I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook
observer.com
observer.com
Woah, slow down there. Neither Milo or anybody else has a first amendment right to give a speech on a college campus. The right to free speech does not equal a right to a podium, the university or their students telling Milo to go away is not a first amendment issue. Cancelling his speech does not give him any sort of moral high ground. (lighting things on fire, on the other hand...)
The only potential free speech argument here is if somebody were to tell Berkeley that they had to allow certain speakers, then the university's free speech would be impinged. The right to tell somebody else to shut the hell up is an important part of free speech. The only entity that doesn't have that right under the first amendment is the government.
UC Berkeley is a public University. It isn't as unfettered as a private school when it comes to restrictions on "speech".
Berkeley allows student organizations to invite speakers. Berkeley is not allowed to discriminate against those speakers based on viewpoint.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/everyon...
> The problem with this argument is that it was not Berkeley itself that invited Yiannopoulos. It was the Berkeley College Republicans, who are legally a separate entity. And as Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks explained, “long-standing campus policy permits registered student organizations to invite speakers to campus and to make free use of meeting space in the Student Union for that purpose.” So the issue is not whether Berkeley should have given Yiannopoulos a platform. It is whether Berkeley should have denied some of its students the ability to give him a platform. And “consistent with the dictates of the First Amendment as uniformly and decisively interpreted by the courts,” Dirks argued, “the university cannot censor or prohibit events, or charge differential fees.”
> somebody were to tell Berkeley that they had to allow certain speakers,
Somebody has told Berkeley just that, the people speaking through the courts.
Here is more of the same from various Law Professors and Chancellors of UC
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/berkeley-milo-yiannopoulos-...
> Campus officials at Berkeley recognized that Yiannopoulos had a First Amendment right to speak. Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks rightly resisted demands, including from Berkeley faculty, to ban Yiannopoulos’ appearance.Even the expression of hate is constitutionally protected; court cases have addressed this very issue on college campuses in the past. Although hate speech unquestionably causes harms, it nonetheless is expression that is covered by the First Amendment. We therefore strongly disagree with those who say that campus officials at Berkeley could keep Yiannopoulos from speaking because of his hateful and offensive message.
> Second, campuses must do all they can to ensure that audience reactions against a speaker are not allowed to silence the speaker. Free speech can be undermined, not only by official censorship and punishment, but also by individuals who seek to disrupt or shut down others when they attempt to exercise their rights. If officials do not work to prevent or punish disruption then there will be a “heckler’s veto” of all unpopular or controversial speakers, and this is not consistent with free speech principles. Campus officials have a duty to protect the free speech rights of protesters, but they must also protect speakers and prevent heckling. Apparently, this, too, occurred at Berkeley. Staff members spent weeks planning extensive security arrangements, including bringing in dozens of police officers from nine other UC campuses.
> Third, there may be situations where controlling the audience proves impossible and there is no choice but to prevent a speaker’s presence to ensure public safety. This should be a last resort taken only if there is no other way to prevent a serious imminent threat to public safety. This appears to be exactly what occurred at Berkeley, where the riotous demonstrators could not be controlled. In such cases, authorities should do all they can, after the fact, to identify and punish those who used violence and violated the law, and should assess how different security arrangements might be more effective in preventing future disruptions. Campus officials should also do what they can to reschedule the speaker for another time.
> By Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the School of Law, University of California, Irvine and Howard Gillman, Chancellor, University of California, Irvine
I encourage you to level up on your knowledge of and defense of free speech rights. Your repeating your mistruths may be part of the problem.
No one is talking about taking Twitter or Berkeley etc to court, we get it, they would win (Assuming Berkeley doesn't get public funding though?)
What we are taking about is big business who control speech effectively censoring the population.
This goes against the spirit of the First Amendment and the Left are the first to be outraged when right wing news media doesn't give them a voice.
They then use this legal loophole, businesses can do what they want, argument when it suits them.
Last year Berkeley got $370M in federal funding and $108M in state funding.
Freedom of speech and freedom of association are key rights in a democracy, and they apply everywhere. I get to talk, but you get to walk away. I get to say what I want, but you are not compelled to help circulate my views. I have the right to say what I think; you have right to say that makes me an asshole.
In this age, nobody in the US is "effectively" censored. At basically no cost, anybody can set up a web server and share their views across the globe. Today, everybody's a publisher, but nobody has to listen.
Nobody caring what I have to say isn't censorship for me; it's freedom for everybody else.
Except the argument here is person X doesn't get to talk.
The argument is Berkeley can stop people talking they politically don't like (Or any other reason) because as a business they have every right to discriminate on political views.
And sure that's legally true perhaps, we all understand that, but it's not right and against the idea of the first amendment.
To argue it's ok for universities to censor speakers is a very scary point of view, and this is what you are doing by bringing in the straw person 'it's legally allowed'
I was addressing your notion about businesses, "this legal loophole, businesses can do what they want". And I presumed you were actually talking about businesses, because a) you mentioned Twitter, a business, and b) UC Berkeley is not a business.
> sure that's legally true perhaps [...] it's not right and against the idea of the first amendment
No. No, no, no. The idea of the First Amendment is not that you are owed a platform. It's just that the government cannot stop you from saying what you want in public or with your own platform. It starts out with "Congress shall make no law" for a reason.
That is not the idea of the First Amendment. It is your idea of the First Amendment. It's a common one, but that doesn't make it the right one, or the only one.
There's also a distinction between the legal notion of free speech and the moral notion of free speech. The moral notion of free speech is that A) you shouldn't use violence to suppress people's ideas and B) if your ideas are so hot, you should be able to defend them instead of trying to deplatform competing ideas.
> The only potential free speech argument here is if somebody were to tell Berkeley that they had to allow certain speakers, then the university's free speech would be impinged.
Government agencies and organizations which choose to receive tax funding give up certain rights, among those the ability to discriminate in any capacity based on politics, religion, etc. If a Berkeley student group wanted to host a Satanist Nazi who endorsed eating babies, Berkeley would have no grounds to prevent them from doing so.
Somehow one faction has an inalienable right to compel speech from its ideological opponents out of pure spite, because sacred principles of antidiscrimination or whatever, but when it comes to giving a speech by express invitation, having raised the necessary funds for security etc, we are maximally minimalist about what a government institution has to allow.
If one group invites a speaker to a public place, another group does not have the right to shut down the speech.
This is exactly the sort of misconception Milo is looking to expose in order to acquire defense on his behalf.
It is the only thing that gives him moral high ground. The rest of his arguments are hateful. His right to speak is protected.
Students' right to protest are also protected. Violence is not protected.
> The right to tell somebody else to shut the hell up is an important part of free speech
False. You can ask them to shut up. You cannot force them.
Trump and his confederates would like to undo free speech and turn America into a de facto Christian state in order to fight against other religions. Today, it's Muslims. The proliferation of your argument will only help them dismantle free speech.
Woah, you better be careful with that double edged sword, because you might cut yourself.
So according to you: any angry mob that is large enough is allowed to shut down any speech they disagree with?
I find it amusing that so called liberals are so keen to silence people they disagree with them, yet they accuse the other side of being fascist, ohhh the irony.
It's not something to admire, per se, but it's extremely interesting to see just how easy the average person (and the media, for that matter) is to manipulate when anger is the biggest tool at your disposal.
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13542853-trust-me-i-m-lyi...
Im hopeful that is not really the case. Seems the general international experience is that shooting into riots is at least counter productive if not outright slaughter.
In particular, this sounds very unlikely:
> if someone tries looting or setting things on fire or attacking people at a right-leaning demonstration in the US, they will probably be shot.
When has that happened?
I'm pretty doubtful of anything that paints the 'other' side as one big stereotype. Also, my personal experience and observations of such things don't match these claims.
> Our station also became deeply involved in what we called “active measures,” which essentially involved dirty tricks and disinformation campaigns. One of the most aggressive campaigns was related to the emerging postcolonial nations of Africa, where the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a struggle for influence. We in the KGB station in New York did everything we could to stir up trouble for the American side.
> One of our dirty tricks involved a nasty letter-writing campaign against African diplomats at the United Nations—an idea cooked up by KGB headquarters in Moscow and approved by the Communist Party Central Committee. Our KGB staff, using new typewriters and wearing gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, typed up hundreds of anonymous hate letters and sent them to dozens of African missions. The letters, purportedly from white supremacists as well as average Americans, were filled with virulent racist diatribes. The African diplomats publicized some of the letters as examples of the racism still rampant in America, and members of the American and foreign press corps quoted from them. I and other KGB officers working as correspondents in the United States reported extensively on this rabidly antiblack letter-writing campaign. I lost no sleep over such dirty tricks, figuring they were just another weapon in the cold war.
> Our active measures campaign did not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or color: we went after everybody. Attempting to show that America was inhospitable to Jews, we wrote anti-Semitic letters to American Jewish leaders. My fellow officers paid American agents to paint swastikas on synagogues in New York and Washington. Our New York station even hired people to desecrate Jewish cemeteries. I, of course, beamed back reports of these misdeeds to my listeners in Moscow, who—tuning in to my broadcasts—no doubt thanked the Lord or Comrade Lenin that they had been born in a socialist paradise, and not in a hotbed of racial tension like the United States of America. [...] I knew our propaganda was exaggerating the extent of racism in America, yet I also saw firsthand the blatant discrimination against blacks. Again, I had no qualms about stirring up as much trouble as possible for the U.S. government. It was all part of the job.
[1] "Spymaster: My Thirty-two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West" - Oleg Kalugin - https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Esp...
Right now the favorite media, digitally crowd sourced, reports news quickly and is cheaper (free) than what you propose.
If someone demonstrates an ability to make use of this world-wide army of reporters and make quality news out of it, with links to actual sources including context, relevant sections of video on the same page, etc., I would pay for that.
Right now, online publishers are still caught up in earning money from advertising, so they won't link externally.
Getting back quality will require both substantial talent and investment.