> After Cambridge University launched an online portal for students to anonymously report microaggressions, the Free Speech Union threatened legal action. The portal was ultimately removed.[11]
I guess they consider some kinds of speech more free than others.
I found this article less than persuasive as it was clearly written to arouse rather than inform or supply context.
False equivalency. Setting up a snitch website has little to do with speech and everything to do with administrative action.
Clearly, many people here don't understand jack about why free speech is important. They just parrot that phrase when they feel it advances their pet ideology, literally not understanding what it means. They treat it as if it's just some clever construct made up by "the other side". This is how we get persistent false equivalency between communication and disrupting communication.
Likewise, if people perceive themselves as significantly endangered by some forms of communication, they have an interest in disrupting it. One could counter that they should argue an alternative point of view, but this presupposes that all arguments are made and evaluated in good faith, and that all disputation is substantive in nature, without any use of rhetorical figures or exploitation of cognitive biases. As we know to our cost, this is often not the case.
It's equally possible that people might want a channel for anonymous complaints because they don't feel comfortable or safe articulating their unhappiness over an issue in public - that is, they feel their own speech to be chilled, directly or indirectly.
Your argument seems to rely on the assumption that that can't be the case, based on events that have happened subsequently - as if the news from today about Paypal is necessarily a consequence of the Cambridge (not Stanford) litigation, when it might be in response to something else entirely; the substack author didn't bother to mention any recent controversies, perhaps assuming that her audience were already following the group's fortunes closely.
The purpose of the portal was to snitch on white people for wrong think and it was taken down for a legal reason.
>Toby Young, general secretary of the FSU, wrote to the vice-Chancellor claiming that the website and policy "proposed a system of policing speech and everyday interaction" which would be "inconsistent" with its duty to uphold free speech. He pointed out that section 43 of the Education Act 1986 requires universities to take reasonably practical steps to secure freedom of speech within the law for employees. "This policy, as you must be aware, would radically interfere with how your academics teach, argue with and learn from students, as well as how students interact with each other," Mr Young said. "It would mean academics and students were under constant threat of being reported and investigated for having committed some wholly innocent but perceived slight, which would inevitably have a chilling effect on interactions that, in a university, should be free and unguarded."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/24/cambridge-remove...
When I think of free speech the context is usually the freedom of discourse and the ability to say controversial things - rather than the demand for total and unrestricted liberty.
So are whistleblowers like Deep Throat ate people you believe shouldn't have right to report and publish material?
> When I think of free speech the context is usually the freedom of discourse and the ability to say controversial things - rather than the demand for total and unrestricted liberty.
You have it backwards. Your pursuing permission not freedom. To have the freedom to speak of controversial subjects speech you must first have the freedom to speak. Freedoms are unrestricted by their very nature.
While I'm not very knowledgeable of English Law, Cambridge University (and every other university in England) receives taxpayer funding. If keeping free speech on campus is a condition for such funding, then this isn't censorship, but a contractual matter between Cambridge and the English courts that Free Speech Union would like to have observed and enforced.
That’s quite different from what I was getting at. I am pro free speech, which includes journalists like you’ve mentioned.
What I was getting at is, people can be pro “free speech” insomuch as wanting open dialogue of controversial or heretical topics while simultaneously finding some kinds of speech/actions chilling and opposing such things. And, they can do this without being considered fundamentally flawed hypocrites.
I’ll propose a hypothetical/analogy. Envision it is the 1950’s in America and I support the rights of communists to speak on college campuses. But I do not support a system to report suspected communist sympathizers to the House Un-American Activities Committee. It could be argued that I’m infringing on the speech rights of the McCarthyites. But in my mind this doesn’t mean I’m anti free speech, because I’m ultimately opposing something I believe has a chilling effect on speech.
i tentatively take it to mean that you did the inference, and it's punishment by the university, but i am not sure, because the mechanism by which the university affects paypal is unclear
Yes thats exactly what free speech is about. It's the public that decides what it thinks about it and not some secret council.
I picked that example because I think it's notable that FSU didn't champion the idea of anonymous dissent and push for a more transparent but maximally inclusive solution; it seems they were OK with a particular kind of speech being shut down. Paypal's lack of transparency about why they're being rejected as customers is a bad thing, but then again Paypal is notorious for unilateralism and consumer hostility, as flea-market traders on eBay have long grumbled.
I might be more sympathetic if this were an org with a long and nuanced history of arguing for a general set of values like the EFF (with whom I don't agree on every topic, but whose independence and consistency are well established). However my first impression of the FSU is that it's a more partial organization than its branding suggests.