MIT Technology Review: “February, all eyes will be on the biggest players in tech—Meta, Google, Twitter, YouTube. A legal provision tucked into the Communications Decency Act, Section 230 has provided the foundation for Big Tech’s explosive growth, protecting social platforms from lawsuits over harmful user-generated content while giving them leeway to remove posts at their… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Free Speech
2022 Corruption Perceptions Index reveals scant progress against corruption as world becomes more violent
Berlin, 31 January 2023: “The 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released today by Transparency International shows that most of the world continues to fail to fight corruption: 95 per cent of countries have made little to no progress since 2017. According to the Global Peace Index, the world continues to become a less peaceful place.… Continue Reading
Justice – Official Site
Jezebel – “It’s been nearly five years since Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court by the Senate in a 50-48 vote—despite allegations of sexual misconduct by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez and about 4,500 other tips that the FBI seemingly just kind of ignored. Justice, a new documentary about the botched… Continue Reading
Students want new books. Thanks to restrictions, librarians can’t buy them.
Washington Post: Schools are struggling to keep their shelves stocked as oversight by parents and school boards intensifies – “States and districts nationwide have begun to constrain what librarians can order. At least 10 states have passed laws giving parents more power over which books appear in libraries or limiting students’ access to books, a… Continue Reading
Supreme Court Poised to Reconsider Key Tenets of Online Speech
The New York Times: “On Friday, the Supreme Court is expected to discuss whether to hear two cases that challenge laws in Texas and Florida barring online platforms from taking down certain political content. Next month, the court is scheduled to hear a case that questions Section 230, a 1996 statute that protects the platforms… Continue Reading
Disquiet in the archives: archivists make tough calls with far-reaching consequences – they deserve our support
The Conversation: “Right now, for technological, ethical and political reasons, the world’s archivists are suddenly very busy. Advances in digital imaging and communications are feeding an already intense interest in provenance, authorship and material culture. Two recent discoveries – a woman’s name scratched in the margins of an 8th-century manuscript, and John Milton’s annotations in… Continue Reading
The Right to Teach
UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 6, page 817- 886. December 2022. The Right to Teach – Joshua E. Weishart. Professor of Law, West Virginia University College of Law: “America’s public school teachers are in dire straits; the law offers little solace. The rights teachers have as public employee-citizens do not protect them as educators. A… Continue Reading
Courts Find That Twitter Can Restrict More Than Just Your Character Count
ABA: “The 21st century court system has seen a surge of internet-related cases as websites and social media platforms continue to connect more individuals around the globe. While only 5 percent of adults in the United States reported using social media in 2005, the number has now skyrocketed to more than 70 percent. Today, people… Continue Reading
Journalists and others should leave Twitter
Dan Gillmor, Techdirt – Here’s how they can get started: “Elon Musk has demonstrated contempt for free speech in general, and journalism in particular, with his behavior at Twitter. He is demonstrating why anyone it is foolhardy for anyone to rely on centralized platforms to create and distribute vital information.” Continue Reading
Inventing the Dark Web
Via LLRX – Inventing the Dark Web – This paper by Thais Sardá, Simone Natale, and John Downey examines how the deep Web, i.e., Web sites that are not indexed and thus are not accessible through Web search engines, was described and represented in British newspapers. Through an extensive content analysis conducted on 833 articles… Continue Reading
Mastodon and the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers
Ars Technica: “As Elon Musk’s Category 5 tweetstorm continues, the once-obscure Mastodon social network has been gaining over 1,000 new refugees per hour, every hour, bringing its user count to about eight million. Joining as a user is pretty easy. More than enough ex-Twitterers are happy finding a Mastodon instance via joinmastodon.org, getting a list… Continue Reading
America’s culture warriors are going after librarians
.coda: “…It’s a tale playing out in cities and states across the country, as a book-banning fever courses through the country’s body politic. Nationally, attempts to remove books from school and public libraries are shattering previous records. The effort is being driven by a loose collection of local and national conservative parents’ groups and politicians… Continue Reading
