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Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made. But if they are made poorly, both are bad for you.

An Iowa House member has introduced a bill that would penalize school districts if they teach history using any information from something called the 1619 Project. That curriculum was developed to re-examine slavery in the United States, and it contains some harsh realities not otherwise taught.

For example, were you taught that, The 1664 General Assembly of Maryland decreed that all Negroes within the province shall serve durante vita, hard labor for life. This enslavement would be sustained by the threat of brutal punishment. By 1729, Maryland law authorized punishments of enslaved people including to have the right hand cut off ... the head severed from the body, the body divided into four quarters, and head and quarters set up in the most public places of the county.?

This is true, but if a teacher uses this information from the project, House File 222 would cut their schools funding. The bill also applies to any similarly developed curriculum. In other words, Even if I havent seen it, its bad.

Beyond the obvious Constitutional problems with the bill, it is unenforceable. Who decides if particular information came from the 1619 Project; who decides if a curriculum is similar? This is nothing but censorship of thought.

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew said, Freedom of speech is useless without freedom of thought, and Alan Dershowitz who represented President Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial has said freedom of speech means that the government cannot pick and choose which expressions to authorize and which to prevent.

If you disagree with speech, you dont ban it; you present opposing views. The Iowa Constitution says plainly that, No law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech ...

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More than 40 groups have officially objected to the bill, and during a subcommittee hearing on Feb. 9 there were many thoughtful statements in opposition. The representative brushed those comments aside, spent 10 of the hearings 60 minutes reading a statement with his thoughts on the politics of the 1619 Project, and never engaged in a meaningful discussion of the pros and cons of the bill.

What was most telling was the fact he never mentioned one constituent, one Iowan who had raised concerns about the project.

Instead, he relied on national opponents of the project who had their views published in places such as the World Socialist website.

Its a good bet that if you were in the Sioux Center Fareway the night before a big blizzard, you could throw a stone and not hit anyone who had ever even heard of the 1619 Project before it became this legislators pet project.

He also has a bill that would make Black market sales of handguns legal. Now, if a drug dealer sells a handgun to another drug dealer who doesnt have a gun permit, thats a felony for both of them. His bill eliminates that crime.

And then theres his attempt to pass a law about how many toilets a bar has to have. Theres more, but thats enough.

Someone needs to take this representative aside and say Look, you dont have to present a bill just because you can. You dont have to be a bully just because you have a bully pulpit.

Small minds make bad laws ... and bad laws get in the way of good ones.

The legislature has only two more months to finish its work.

In the month its been in session, it has passed only a handful of bills and resolutions, including to give Coast Guard members the same rights given other military members, modify the disorderly conduct statute dealing with loud and raucous noise, allow more consumer accounts to be billed for service charges, deal with remote education, and propose a constitutional amendment dealing with firearms.

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Meanwhile, the Legislative Services Agency had to draft HF 222, opponents of the bill had to respond to the bill, and there was a one-hour hearing all wasted on an unconstitutional, unenforceable bill because someone thinks they are better qualified to decide what to teach than trained educators and the Department of Education.

We dont watch sausage being made because we trust the sausage-maker to do their job right and to give us a good and safe product. We should be able to expect the same from the Iowa Legislature.

Bob Teig was a career federal prosecutor in Cedar Rapids for 32 years before he retired in 2011.

Original post:
Iowa's proposed '1619 Project' ban is a censorship of thought - The Gazette

Under new draft laws, the eSafety Commissioner could order your nude selfies, sex education or slash fiction to be taken down from the internet with just 24 hours notice.

Officially, the Morrison governments new bill aims to improve online safety.

But in doing so, it gives broad, discretionary powers to the commissioner, with serious ramifications for anyone who engages with sexual content online.

After initial consultation in 2019, the federal government released the draft online safety bill last December. Public submissions closed on the weekend.

The bill contains several new initiatives, from cyberbullying protections for children to new ways to remove non-consensual intimate imagery.

Crucially, it gives the eSafety Commissioner a federal government appointee a range of new powers.

It contains rapid website-blocking provisions to prevent the circulation of abhorrent violent material (such as live-streaming terror attacks). It reduces the timeframe for takedown notices (where a hosting provider is directed to remove content) from 48 to 24 hours. It can also require search engines to delete links and app stores to prevent downloads, with civil penalties of up to $111,000 for non-compliance.

But one concerning element of the bill that has not received wide public attention is its takedown notices for so-called harmful online content.

Due to the impracticality of classifying the entire internet, regulators are now moving towards systems that require access restrictions for certain content and make use of user complaints to identify harmful material.

In this vein, the proposed bill will require online service providers to use technologies to prevent children gaining access to sexual material.

Read more: Coalition plans to improve online safety don't address the root cause of harms: the big tech business model

Controversially, the bill gives the commissioner power to impose their own specific restricted access system.

This means the commissioner could decide that, to access sexual content, users must upload their identity documents, scan their fingerprints, undergo facial recognition technology or have their age estimated by artificial intelligence based on behavioural signals.

But there are serious issues with online verification systems. This has already been considered and abandoned by similar countries. The United Kingdom dropped its plans in 2019, following implementation difficulties and privacy concerns.

The worst-case scenario here is governments collect databases of peoples sexual preferences and browsing histories that can be leaked, hacked, sold or misused.

The bill also creates an online content scheme, which identifies content that users can complain about.

The bill permits any Australian internet user to make complaints about class 1 and class 2 content that is not subject to a restricted access system. These categories are extremely broad, ranging from actual, to simulated, to implied sexual activity, as well as explicit nudity.

In practice, people can potentially complain about any material depicting sex that they find on the internet, even on specific adult sites, if there is no mechanism to verify the users age.

The draft laws then allow the commissioner to conduct investigations and order removal notices as they think fit. There are no criteria for what warrants removal, no requirement to give reasons, and no process for users to be notified or have opportunity to respond to complaints.

Without the requirement to publish transparent enforcement data, the commissioner can simply remove content that is neither harmful nor unlawful and is specifically exempt from liability for damages or civil proceedings.

This means users will have little clarity on how to actually comply with the scheme.

The potential ramifications of the bill are broad. They are likely to affect sex workers, sex educators, LGBTIQ health organisations, kink communities, online daters, artists and anyone who shares or accesses sexual content online.

While previous legislation was primarily concerned with films, print publications, computer games and broadcast media, this bill applies to social media, instant messaging, online games, websites, apps and a range of electronic and internet service providers.

It means links to sex education and harm reduction material for young people could be deleted by search engines. Hook up apps such as Grindr or Tinder could be made unavailable for download. Escort advertising platforms could be removed. Online kink communities like Fetlife could be taken down.

The legislation could embolden users - including anti-pornography advocates, disgruntled customers or ex-partners - to make vexatious complaints about sexual content, even where there is nothing harmful about it.

The complaints system is also likely to have a disproportionate impact on sex workers, especially those who turned to online work during the pandemic, and who already face a high level of malicious complaints.

Sex workers consistently report restrictive terms of service as well as shadowbanning and deplatforming, where their content is stealthily or selectively removed from social media.

Read more: How the 'National Cabinet of Whores' is leading Australia's coronavirus response for sex workers

The requirement for service providers to restrict childrens access to sexual content also provides a financial incentive to take an over-zealous approach. Providers may employ artificial intelligence at scale to screen and detect nudity (which can confuse sex education with pornography), apply inappropriate age verification mechanisms that compromise user privacy, or, where this is too onerous or expensive, take the simpler route of prohibiting sexual content altogether.

In this sense, the bill may operate in a similar way to United States FOSTA-SESTA anti-trafficking legislation, which prohibits websites from promoting or facilitating prostitution. This resulted in the pre-emptive closure of essential sites for sex worker safety, education and community building.

Platforms have been notoriously poor when it comes to dealing with sexual content. But governments have not been any better.

We need new ways to think about moderating sexual content.

Historically, obscenity legislation has treated all sexual content as if it was lacking in value unless it was redeemed by literary, artistic or scientific merit. Our current classification framework of offensiveness is also based on outdated notions of morality, decency and propriety.

Read more: The ChatterleyTrial 60 years on: a court case that secured free expression in 1960s Britain

Research into sex and social media suggests we should not simply conflate sex with risk.

Instead, some have proposed human rights approaches. These draw on a growing body of literature that sees sexual health, pleasure and satisfying sexual experiences as compatible with bodily autonomy, safety and freedom from violence.

Others have pointed to the need for improved sex education, consent skills and media literacy to equip users to navigate online space.

Whats obvious is we need a more nuanced approach to decision-making that imagines sex beyond harm, thinks more comprehensively about safer spaces, and recognises the cultural value in sexual content.

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A new online safety bill could allow censorship of anyone who engages with sexual content on the internet - The Conversation AU

Contact:Hadar Harris, Executive DirectorStudent Press Law Center(202) 549-6316 /hharris@splc.org

Student Journalists Celebrate 3rd Annual Student Press Freedom Day on Feb. 26

Washington, D.C. In anticipation of the 3rd annualStudent Press Freedom DayonFriday, Feb. 26th, the Student Press Law Center released a white paper today detailing a continuing pattern of censorship of student journalists by school officials across the country.Student Journalists in 2020: Journalism Against the Odds notes that, despite incredible challenges students faced, they produced top-quality reporting on the most important safety, health and political issues of our day.

Examples detailed in the white paper include:

Student journalists, like professional journalists, provide an essential, constitutionally-protected service to their communities and should be recognized and fully supported for the service they provide in gathering and delivering vital information on issues of concern to the public, said Hadar Harris, executive director of the Student Press Law Center.The troubling trends we observed over the past year reinforce the need to ensure legal protections for student journalists in all 50 states.

The theme for Student Press Freedom Day 2021 isJournalism Against the Odds,in acknowledgment of the important news coverage student journalists have produced, despite being faced with incredible challenges. In addition to outright censorship, student journalists worked against odds that included prior review, lack of access to critical data, suppression of or discipline for unflattering or controversial photos or other news coverage, assault and harassment during public gatherings, budget cuts, and an abrupt shift to an all-virtual newsroom and all-online business model. Furthermore, they faced the continuing scourge of a legal system that, following the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decisionHazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, has created an exemption for student free speech rights as it relates to student journalists, allowing overzealous school administrators to assert their power to censor broadly.

As the only reporters with a front row seat to the challenge of safe schooling in 2020, student journalists like me had a unique perspective on the experience of the nearly 73 million students who were forced to move suddenly to remote learning in spring 2020 and the impact this had on our families and communities, said Neha Madhira, sophomore at the University of Texas, Austin and reporter at theDaily Texan. Beyond our COVID-19 reporting, we have helped curate an important discussion about racial justice and systemic racism on our campuses and communities, and we took physical risks to cover protests in our communities, often being targeted by law enforcement because of our role as journalists. We student journalists must be allowed to do our jobs without undue interference.

As part of Student Press Freedom Day, SPLC has curated21 examples of impactful, important student journalism, focused on reporting on the impact of COVID-19, reckoning with racial justice, overcoming censorship and more. The stories represent work by both high school and college journalists with diverse backgrounds and from geographically diverse schools. These stories represent some of the very best in student journalism.

A critical part of Student Press Freedom Day is students sharing their stories with mainstream media outlets, lawmakers, and their peers about the incredible odds they have faced in the past year to carry out their work. More than 100 student journalists took part this month in anop-ed writing boot camp with veteran CNN & New York Times Journalist Steven A. Holmesabout how to craft and place an op-ed, and nearly half of the participants are working with a professional coach to support their efforts.

In addition, with legislative sessions underway, students are advocating withNew Voices chaptersin their states and testifying before education and judiciary committees for proposedchanges to state law that will protect student press freedom. They are creating and sharing video testimonials on social media about the challenges they face as student journalists and spreading the word using the hashtag#StudentPressFreedom. They are participating in astudent-moderated town hall forumabout how to strengthen student press freedom moving forward. They are hostinggroup screenings and discussions ofRaise Your Voice, a documentary about how the student journalists at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL navigated their school mass shooting as both survivors and journalists.

Student Press Freedom Day is co-sponsored by more than 15 organizations, including the Journalism Education Association, the College Media Association, The Associated Collegiate Press, the National Scholastic Press Association, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and more.

In the past year, readership of student newspapers significantly increased in many places, underscoring the important role student media plays in the community in times of crisis and moments of historic significance, said Hadar Harris. As student press freedom faced unparalleled challenges in 2020, the movement to support it continues to grow.

About Student Press Freedom Day

The Student Press Law Center launched Student Press Freedom Day in 2019 to raise awareness of the vital work and impact of student journalists, highlight the censorship and prior review challenges student journalists face, and underscore the importance of journalism education. It is a national day of action which activates and empowers student journalists to assert their right to student press freedom.

About the Student Press Law Center

The Student Press Law Center (SPLC.org,@splc) is an independent, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit working at the intersection of law, journalism and education to support, promote and defend the rights of student journalists and their advisers at the high school and college levels. SPLC has the nations only free legal hotline for student journalists. Based in Washington, D.C., the Student Press Law Center provides information, training and legal assistance at no charge to student journalists and the educators who work with them

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Censorship of Student Journalists Persists Despite their Essential Role Reporting on COVID, Protests, Racial Justice and Elections, New White Paper...

One hundred years ago on Sunday, a decision by a lowly New York court had the effect of banning James Joyces Ulysses in the United States. In the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses, set on Sandymount Strand, Leopold Bloom masturbates as Gerty MacDowell lets him glimpse her legs. Serialised in The Little Review, a literary magazine, this caught the attention of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The magazines publishers were duly convicted of obscenity and fined $50; no other legitimate American publisher would risk taking on Ulysses for more than a decade.

In the meantime, mores were changing. In 1932, Random House imported a single copy of Ulysses and arranged for US Customs to seize it. The resulting court case ended in a famous victory when Judge John Munro Woolsey, who had spent months studying the novel, found that Ulysses was not obscene. Random House were free to import it; and, by implication, to print it.

It is easy to laugh, now, at the prudishness of Joyces moralising persecutors; it is less easy to apply a lesson from their eventual defeat. That lesson might seem to be that, as Judge Woolsey put it during the latter case, ideas ought to take their chances in the marketplace; but the idea of untrammelled freedom of expression has come under new strain in this age of social media, exemplified in the belated, clumsy attempts of the platforms to censor Donald Trump.

The Woolsey decision was less about the principle of freedom of expression than about a changing understanding of the balance to be struck between that freedom and the constraints that were acknowledged to be necessary upon it. Woolsey found that, although the effect of Ulysses on the reader could be emetic, or vomit-inducing, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac; had it done so, it would still have been obscene. A hundred years from now, perhaps people will look back and laugh at our fumbling attempts to censor online speech. We can only hope that we wont have to wait a further decade to find the right balance between constraint and freedom.

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The Irish Times view on the banning of Ulysses: lessons on censorship - The Irish Times

PHILADELPHIA, PA Freedom of expression is among the most important civil liberties enjoyed by members of a free society. By allowing these members to question authority, freedom of expression enables a community to check itself, to make sure that the ship is pointed in the right direction and to course-correct if needed. Not only is it vital for maintaining a healthy diversity of views and opinions, but it also allows peopleincluding journaliststo stand in the public square and share ideas and information with their fellow citizens.

Over the past year, and particularly over the past several months, we have seen more and more instances of major tech companies suppressing peoples speech through censorship, eroding their ability to express themselves by revoking access to this public square.

For example, mid-October, Twitter and Facebook coordinated a campaign to censor a New York Post article that exposed emails obtained from a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, President Joe Bidens son. The two companies took steps to limit the spread of the story by warning users that the article may contain unsafe material and locking the Post out of its own Twitter account.

Regardless of whether the article which thus far has not been debunked, and parts of which have been corroborated contains truly critical information or not, it was (and may still be) an important and legitimate news story. For Twitter and Facebook to try to shut down the story in the run-up to a major presidential election was grossly irresponsible, and it shows a concerning willingness to silence journalists in the name of safety.

During a Senate hearing on censorship involving Facebook, Google and Twitter in late October, it was revealed that Google had been suppressing content from the World Socialist Website in its search results. The revelation backs up a 2019 Wall Street Journal investigation that detailed the use of algorithms by Google to alter users search results. It also reconfirms suspicions that the tech giant has been effectively censoring WSWS articlessuch as its critical coverage of the New York Times 1619 Projectdating as far back as 2017.

While using algorithms to dictate search results may make search engines more efficient and convenient for users, it also makes it much easier to manipulate results so that they suppress certain viewpoints or information. If people who rely heavily on the Internet for news or research (as, I assume, most of us do) are only exposed to select viewpoints and publications, it is far more difficult to determine facts and gain a well-rounded understanding of the world we live in.

In another instance, YouTube announced in December that it would begin removing videos and accounts of users claiming that there was widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election and questioning the results.

It is highly unlikely that the election was stolen, and the lawsuits (pushed by both Donald Trump and his allies) to overturn the results have flopped. However, YouTubes decision to block this content limits users ability to assess the information presented and decide for themselves what they believe, in addition to further entrenching the beliefs of those convinced the election was stolen.

In the United States, free speech is often referenced in tandem with the First Amendment, which guarantees American citizens the right to freedom of religion, expression, assembly and petition by preventing Congress from restricting any one of these actions in public forums. But freedom of speech is more than just a law as defined under the First Amendment; it is a core tenet of liberal philosophy that promotes the right of the individual to access the public square of discourse. It is an important part of individual freedom and is invaluable in ensuring that the groups that hold the most power, be they governments or trillion-dollar industries, cannot control the discourse of their constituents.

A handful of private tech companies hold an ever-growing monopoly over the internet and social media, which have become the new public square in our society; the increasing normalization of political censorship by these organizations is a problem. Its true that the millions of people who share this public square should not and cannot be forced to listen to the ramblings of any yahoo standing on a soapbox, but to take away someones voice for the crime of sharing information that may be politically inconvenient, expressing views that may be controversial, or for simply being wrong only encourages more authoritarian behavior.

One might argue that if someone doesnt like the speech policies of one social media network or another, they can simply move to another or create their own. This is true, and that is exactly what happened earlier this year. Parler, a social network founded for the purpose of promoting freedom of expression, briefly became the most downloaded app in the country, with users jumping ship from Twitter and Facebook citing claims of censorship following Bidens presidential victory.

This was short-lived, though, as Parler was quickly booted from the internet after being removed from Apple and Googles app stores, as well as from Amazon Web Services, for a lack of moderation regarding content promoting the violent riots at the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. In contrast, similar content was also spreading across significantly larger networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, for weeks leading up to the Electoral College vote, but they faced no such action. Parler is now back online since striking a new deal with the Russian-owned DDos-Guard, after having spent a week struggling to find a new host.

So yes, you can jump to other social networks or even form your own if you disagree with the speech policies set by the largest companies in the world. But if your network does not abide by the standards of content moderation set by those companies, it runs the risk of being shut down. This is not to say that it is unreasonable to make content encouraging violence against your guidelines. But so long as the content is not illegal, a platform should not be faced with a dogpile of tech giants for choosing to let its users speak their minds.

That said, the pressure to conform with certain speech policies and standards of moderation does not come from tech companies exclusively. During congressional antitrust hearings on the tech monopolies held by Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, some U.S. senators argued for social media companies to be even more aggressive in taking down posts. Threats of litigation can be leveraged against tech companies by the government, encouraging them to pursue policies that may be preferred by certain officials or agencies.

So, is there anything that can actually be done to combat political censorship by tech companies? Maybe. The largest legal protections that tech companies have are those provided under the Communications Decency Act Section 230:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

In a nutshell, this means that tech companies cannot be held liable for the actions of their users, i.e. you cannot sue Twitter for slander based on the statements made by Twitter user @FakeName37.

By and large, this is a good thing. A social media company that acts as a service provider should not be held responsible for the independent actions of its users. However, there is an argument to be made that companies such as Twitter, Facebook or Google by choosing to take responsibility for the speech of their users out of concern for things like disinformation in the cases of the New York Post or election fraud conspiracy theorists have now invalidated those protections. By deciding that certain kinds of political speech are not acceptable, they have effectively become publishers of content as opposed to simply service providers.

This is where the road starts to get a bit rocky. As I stated, it is very possible for the federal government to use threats of litigation as a way for tech companies to pursue policies it finds favorable. In early 2020, I wrote about one such case: the EARN IT Act, proposed legislation that would have threatened to remove Section 230 protections if tech companies did not sacrifice user data encryption and potentially even send all user messages to law enforcement agencies to be scanned for child sex abuse material. If Section 230 protections were to be revoked, this could still open a pathway to more authoritarian speech controls.

I stand by my opposition to the EARN IT Act for its intent to undermine end-to-end data encryption. However, with the increasingly apparent authoritarian censorship by tech companies (particularly in the past year), something may need to be done to preserve individuals freedom of political expression. Taking a good hard look at exactly who should be protected under Section 230 could be one solution, albeit a risky one.

According to the current interpretation of Section 230, companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook are protected from the threat of mass litigation by their users. But to allow tech companies to continue to abuse their monopolies over the public square of discourse unchecked is a serious mistake and one that needs to be addressed. If faced with no other option, rethinking Section 230 protections may just be a risk worth taking.

Read more here:
Unchecked Big Tech Censorship is a Serious Problem - Drexel University The Triangle Online