Best speech flourishes when hate speech is allowed. As Nadine Strossen, civil liberties activist and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said, “hate speech laws are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive.” Strossen’s first premise is that in countries with stricter hate speech laws, there was a rise in racist hatred…
In a recent proposal to the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish National Party (SNP) has outlined new policies to enact “true equality” by regulating negative or critical speech of certain identity groups through legal punishment. This would mean that anyone whose open discourse, digital or otherwise, that happens to be critical of the reasoning for certain…
Facebook has had a pretty long list of banning people and censoring speech they don’t agree with. Now it seems they have censored the Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of the late and highly regarded evangelist Billy Graham. Graham took to Twitter last night to announce that he had been banned from posting on Facebook…
LISTEN TO TLR’S LATEST PODCAST: By Brett Chandrasekhar Back in April, New York Times opinion writer Ulrich Baer came out in favor of censorship by arguing it was compatible with free speech. Now, another NYT writer is also making the case for censorship laws, this time arguing that some forms of speech should be considered violence….
LISTEN TO TLR’S LATEST PODCAST: By Eric Lieberman An Austrian court ruled Friday that Facebook must remove certain forms of speech on the platform after the leader of the country’s official Green party was insulted in posts, according to a Monday report. The Austrian Green Party (also known as The Greens) initiated the legal complaint last…