UK minister to tell universities to stop 'no-platforming' speakers
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is a real issue but actually most people have reasonable notions of free speech. It is just that the types that end up being welfare/student/women/minority officers are extremely aggressively attacking perceived attacks/hate speech/dissenters/traitors to the cause.
If anyone remembers the Tim Hunt story and the witch-hunt that followed (and let us not forgot the role the Guardian played in peddling that), there was a situation where Tim Hunt was supposed to give a speech at a college.
The women's officer was outraged and riled up freshers who where thoroughly convinced that a man accused of making a sexist joke merely speaking in a room inside their college was a violation of their own safety, a phrase I recall is 'The college is our home and our safe space'.
Most faculty/graduate students/undergrads are actually very reasonable and want to hear dissenting opinions. The problem is just that most well-adjusted people quickly tire of outrage-driven student politics, so it's left to the ultra-aggressive types.
A problem here especially is how quickly anything done by the university is framed as an attack on the mental health and safety of students.
For example, in a recent survey, students were asked about their mental health issues. Examples of the university not being supportive enough were things such as 'I was not given an extension on an essay'.
These incidents make me realise that a non-trivial fraction of this generation of students really feels intense emotional distress to a point of needing counselling over things my generation would book under normal aspects of adult life. In these cases, there is also little self-reflection on one's own responsibility to handle such situations - everything is framed as an attack.
I think it’s utterly vital that controversial views are aired, and that ludicrous fascist and racist views are publicly exposed to ridicule. But student unions are private organisations, governed generally democratically, and they must equally be free to decide on what policy they will take towards external speakers. The “no platform” policy of the NUS which is mentioned in the article is very narrow – it applies to six specified organisations, and forbids the use of union premises, speaking at union events, and rules out membership of those organisations for union officers.
Personally I don’t think it’s worth the cost, in particular because these policies have muddied the debate with a lot of ill-informed misinformation from every perspective - the various controversial speakers, for example, are not subject to any “no-platform” policy, but have been excluded from discussion based on the decisions of individual students.
Frankly the far bigger problem is the attitude of those individual students. It’s been about a decade since I was at university, but even then the entire sphere of student politics was filled with ill-informed reactionaries who had very little tolerance for the idea that people might disagree with them while not being evil. The idea of Peter Tatchell being excluded from a discussion of gay rights is outright ludicrous, and just reflects the bubble that these folk tend to live in.
That’s the thing we should be worried about, rather than some bogus hand-waving about safe-space policies that don’t actually exist and are just red meat to the usual shit-stirrers.
> That’s the thing we should be worried about, rather than some bogus hand-waving about safe-space policies that don’t actually exist and are just red meat to the usual shit-stirrers.
I don't understand how you can say "there's not a no-platform policy, and if there is it only applies to six very small extremist organisations", and then mention Peter Tatchell being excluded from a discussion.
This is seems incorrect: "Funding for the unions comes from a "block grant" from the university"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_students%27_unions_in_...
I suppose you could make the argument that the block grant could be contingent upon being free from “no platform” policies.
I agree, but putting those views on a platform where they are heard more than the views of the people they're attacking is absolute horse shit. Why is it perfectly fine to give platforms to people spouting Nazi talking points, or transphobia/homophobia/racism, but the minorities those people are saying should be killed aren't given anywhere near as high a platform by universities? If you're going to give a platform to people spouting bigotry and bullshit, you have to give even more of a platform to the people peacefully talking about why they shouldn't be killed just for being alive.
I'm a left-leaning centrist libertarian socialist, and I'd have no problem going to talks presented by far-left or far-right speakers, but a talk given by someone saying I'm subhuman, deserve to be raped, or should be killed for who I am? That's fucked up. The government shouldn't be forcing colleges to allow speakers spouting that kind of thing.
If this was the government trying to enforce and NPR-style "no political bias" rule for public colleges, that would be awesome, but this isn't what's going on. The first paragraph of the article makes it clear they want to force colleges to let transphobes speak. Hell, the article itself even seems to have a huge bias for this law, juxtaposing shitty beliefs with left-wing beliefs to push a narrative: "Asked about cases where students had tried to deny speaking slots to Tatchell, a gay rights campaigner, and Greer, a feminist writer, over their views on transgender issues".
You've provided an objective benchmark.
Please list the occasions this has happened. I have yet to hear a political leader say that. I think you might find those people under Youtube comment sections and on 4chan but I've yet to hear of "kill minority x" as a part of somebody's platform.
I don't think you're going to be able to find anybody who isn't obscure to the point other far rightists haven't heard of him.
Leftists and Rightists interpret the same information completely differently sometimes, when Donald Trump was an anti-Semite, unquestionably, I remember that.
I have a follow up question.
What do you make of this:
https://twitter.com/douglaskmurray/status/616194188489682944
Douglas Murray claims genuine terrorists, people who have been arrested for plotting to murder people, have been lecturing inside a year in UK colleges, it looks like 20 of them have been arrested or killed fighting in Syria and another 80+ are affiliated.
"Last year, there were 123 speeches by extremists, which featured claims such as 'the West is waging a war against Islam'. There were also 145 events in 2013 and 132 in 2012. While the far Right hosted a handful of events, the lists were overwhelmingly dominated by Islamic speakers."
It appears to me that the shoe is quite on the other foot when presented with this information.
Milo Yiannopoulos advocates for practices that would literally kill people, in addition to advocating for pedophilia and getting very close to Nazi talking points.
>Leftists and Rightists interpret the same information completely differently
Good thing I'm a centrist.
>What do you make of this:
Completely irrelevant. This has nothing to do with what we're talking about. However, I feel just the same as allowing right-wing extremists.
You should be able to post some links illustrating this. I expect he says a lot of things that sound like that but which really aren't on closer inspection. Traditionally the political wings produce fan fiction of the other side and heavily paraphrase whatever the other side says.
Are you aware that Milo Yiannopoulos does not claim to be on the far right and they don't think he is either? His political orientation is best described troll-wing.
They simply argue that hate speakers should not be given as much time as their targets/potential victims/people not advocating hate, and their post is virtually white.
And none of the people who downvoted put their name to it by making an argument/reply/rebuttal.
In all seriousness though, HN has an echo chamber, it's the inverse of Reddit. Reddit and HN function very similarly with their voting systems, and everyone knows Reddit is an extreme-left shithole, but HN is getting more conservative, I've definitely seen a lot more comments that are low-effort and look like they could be from T_D now that Reddit is banning a fuck-ton of them for brigading. Give it a few years and I guarantee this becomes T_Dv2 (or at least a lot more like /pol/).
Seems like I have at least one such user following me around now, downvoting my comments (my anti-racist comments anyway) in different threads.
We'll see if they anonymously announce themselves with this post too.
Edit: And right on cue, the test produces a result: mere minutes after making this post - two more downvotes, including a post already downvoted.
So either someone is keeping themselves awake 24/7 to religiously reload a dead thread, or my comments page, using multiple accounts to downvote (which while completely insane is still flattering), or it's a bot with no limit (for reasons that can only be guessed at) that checks for new posts and downvotes automatically.
(Perhaps more tests are needed, I can then write a Medium and submit the results here.)
Either way it's an interestingly hostile response to someone commenting about far-right/racist users at Hackernews.
Some people are so childish.
Why? How else can you prevent strongest factions from silencing all minorities?
The role of the adult is to keep in check strongest kids so the weaker can play safely.
Adult does the estimating.
Please could you link to some of these cases? Because in almost all of the ones I've seen it's been someone making threats of violence, not just being offensive.
Section 127 of the communications act is an abomination.
But those cases got widespread, mostly american, coverage of the attack on free speech. Those sites are wrong.
This guy in the UK has been in court for 2 years for making this video. It is an obvious joke, yet the crown is acting like he is a secret Nazi trying to use his dog to convert people into extremism.
Throwing media attention at those who seek to push us gays back into the closet is counterproductive, akin to fanning a flame. Milo and his ilk love to be no platformed, as it makes for great PR when they can say "Blah college banned us, how dare they!".
Suppression of ideas doesn't work, let them die in the brutal, harsh light of public discussion and debate. With free media attention and a stunted discussion, this will only continue to snowball.
Building walls never works, unless you prop them up!
Quite a few of the people involved already have a 'platform' writing for major national or international publications[1], or regularly featuring on TV. So yes it does give them something else to moan about in their regular newspaper column, but I'm not sure it makes all that much difference to how much attention they get. The media is already pretty much saturated with people like Germain Greer, and they are all very adept at generating controversy to promote themselves without outside help - that's how they got where they are today.
That's the irony of this really - it's a bunch of people with the biggest megaphone imaginable complaining that they have been silenced because people didn't want to come to/host their utterly insignificant student debate. The fact that such an insignificant thing has become a major story is evidence of just how loud their voices are, sadly.
[1] there are other people being 'no platformed' as well, but I'm not sure the government/Daily Mail is really suggesting they want to force universities to host Abu Hamza al-Masri or face fines
The point is that particularly antagonistic speakers attract attention not for the debate on the subject matter proper, but precisely for the rousing antagonism itself. So you're not necessarily going to get any real debate; nor will these speakers suffer in the brutal harsh light of public discussion - they'll thrive (regardless of the details of the message itself - that doesn't actually matter!) on public anger.
That's not constructive, nor is it what free speech is about. You're not helping everybody find truth, or any approximation thereof: you're holding a shouting match. You might think that's not so harmful. After all, people should be able to enjoy a kind of shared inspiration, and rational people wouldn't let that affect the conceptually unrelated issue of what was said. However, people - including you and me - aren't actually very good at separating serious message from noise; the way you consume information has an impact on your ability to process it usefully. It's not some hypothetical risk that whatever extreme standpoint the hostile speaker takes will can gain traction because people agree with their anger - misattributing their shared worries to whatever coincidentally happened to be the message used to spark controversy. This has happened many, many times before - and even though that's easy to see in retrospect, that didn't prevent the people caught up in the heat of the moment from going along with it.
I wouldn't want to suggest that controlling the message doesn't have its own risks - but that just means this is a tricky balance to make. What's certain is that fully unrestricted speech is harmful. Note that every society takes that for granted: they all have rules about incitement to violence or even terrorism, rules about deceiving others in various situations (fraud, perjury, truth in advertising), and rules about libel, and probably more. Getting the best out of free speech takes some tuning; it's not black and white.
I think the no-platforming rules seem perhaps somewhat excessive, by the way. But I don't think it's an issue of yay! free speech! either.
Milo has literally argued that men in their late 20's should be allowed to rape young teenagers, if a university wants to ban him, why shouldn't they be able to? Should they allow NAMBLA to have on-campus talks and gatherings?
Edit: I do think that welcoming some ideas is a waste of time, or perhaps dangerous (fascism, for example). But I cannot see why Peter Tatchell is an imminent danger.
That's exactly how Charlottesville happened.
The Charlottesville guys were not trying to engage in an educated debate or expose their opinions to scrutiny, their creed does not accommodate the very idea of dissent. Few among them [edit: previously " Few fascists"] are brave or patient enough to be civilized. Groups like theirs generally value shock tactics and its meeting was mainly conceived as a demonstration of power.
Like-minded people, good or bad, will reunite and some groups will use the US free speech laws to propagate their hate and attract more followers. It is a very different scenario than polemic opinions being treated like a civilizational hazard in England (or elsewhere). Gay rigths, desegragation and many other ideas now taken for granted were once unpopular. History does not moves always forward and everyone that values freedom needs caution when considering politics regulating speech - they can be used for nefarious purposes or create unexpected precedents.
[Edit: formatting and grammar]
Al Muhajiroun; British National Party (BNP); English Defence League (EDL); Hizb ut Tahir; Muslim Public Affairs Committee; National Action
Some of these are proscribed organisations in the UK, eg https://www.gov.uk/government/news/national-action-becomes-f...
The problem is that local branches go much further, and ban many more people.
Favoring some political parties over others should not be allowed.
They have one elected politician, in local government, I think it's fair to say they're an extreme minority voice in British Politics these days.
The leaders of the party have criminal convictions and their rallies are known for violence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party#Associa...
"far" seems to start at about 3/10.
If the bans started at 3/10 then UKIP would definitely be banned.
BNP members went on to form paramilitary organisations that are linked to the murder of immigrants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_18
> Combat 18 is an openly neo-Nazi group that is devoted to violence and is hostile to electoral politics, and for this reason Sargent [the founder of Combat 18] split decisively from the BNP in 1993.
Because at issue isn't any ban on free speech, it's whether it's OK to ban invited speakers expected e.g. to incite harassment, bigotry, or violence. And obviously there's a grey area there, but it's certainly no restrain on the message at all - merely the platform (not that that's irrelevant, but the distinction isn't irrelevant either), and I kind of doubt you'd want to provide a platform to everything regardless of what kind of hate speech they're spouting. There's a fine line between a constructive diversity of opinions, including ones you don't agree with, and giving a microphone to those saying nothing new, where the primary draw isn't the message itself, but the drama and tribalism surrounding it.
But then you see who gets no-platformed, and it's not always those people.
When Peter Tatchil (gay rights) and Germaine Greer (feminist) get considered for no-platforming we know it's gone too far.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/nus-no-platform-safe-sp...
But we need to be a bit careful, some people are considered for no-platforming but are allowed to speak: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/may/05/boris-tatc...
(Personally, I think the idea of a minister getting involved and trying to control the debate is much worse than the student unions making relatively small mistakes, but hey, that's me).
Your second paragraph epitomises the problem highlighted by the minister. It seems that you seek to judge free speech by considerations aside from its legality. I am not aware that Voltaire added a qualification to "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
We talk of dog whistles, but the phrases hate speech and hate crime are also some kind of whistle. If there is a crime, then there exists a law to deal with it. What then does the 'hate' add? Subjectivity and political bias in my opinion.
When I see my ideological enemy I don't get good feelings about them either, but they have the privilege of being able to talk, that should be what is right.
Universities and student unions foremost reponsibility is to the safety of the students and yes that can mean stopping the odd event.
Also unions are generally mandated to uphold an atmosphere of inclusion and tolerance and that certainly means going further than the legal minimum in rejecting hate.
They're a great environment in which young folks can have these debates with minimal consequences
If the children toss their toys outside they should be taken away from playpen.
Offhand, I would say that seems absurdly wrong.
> and yes that can mean stopping the odd event.
Yes, but even if we accept the assertion that universities exist to shelter students, it obviously doesn't require stopping Germaine Greer speaking. Sure, maybe if there was some event so insanely contentious and violent that the full weight of law enforcement was unable to maintain safety it'd be justifiable to cancel a speech, but...has that ever happened? Really?
> Also unions are generally mandated to uphold an atmosphere of inclusion and tolerance
I think you've identified the root problem here.