only a matter of time before this would happen in the United States.
Violence in the West aimed at those who draw cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed has become increasingly common.
In January, 12 people were killed by two gunmen at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris, which had run a number of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
A month later in Copenhagen, Denmark, at an event featuring Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who had also drawn cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, one of the attendees was killed by a gunman who had pledged allegiance to ISIS.
On Sunday, two men opened fire outside the "Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest" in Garland, Texas.… Seguir leyendo »
While most of us would agree that religious fundamentalists, foreign and domestic, sometimes do serious harm to our society, there are other kinds of fundamentalists who are also dangerous: I refer to legal fundamentalists.
More precisely, the tranche of lawyers, academicians, journalists and publishers who, over the years, have developed into First Amendment fundamentalists and have become a powerful influence on our government. Currently, they appear to have persuaded our attorney general that the amendment bars him from taking action against Inspire magazine, published on the Internet by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
The organization is a sworn enemy of the United States, and its web publication is available throughout the land.… Seguir leyendo »
Sony's high profile lawyer David Boies is demanding Twitter take action to block tweets that draw upon the material hackers took from the corporation's computer servers. He wants the accounts of those who post the stolen emails to be suspended.
Earlier, Boies wrote to news organizations admonishing them that they should not publish stories based on the company's stolen secrets.
Gossip-hungry media consumers have been enjoying a feast of salacious celebrity fare from the hacked computers of Sony Entertainment. The U.S. government says North Korea is responsible for the hacking, which apparently was prompted by a Sony movie, "The Interview." Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a man who loves movies but bans virtually all contact between computer, videos and his own starving citizens, is apparently unamused at the film, which makes a joke of his imaginary assassination.… Seguir leyendo »
It’s not easy task to make North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un look like an unfairly maligned underdog, but leave it to the bumbling greed of Hollywood to succeed at mission impossible.
“The Interview” may be a joke of a film, but the Sony hacking incident and escalating war of words between anti-Kim detractors and the pro-Kim hackers is deadly serious.
Despite the predictable, petulant cries of “caving in,” Sony Japan finally found the gumption to say “no” to its decadent, derelict Hollywood division.
Is it worth beating the drums of war for an exercise in bad taste?
Sony’s decision to pull “The Interview” — an enormous act of self-censorship under threat of violence — somehow comes as no great surprise to me. It is the culmination of an insidious trend of self-censorship in the face of intimidation that has plagued Western culture for more than a decade.
Nine years ago, as culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, I commissioned cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to start a debate about how we talk about Islam. In commissioning the cartoons, my newspaper was reacting to a pattern of self-censorship among publishers, writers, museums, theaters and performers. Institutions like the Tate museum in London and the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden, had called off shows or removed artwork from exhibits.… Seguir leyendo »
On June 20, 2011, in Veracruz, Mexico, Miguel Ángel López Solana arrived home to find that his brother, mother and father had been murdered. Both sons were photojournalists at the newspaper where their father was a columnist, writing about crime and political corruption. Within a month, another journalist at the paper was decapitated. A year later, four more journalists were murdered there in a single week. It’s not clear why they were killed, but Mr. López wasn’t going to wait around to find out.
“I just ran away, I ran away, I ran as far as I could, to where I could get lost in the black of night,” Mr.… Seguir leyendo »
Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Snyder v. Phelps, a case about the nature and scope of basic rights -- those of free speech vs. those of privacy. But this case is fundamentally about wrongs and the law's imperfect ability to redress them.
The facts of the case are well known. Matthew Snyder, a Marine lance corporal from Westminster, Md., was killed in the line of duty in Iraq in 2006. The Rev. Fred Phelps and members of his Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church traveled more than 1,000 miles to Maryland to picket his funeral and draw attention to their view that society and the military are too tolerant of homosexuality.… Seguir leyendo »
Utilizamos cookies para el correcto funcionamiento de la página web y analíticas para estadísticas.ACEPTARPolítica de privacidad
