Attention Economy


Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Free Speech – Who Decides?

Melissa Barrera: Actress fired from Scream 7 over Israel-Gaza posts
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-67494374  
 
War and the Collapse of the Campus Speech Consensus
https://www.chronicle.com/article/war-and-the-collapse-of-the-campus-speech-consensus
 
Eric Levitz notes:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/the-israel-palestine-conflict-makes-the-case-for-free-speech.html
In recent years, social-justice activists have made a practice of seeking to deplatform or punish speech on the grounds that it (1) causes emotional (or theoretically physical) harm to oppressed groups or (2) is motivated by bigotry. Others on the left have argued that organizations and institutions canceling speakers or refusing to platform certain perspectives was itself an exercise of First Amendment rights worth defending: The “freedom of association” entitles Americans to form collectives that dissociate from some forms of speech.
Anti-woke types of the center and the right, meanwhile, tended to decry such censoriousness as an illiberal bid to impose orthodoxy on others through emotional blackmail and institutional capture. And they were also inclined to emphasize that “free speech” is not just a matter of constitutional law but a civic ethos…
The Israel-Hamas war has flipped the ideological valence of these positions.