All posts tagged: FREE SPEECH

The Founders Would Have Been Worried About TikTok

The Founders Would Have Been Worried About TikTok

Does Congress really have the power to force a sale of TikTok? Last week, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill that would require TikTok’s parent company, the Beijing-based ByteDance, to sell the U.S. version of TikTok to an American buyer within six months or have the app blocked. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but its early momentum seems to have genuinely shocked and dismayed many people, who see it as a xenophobic provocation, a performative-messaging bill, or the first step in a dangerous unwinding of a global, free internet. Underlying these somewhat confused critiques is a palpable sense of affront and bewilderment, a fierce instinct that something terribly wrong is afoot. In an era of globalization and free trade, the idea of the U.S. government blocking foreign ownership of a tech platform seems so extreme that there must be some darker explanation. But this intuition is mistaken. The idea that we must enact barriers to foreign-government surveillance and political interference is actually a very old one, …

Could a TikTok ban actually happen?

Could a TikTok ban actually happen?

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Efforts to crack down on TikTok are picking up momentum in Congress. What was once a Trump-led effort boosted by Republicans has since become a bipartisan priority for lawmakers hoping to look tough on China in an election year. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: New Momentum Efforts to ban TikTok in the United States—or at least to attempt to force the Chinese-founded company ByteDance to divest TikTok—have recently picked up momentum. What once seemed like a quixotic, Trumpian endeavor has now shaped into a congressional bill that a bipartisan House committee voted unanimously to advance last week. The bill’s pointed provisions, which will most likely be brought to a broader House vote this week, refer to TikTok by name and would force other large apps owned by foreign adversaries to sell to a domestic owner …

Protecting free speech on campus from attacks from both sides

Protecting free speech on campus from attacks from both sides

Greg Lukianoff has learned the value of defending free speech on college campuses from both sides of the aisle — sometimes to the anger of his own donors.   Lukianoff, the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), is the son of a Russian refugee and says first-generation immigrants from totalitarian regimes “really take seriously things like freedom of speech, because we came from places that didn’t have it.”  His organization has battled both conservatives and liberals over threats to the freedom of speech on campus, pushing back against both school policies and laws passed at the state level.   “The idea was partially to have a group that represented both the right and the left in its staff, so they were excited to hire me as the first legal director as a nice sort of counterbalance to the more conservative-leaning executive director, and so I joined in 2001,” Lukianoff said about his first days at FIRE.   He said his biggest early case — and one the organization knew would be “unpopular” — was …

After a teacher is removed for teaching about Gaza, who can Muslim students trust?

After a teacher is removed for teaching about Gaza, who can Muslim students trust?

(RNS) — It started with a WhatsApp notification on my phone from one of our local mosque groups sharing the news that a high school teacher near me in Deep Run, Virginia, outside Richmond, Virginia, had been recorded by a student as she spoke about the war in Gaza in class. It culminated in a contentious school board meeting during which numerous speakers called for the teacher, Catherine Massalha, who has been removed from teaching but is still working for the district, to be dismissed, while warning of an “infiltration of Hamas” in the area’s schools. Other parents, residents and students spoke up for Massalha, asking school officials to establish better policies about teaching complicated topics and to protect Muslim and other minority kids from bullying and discrimination. The story broke in late January, when the conservative Washington Examiner ran the 12-minute recording of Massalha, a history teacher, saying that Israel has committed war crimes in its military action in Gaza and that the United States is complicit in genocide. She also encouraged students to …

Dictators Used Sandvine Tech to Censor the Internet. The US Finally Did Something About It

Dictators Used Sandvine Tech to Censor the Internet. The US Finally Did Something About It

When the Egyptian government shut down the internet in 2011 to give itself cover to crush a popular protest movement, it was Nora Younis who got the word out. Younis, then a journalist with daily newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, found a working internet connection at the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis Hotel that overlooked Tahrir Square, the heart of the protests. From the balcony, she filmed as protesters were shot and run down with armored vehicles, posting the footage to the newspaper’s website, where it was picked up by global media. In 2016, with Egypt having slid back into the authoritarianism that prompted the uprising, Younis launched her own media platform, Al-Manassa, which combined citizen journalism with investigative reporting. The following year, Almanassa.com suddenly disappeared from the Egyptian internet, along with a handful of other independent publications. It was still available overseas, but domestic users couldn’t see it. Younis’ team moved their site to a new domain. That, too, was rapidly blocked, so they moved again and were blocked again. After three years and more than a dozen …

The Books Briefing: The Strangest Job in the World

The Books Briefing: The Strangest Job in the World

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. The role of first lady couldn’t be stranger. You attain the position almost by accident, simply by virtue of being married to the president, but then it comes with punishingly high expectations. The moment’s prevailing ideas about womanhood and marriage—right now, very confused and fluctuating ones—are projected onto the plus-one, who must conform or find some way out from under this burden. Katie Rogers’s new book about our most recent first ladies, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden, looks at exactly this struggle to play a part for which there is no longer any clear script to follow. “Every first lady in modern times has been a pathbreaker,” writes Helen Lewis in her essay on the book: Perhaps, she argues, none more so than … Melania Trump. Having largely ignored what a first lady is supposed to do—including not even living in the White House for a long stretch of time—Trump broke the …

The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning

The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning

By now, December’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point. The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with …

The One Internet Hack That Could Save Everything

The One Internet Hack That Could Save Everything

The impact on the public sphere has been, to say the least, substantial. In removing so much liability, Section 230 forced a certain sort of business plan into prominence, one based not on uniquely available information from a given service, but on the paid arbitration of access and influence. Thus, we ended up with the deceptively named “advertising” business model—and a whole society thrust into a 24/7 competition for attention. A polarized social media ecosystem. Recommender algorithms that mediate content and optimize for engagement. We have learned that humans are most engaged, at least from an algorithm’s point of view, by rapid-fire emotions related to fight-or-flight responses and other high-stakes interactions. In enabling the privatization of the public square, Section 230 has inadvertently rendered impossible deliberation between citizens who are supposed to be equal before the law. Perverse incentives promote cranky speech, which effectively suppresses thoughtful speech. And then there is the economic imbalance. Internet platforms that rely on Section 230 tend to harvest personal data for their business goals without appropriate compensation. Even when …