Essay 3
Minimum of 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Choice A
Watch Hasan Minhaj in The Patriot Act episode “Why the Internet Sucks” and develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the episode’s main theme.
Choice B
Watch John Oliver’s YouTube presentation about medical devices and develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the alleged abuses in the medical device industry.
Choice C
Read Ibram Kendi’s “What the Believers Are Denying” and agree or disagree with his contention that racism and global warming denial are rooted in the same psychologically flawed thinking.
Choice D
Read "It's Time to Confront the Threat of Right-Wing Terrorism" by John Cassidy in The New Yorker and "Does the banning of Alex Jones signal a new era of big tech responsibility?" by Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon in The Guardian and agree or disagree with the claim that big tech companies are morally obliged to censor right-wing white nationalist trolls such as Alex Jones. For another source, you can also use “Free Speech Scholars to Alex Jones: You’re Not Protected” by Alan Feuer.
Choice E
In the context of Jasmin Barmore’s essay “The Queen of Eating Shellfish Online,” develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the alleged benefits of mukbang, the glorification of binge-eating on a webcam.
Choice F
Read “Is Dentistry a Science?” by Ferris Jabr and refute or defend his claim that dentistry is rife with venality (greed) and corruption that compromises a patient’s best interests. For this assignment, you can consult “Dentists Need to Up Their Game” and “Is Your Dentist Ripping You Off?”
Choice G
Read Nick Hanauer’s “Better Schools Won’t Fix America” and refute or support the author’s contention that structural inequality, not schooling, is the root of America’s crisis.
Choice H
Read Andrew Marant’s “Free Speech Is Killing Us” and support or refute his claim that free speech does not apply to private companies.
Choice I
Read Allison Arieff’s “Cars Are Death Machines. Self-Driving Tech Won’t Change That” and support or refute her contention that self-driving cars are not the solution to traffic dangers.
Choice J
Read Judith Shulevitz’s essay “Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore,” and support or refute the author’s claim that lack of regular friendship bonding is having far outreaching destructive effects on society.
October 15 Essay 2 due on turnitin. We will watch Patriot Act episode “Why the Internet Sucks” and develop and argumentative thesis. We will also develop an argument about medical devices based on John Oliver’s video. Homework #10 for next class. Read Ibram Kendi’s “What the Believers Are Denying” and in 200 words agree or disagree with his contention that racism and global warming denial are rooted in the same psychologically flawed thinking.
October 17 Go over Ibram Kendi’s “What the Believers Are Denying.” Homework #11 for next class: Read "It's Time to Confront the Threat of Right-Wing Terrorism" by John Cassidy in The New Yorker and "Does the banning of Alex Jones signal a new era of big tech responsibility?" by Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon in The Guardian and in 200 words agree or disagree with the claim that big tech companies are morally obliged to censor right-wing white nationalist trolls such as Alex Jones.
October 22 Go over "It's Time to Confront the Threat of Right-Wing Terrorism" by John Cassidy in The New Yorker and "Does the banning of Alex Jones signal a new era of big tech responsibility?" by Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon in The Guardian and agree or disagree with the claim that big tech companies are morally obliged to censor right-wing white nationalist trolls such as Alex Jones. We will also read “Free Speech Scholars to Alex Jones: You’re Not Protected” by Alan Feuer. Homework #12: In the context of Jasmin Barmore’s essay “The Queen of Eating Shellfish Online,” develop an argumentative thesis of 22 words that addresses the alleged benefits of mukbang, the glorification of binge-eating on a webcam.
October 24 Go over Jasmin Barmore’s essay “The Queen of Eating Shellfish Online,” develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the alleged benefits of mukbang, the glorification of binge-eating on a webcam. Your homework #13 is to read “Is Dentistry a Science?” by Ferris Jabr and in 200 words refute or defend his claim that dentistry is rife with venality (greed) and corruption that compromises a patient’s best interests.
October 29 Go over “Is Dentistry a Science?” by Ferris Jabr and refute or defend his claim that dentistry is rife with venality (greed) and corruption that compromises a patient’s best interests. You can also consult “Dentists Need to Up Their Game” and “Is Your Dentist Ripping You Off?” Homework #14 is to read Nick Hanauer’s “Better Schools Won’t Fix America” and in 200 words explain the author’s argument.
October 31 Read Nick Hanauer’s “Better Schools Won’t Fix America” and refute or support the author’s contention that structural inequality, not schooling, is the root of America’s crisis.
November 5 Chromebook In-Class Objective: Write introduction and thesis paragraph.
November 7 Chromebook In-Class Objective: Write 3 supporting paragraphs, your counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, and your conclusion.
November 12 Essay 3 is due on turnitin.
Choice D
Read "It's Time to Confront the Threat of Right-Wing Terrorism" by John Cassidy in The New Yorker and "Does the banning of Alex Jones signal a new era of big tech responsibility?" by Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon in The Guardian and agree or disagree with the claim that big tech companies are morally obliged to censor right-wing white nationalist trolls such as Alex Jones. For another source, you can also use “Free Speech Scholars to Alex Jones: You’re Not Protected” by Alan Feuer.
Also see "No one's civil liberties are violated by a ban on the far-right Infowars" by Mike Segalov.
The Problem:
Primary
We are seeing an explosion of radicalization of violent Alt-Right racism from weaponized social media racist ideology that inspires killings as a form of virtue signaling to fellow racists.
Secondary
We are seeing a glut of unfounded conspiracy claims that Alt-Right racists use to fight against liberal democracies as they wish to push a white nationalist "caliphate" across the world.
From Cassidy:
Racist Violence Increase
These are just the most visible recent examples of the ongoing violence perpetrated by white supremacists and other right-wing nuts. “Right-wing extremists were linked to at least 50 extremist-related murders in the United States in 2018, making them responsible for more deaths than in any year since 1995,” the Anti-Defamation League noted in January. Even the Trump Administration’s own report, “National Strategy for Counterterrorism,” which was published last year, acknowledged that “domestic terrorism in the United States is on the rise,” and it cited “racially motivated extremism” as one of the causes.
Social Media Factor
Another factor, undoubtedly, is the role that social media plays in cultivating the growth and amplifying the impact of extremist groups. In this case, Tarrant not only inhaled hatred and bigotry from the online world: he also live-streamed his murderous attack on Facebook, and the giant social network didn’t even know about it until they were informed by the police in New Zealand. By that stage, the gruesome video had gone viral. “The attack was teased on Twitter, announced on the online message board 8chan and broadcast live on Facebook,” Kevin Roose, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote. “The footage was then replayed endlessly on YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, as the platforms scrambled to take down the clips nearly as fast as new copies popped up to replace them.”
Solutions
What can we do about all this? In the face of all the hatred, the violence, and the enabling digital technology, it is easy to feel helpless. But some things can be done. To begin with, as Simon Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, argued in a recent analysis, politicians from all parties, the President included, need to openly acknowledge the scale of the threat represented by right-wing terrorism, and to commit to tackling it in a number of different ways. One obvious step is to beef up the law-enforcement resources devoted to tracking right-wing extremism and investigating possible plots to carry out threats. In addition, the Trump Administration “needs to understand how overheated rhetoric—including the president’s own words—can lead to violence,” Clark wrote.
From Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon (parenthetical headings are my own)
(Trolls hide behind free speech argument when in fact their fake conspiracy theories are an attempt to kill the free speech of free discourse)
By moving beyond the knee-jerk framing of Jones’ removal as a free speech issue, we can view his de-platforming as an attempt to clean up the waters he has muddied with misinformation and hatred.
“It seems like the beginning of a recognition that platforms can ban hateful tactics, not just explicitly hateful speech; that they can protect public discourse by banning those who strategically work to sour [it],” said Tarleton Gillespie, author of Custodians of the Internet.
(We look at free speech in the framework of "good faith," sincere attempts at dialogue, and "bad actors" who are trying to make all speech confusing, chaotic and irrelevant by turning speech into a circus)
For too long, social media companies have policed their platforms as if users are either genuine and acting in good faith or bad actors who violate the rules.
(The troll's "playbook" is to make free speech impossible by sowing seeds of confusion)
These rules don’t apply to Jones, whose playbook is to foster distrust and confusion, shout people down and make meaningful public discourse impossible. He dressed inflammatory, false and cruel statements “sometimes as legitimate speech, mere theater at others, and his readers like and forward it like it’s the latest viral cat video”, Gillespie said.
“He produces the commodity that mimics what platforms want, and pretends to be the contribution they swear to protect,” he added.
“The ‘free speech’ outrage conveniently protects people like Alex, white rightwing conspiracy theorists that pose an actual, credible harm to many vulnerable communities like immigrants, Muslims, and transgender folks,” said Reem Suleiman, senior campaigner at SumOfUs.
(In addition to chaos, trolls promote violence)
One of Jones’s conspiracy theories to have stoked real world-violence is the notion that the left is planning a civil war against “patriots” like him.
“It’s really dangerous and contributing to a lot of these running street battles,” said Data & Society’s Joan Donovan, citing violence in Portland and Berkeley last weekend ahead of the anniversary of Charlottesville.
Facebook has already pledged to clamp down on misinformation that incites violence in places like Sri Lanka and India, but has so far been reluctant to do so on its own doorstep.
(Trolls are moral nihilists with no moral boundaries in harming the innocent and victims of tragedies)
Jones’s damage extends beyond the victims of his lies, such as the parents of Sandy Hook victims, to the people who believe what he says and “all of us” in society, argued Susan Benesch of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
“He has with various kinds of content caused various different kinds of harm,” Benesch said. “Egregiously false conspiracy theories are bad for the functioning of democracy. How many other people have gotten their ability to understand the world and distinguish fact from fiction degraded by Alex Jones?”
(That advertisers look at trolls such as Alex Jones as a liability gives us hope that cultural norms are still intact; but imagine a world in which Alex Jones becomes normal. That could spell the end of civilization as we know it.)
Despite Google and Facebook publicly stating they were removing Jones over hate speech, Jones was also becoming a liability in the eyes of advertisers, who did not want to be associated with his toxic brand of entertainment.
He might have garnered a large and engaged following, but that’s of no value to the platforms unless it can be monetized. This explains why Jones pivoted to peddling his own supplements, body armour and “prepper” gear for his imaginary civil war.
“We’re not talking about morality, we’re talking about capitalism,” said Whitney Phillips, an academic who researches online extremism and manipulation.
From "No one’s civil liberties are violated by a ban on the far-right Infowars" by
Parenthetical Headings Are Mine
(We already censor content based on moral standards, and since Alt-Right is an egregious violation of those standards, it should be censored from various platforms)
It’s time we accept that there’s no such thing as an impartial media, and that giving a platform to racists legitimises their ideas and language. When it comes to creating space for the far right, we can draw a red line.
All platforms, whether print, digital, broadcast or social, make active choices every day about the content they publish, produce and share. Television commissioners decide which documentaries or comedies make it to transmission, producers on news shows make a call as to who is invited on air. Every article has been through a commissioning and editing process. And that’s before we consider who hires whom; who’s the editor and the proprietor? On top of all this there are commercial interests. The same can be said for social media: algorithms, privacy policies, advertising and terms of use determine what we see when we scroll. Both social and traditional media decide which ideas to distribute, it’s as simple as that.
(Private companies enjoy profits of hate at their own peril and credibility)
That’s why it’s no affront to liberty if the likes of Apple, YouTube, Facebook and Spotify finally take a stand and kick Infowars off their platforms – even if there could have been greater transparency about the decision-making process. This isn’t a matter of private companies silencing voices or engaging in censorship, but deciding not to profit from hate.
(Giving hateful voices is not free speech; it's crying fire in a crowded theater)
Giving a platform to racists doesn’t just legitimise and amplify their voices; it has serious consequences offline too. A 2018 study by the University of Warwick is uncompromising: “Our findings suggest that social media has not only become a fertile soil for the spread of hateful ideas but also motivates real-life action.” One only need look to Infowars’ founder Jones’s part in spreading the Pizzagate conspiracy theory: a case in which fake news stories claiming that Hillary Clinton oversaw a child abuse ring at a Washington DC restaurant led to an incident with a gunman. It wasn’t long ago that Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered. Islamophobic incidents are at an all time high.
From Alan Feuer
(Alex Jones defenders cry free speech, but Alex Jones' behavior is not protected from the First Amendment)
Not long after several of the country’s biggest tech firms — namely Apple, Facebook and Google — kicked the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones off their various online platforms, Mr. Jones’s allies complained that he had been deprived of his First Amendment rights to free speech.
“Social media goes Gestapo!” wrote Bill Mitchell, a conservative Twitter personality with 366,000 followers, on Monday evening.
“The great censorship purge has truly begun,” warned Paul Joseph Watson, a contributor to Mr. Jones’s website, Infowars.
And in his own message on Twitter, one platform that hasn’t removed his content, Mr. Jones asked: “Now, who will stand against Tyranny and who will stand for free speech?”
The removal of Mr. Jones and Infowars came after months of mounting pressure on technology companies to tackle the spread of misinformation online. Mr. Jones and Infowars have for years used social media to push unfounded conspiracy theories. On Sunday, Apple removed five of the six Infowars podcasts on its popular Podcasts app and by Monday Facebook and Google’s YouTube had followed with similar measures.
But this isn’t the only effort to stop Mr. Jones from spreading his theories. He also faces multiple defamation claims, and well before Monday’s moves, several scholars of free speech had already concluded that many of the things he has said online were not in fact protected by the First Amendment.
In a recent court filing, four law professors who specialize in free-speech issues said that Mr. Jones’s oeuvre was riddled with “absurd conspiracy theories” and urged a federal judge considering a lawsuit against him not to let him hide behind the First Amendment while publishing his rhetoric.
“False speech does not serve the public interest the way that true speech does,” the scholars wrote. “And indeed, there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.”
(First Amendment scholars are studying Alex Jones' claims of free speech and in Jones' favor)
The filing — an amicus, or friend of the court, brief — was submitted in June in the case of Brennan Gilmore, a former State Department official and Democratic Party activist who attended last summer’s violent far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Mr. Gilmore, 39, was on the street on Aug. 12 when James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing a woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring several others.
After Mr. Gilmore posted a video of the episode online and spoke about it repeatedly to the media, Mr. Jones published his own video on Infowars, accusing him in a rambling jeremiad of being a plant from the Central Intelligence Agency employed by the billionaire George Soros.
In a breathless moment (“I mean, it’s like, whoa, whoa — C.I.A.?”), Mr. Jones went on to suggest that Mr. Gilmore may have been involved in the attack on Ms. Heyer to bring about what he described as “the downfall of Trump.”
In March, Mr. Gilmore sued Mr. Jones for defamation, arguing that he had suffered threats and harassment because of the report.
Mr. Jones is also facing defamation lawsuits filed by the parents of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut for claiming the attack was an elaborate hoax. But the Gilmore suit is the first against Mr. Jones in which a judge, Norman K. Moon of Federal District Court in Charlottesville, has directly sought the opinion of First Amendment scholars.
In defending himself, Mr. Jones has claimed in court papers that his allegations concerning Mr. Gilmore were “opinion, not statements of fact” and that Infowars is a “freewheeling” website, “in which hyperbole and diatribe reign as the preferred tools of discourse.” His viewers, Mr. Jones maintained, “expect an interview or monologue to be more free-flowing and opinionated and less precise in its use of language than an article or a book.”
While they acknowledged that the protection of speech is “a priority of the first order,” the First Amendment scholars, from institutions like Rutgers University and the University of Chicago Law School, noted that since the Middle Ages defamation law has created “social boundaries about what speech is and is not acceptable.” It has also, they wrote, long sought to balance the freedom of expression with the safeguarding of people’s reputations.
To do this, the scholars said, defamation statutes have always restricted some speech — especially for private figures like Mr. Gilmore, who have less of an ability than those like Mr. Jones with media platforms to “disseminate their own side of the story.”
The scholars were particularly scathing when it came to Mr. Jones’s contention that his videos on Infowars reflected nothing more than his beliefs. It would set a dangerous precedent, they said, if Judge Moon ruled on his behalf.
“It would allow unscrupulous news organizations to couch their language as ‘opinion’ and to mask their meaning with implication and insinuation,” the scholars wrote. That, they added, would leave “readers clear as to the message but avoiding all liability for defamatory remarks. This should not be allowed and, in fact, is not allowed.”
The law professors who signed the amicus brief were Lyrissa B. Lidsky, dean of the University of Missouri School of Law, Tamara R. Piety at the University of Tulsa College of Law, David A. Strauss from the University of Chicago Law School, and Carlos A. Ball of Rutgers.
The brief was also signed by Michael B. Hissam, a lawyer at the firm of Bailey & Glasser in Charleston, W.Va., who is amicus counsel for Mr. Gilmore, and Katharine M. Mapes and Katherine O’Konski, lawyers at the firm of Spiegel & McDiarmid in Washington.
From "How Social-Media Trolls Turned U.C. Berkeley into a Free Speech Circus" by Andrew Marantz
(Trolls and Alt-Right Pose Free Speech Crisis on College Campuses)
Fifty-three years later, the mood on campus was distinctly less celestial. Like the agitation throughout the country, the agitation at Berkeley had many long-roiling causes, but its proximate cause was easy to identify: a right-wing professional irritant named Milo Yiannopoulos. A former Breitbart editor and a self-proclaimed “Internet supervillain,” he was known less for his arguments than for his combative one-liners and protean, peroxide-blond hair. Another word for “Internet supervillain” is “troll,” and, whenever too many news cycles passed without any mention of him, Yiannopoulos showed up somewhere unexpected, such as the White House press briefing room or a left-leaning college campus, hoping to provoke a reaction.
In the process, he convinced his supporters that he should be a poster child for campus free speech, a principle that is universally lauded in theory but vexingly thorny in practice. In the 2017-18 academic year, Politico reported, an unusually large number of universities struggled “to balance their commitment to free speech—which has been challenged by alt-right supporters of President Donald Trump—with campus safety.” One expert on campus life called this “the No. 1 topic of the year.” Many college administrators were forced to devote their scarce time and money to securing on-campus venues for pugnacious right-wing speakers such as Ann Coulter and David Horowitz; arch-conservative policy entrepreneurs such as Heather Mac Donald and Charles Murray; and avowed racists such as Richard Spencer. These are names that a lot of Americans would prefer to forget. All of these figures hold views that are divisive, or worse. Yet this is precisely what makes them useful test cases. The Supreme Court’s most important First Amendment opinions often concern the lowliest forms of human expression: a burning cross, a homophobic slur, a “bong hits 4 jesus” banner.
(When does danger to others take priority over free speech?)
The last stop on his tour, on February 1, 2017, was U.C. Berkeley, the nation’s preëminent public university, in one of its most proudly left-leaning cities. A week before Yiannopoulos’s arrival, the U.C. system had reaffirmed its promise to protect undocumented students from arrest and deportation. In response, Yiannopoulos called for Berkeley’s administrators to be criminally prosecuted. There were rumors that he planned to name undocumented students from the stage, alerting Immigration and Customs Enforcement to their presence. There was little that administrators could do. At a public institution, cancelling a speech because of what the speaker might say is called prior restraint, and the courts have generally deemed it unconstitutional.
On the afternoon of the event, fifteen hundred protesters amassed on Sproul Plaza. Some called themselves Antifa, for “anti-Fascist,” a loose collective of far-left vigilantes who draw inspiration from the European anarchist tradition. A few protesters, wearing black clothing and bandannas or masks over their faces, hurled metal police barricades through a plate-glass window of Berkeley’s student center; someone set fire to a lighting rig, and flames leaped several stories into the air. A Berkeley student, wearing a red hat that said “Make Bitcoin Great Again,” was interviewed by a local news crew as the mayhem escalated behind her. “I’m looking to just make a statement by being here, and I think the protesters are doing the same,” she said. “And props to them, for the ones who are doing it nonviolently.” Moments later, a masked protester ran up and pepper-sprayed her in the face.
Police evacuated Yiannopoulos from campus before he could speak. The next morning, the riot was the lead story on “Fox & Friends.” The show’s most prominent fan, Donald Trump, who had been President for less than two weeks, tweeted, “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - no federal funds?” The whole spectacle was such a boon to Yiannopoulos’s brand that some left-wing conspiracy theorists wondered whether he had hired the masked protesters himself.
(When does free speech dissolve into violence and unjustified censorship?)
Whether a sophist like Milo Yiannopoulos may speak at a public university like Berkeley is less a question of what the law is than of what the law should be. The Supreme Court has been consistent, during the past half century or so, in its broad interpretation of the First Amendment. “Speech can’t be prevented simply because it’s offensive, even if it’s very deeply offensive,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law and the co-author of a book called “Free Speech on Campus,” told me one morning in his office. He grimaced sympathetically as he talked, like a doctor delivering bad news. “I would argue that it’s generally a good idea to protect speech we don’t like, even when we’re not legally obligated to do so, but in this case we are.”
Voltaire, anti-Semite and sage of the Enlightenment, is credited with the aphorism “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Chemerinsky, arguably the foremost First Amendment scholar in the country, believes, in the Voltairean tradition, that free speech is the bedrock of a free society. I asked him about the Antifa activists who had vowed to shut down Yiannopoulos’s events by any means necessary. “Violence is never protected by the Constitution,” he said. “And preventing the speech of others, even by using one’s own speech, is called the heckler’s veto, and it is not protected, either.”
(Extremists on both the Right and Left lack critical thinking and nuance to discuss free speech)
On talk radio and social media, many free-speech advocates lack Chemerinsky’s judiciousness. Some answer every challenge with a recitation of the First Amendment, as if its forty-five words were a magic spell that could settle any debate. Free-speech skeptics on the left can be equally predisposed to bad-faith arguments—misreading or ignoring the Constitution, dismissing the concept of free speech as inherently racist, or simply bypassing discourse and setting public property on fire.
(We must always weigh free speech against the interests of equality, so the answer is never going to be simple or easy.)
There are better arguments. “No one is disputing how the courts have ruled on this,” john a. powell, a Berkeley law professor with joint appointments in the departments of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies, told me. “What I’m saying is that courts are often wrong.” Powell is tall, with a relaxed sartorial style, and his manner of speaking is soft and serenely confident. Before he became an academic, he was the national legal director of the A.C.L.U. “I represented the Ku Klux Klan when I was in that job,” he said. “My family was not pleased with me, but I said, ‘Look, they have First Amendment rights, too.’ So it’s not that I don’t understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?”
(The idea of absolute free speech is a myth.)
Yiannopoulos and many of his defenders like to call themselves free-speech absolutists, but this is hyperbole. No one actually believes that all forms of expression are protected by the First Amendment. False advertising, child pornography, blackmail—all are speech, all are illegal. You’re not allowed to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, make a “true threat,” or incite imminent violence. These are all exceptions to the First Amendment that the Supreme Court has made—made up, really—over time. The boundaries can and do shift. In 1940, a New Hampshire man was jailed for calling a city marshal “a damned Fascist.” The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, ruling that the words were not protected by the First Amendment, because they were “fighting words,” which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
Are some of Yiannopoulos’s antics—say, his attempts to intimidate undocumented and transgender students—closer to fighting words than to intellectual discourse? Maybe. But the fighting-words doctrine has fallen out of favor with the courts. In 2006, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed a soldier’s funeral, carrying signs that read “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “You’re going to Hell.” Even factoring in almost seven decades of epithet inflation, this would seem more injurious than “damned Fascist.” And yet the Supreme Court ruled that the signs were protected by the First Amendment.
(Protecting women's rights in the workplace led to a refutation that in the world of free speech, anything goes.)
In the nineteen-seventies, when women entered the workplace in large numbers, some male bosses made salacious comments, or hung pornographic images on the walls. “These days, we’d say, ‘That’s a hostile workplace, that’s sexual harassment,’ ” powell said. “But those weren’t recognized legal concepts yet. So the courts’ response was ‘Sorry, nothing we can do. Pornographic posters are speech. If women don’t like it, they can put up their own posters.’ ” He drew an analogy to today’s trolls and white supremacists. “The knee-jerk response is ‘Nothing we can do, it’s speech.’ ‘Well, hold on, what about the harm they’re causing?’ ‘What harm? It’s just words.’ That might sound intuitive to us now. But, if you know the history, you can imagine how our intuitions might look foolish, even immoral, a generation later.”
(Trolls use their "right" to speak on college campuses to get easy attention.)
Yiannopoulos is not the only orator who has figured out that a speaking gig at a public university, especially in the face of fierce ideological opposition, is an easy way to attract an audience. “My college tour began after the victory by Donald Trump,” Richard Spencer, a proponent of “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” said in a recent YouTube video. “I loved it. I thought it was a great success, and so did most everyone else.” Such speakers often portray themselves as soldiers for free speech, but more often they use the First Amendment as a convenient shield.
(Can we censor speech on the basis that some speech is a "trigger" than can cause PTSD?)
I asked john powell what he thought about the rhetorical tactic of conflating speech with bodily harm. “Consider the classic liberal justification for free speech,” he said. “ ‘Your right to throw punches ends at the tip of my nose.’ This is taken to mean that speech can never cause any kind of injury. But we have learned a lot about the brain that John Stuart Mill didn’t know. So these students are asking, ‘Given what we now know about stereotype threat and trauma and P.T.S.D., where is the tip of our nose, exactly?’ ”
(Is the Right exaggerating the censorship of speech on campus?)
Recently, on Fox News, Ben Shapiro said, “Everything has been deemed hate speech on campus. . . . There is a big part of the left—and it’s growing—that says that it is incumbent to protect the campus from ideas that are dissenting.” This premise has become commonplace, even among liberals, but the evidence is mixed. One study, from 2015, did find that forty per cent of millennials, a greater proportion than in any other age group, would want the government to be able to censor speech that is “offensive to minority groups.” But another study, conducted the following year, found that only twenty-two per cent of college students wanted universities to ban offensive speech—a lower proportion than in the rest of the American adult population. In March, a political scientist named Jeffrey Sachs analyzed the most recent data, broken down by age. In conclusion, he tweeted, “There is no campus free speech crisis, the kids are all right, those that say otherwise have lost all perspective, and the real crisis may be elsewhere.”
(Some are making the argument that free speech laws need to be revised in the digital age when hateful sociopathic performance artist trolls can weaponize hate and chaos on social media platforms.)
Carol Christ told me that the events of the past academic year hadn’t changed her faith in the First Amendment, but that they had made her wonder how an eighteenth-century text should be interpreted in the twenty-first century. “Speech is fundamentally different in the digital context,” she said. “I don’t think the law, or the country, has even started to catch up with that yet.” The University of California had done everything within its legal power to let Yiannopoulos speak without allowing him to hijack Berkeley’s campus. It was a qualified success that came at a steep price, in marred campus morale and in dollars—nearly three million, all told. “These aren’t easy problems,” Brown told me. “But I don’t think it’s beyond us to say, on the one hand, that everyone has a right to express their views, and, on the other hand, that a political provocateur may not use a university campus as his personal playground, especially if it bankrupts the university. At some point, when some enormous amount of money has been spent, it has to be possible to say, O.K. Enough.”
Choice D
Read "It's Time to Confront the Threat of Right-Wing Terrorism" by John Cassidy in The New Yorker and "Does the banning of Alex Jones signal a new era of big tech responsibility?" by Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon in The Guardian and agree or disagree with the claim that big tech companies are morally obliged to censor right-wing white nationalist trolls such as Alex Jones. For another source, you can also use “Free Speech Scholars to Alex Jones: You’re Not Protected” by Alan Feuer.
Also see "No one's civil liberties are violated by a ban on the far-right Infowars" by Mike Segalov.
Suggested Outline
Paragraph 1: Explain the tension between the fight to protect free speech on one hand and the fight to protect democracy and freedom on the other.
Paragraph 2: Develop an argument that supports or refutes the notion that social media outlets have a moral responsibility to deplatform--in essence censor--racist bad actor trolls such as Alex Jones who not so much contributing to debate as much as they are gaslighting the community with disingenuous conspiracies, attention-getting magic tricks, and flagrant self-promotion, much of which threatens human lives and democracy itself.
Your supporting paragraphs might address some of the following:
One. We are seeing an explosion of radicalization of violent Alt-Right racism from weaponized social media racist ideology that inspires killings as a form of virtue signaling to fellow racists. Therefore, such speech should be deplatformed.
Two. We are seeing a glut of unfounded conspiracy claims that Alt-Right racists use to fight against liberal democracies as they wish to push a white nationalist "caliphate" across the world. Thus, such speech should be deplatformed.
Three. Trolls hide behind free speech argument when in fact their fake conspiracy theories are an attempt to kill the free speech of free discourse, so these trolls use speech to kill free speech; therefore, they are hypocrites that need to be deplatformed.
Four. We already censor content based on moral standards, and since Alt-Right is an egregious violation of those standards, it should be censored from various platforms.
Five. The idea of absolute free speech is a myth. Speech that is the equivalent of "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is criminal behavior.
Six. Free speech laws need to be revised in the digital age when hateful sociopathic performance artist trolls can weaponize hate and chaos on social media platforms.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal.
Counterarguments might be the following:
One. Once we censor Alex Jones, we create a slippery slope. Where does censorship stop? What if a non-troll is labeled a troll?
Two. We cultivate snowflakes who can cry "trigger" and "PTSD," especially on college campuses, whenever someone posts something on social media that they disagree with.
Paragraph 8: Your conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
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