🚨 The First Amendment bars the government from punishing speech based on specific viewpoints. For decades, it has thwarted officials of all stripes from throttling dissent. The wisdom of this ‘bedrock principle’ has only been reinforced during Trump 2.0.

THREAD 👇 First, let’s look at the Trump admin going after law firms.

📍 On March 6, President Trump signed an executive order targeting the Perkins Coie law firm, removing security clearances and access to government buildings and officials from its lawyers.

🇪🇺 @JDVance was right. The state of free speech in Europe is bad. Rather than fully endorsing his claims, his recent Munich speech deserves a healthy dose of skepticism — especially given the Trump administration's targeting of the media and dissenters. 🧵 Free speech is undeniably in retreat across Europe. In Germany, which regularly prosecutes people for online speech, insulting a politician could lead to a police raid.

🧵 @ma_franks claims that her new book "offers a different and bolder perspective on free speech that takes power, harm, and history seriously."

So let's examine whether history supports her thesis that the First Amendment only protects the powerful. Franks argues that the First Amendment has perpetuated the exploitation of racial and religious minorities as well as women to serve a male-dominated society.

🧵 Democracies around the world are adopting ever more draconian measures to combat online disinformation. From Brazil to the EU and, most recently, the UK, there is a pervasive belief that disinformation is destroying democracy.

But as we’ll explore in this 3-part 🧵MEGA THREAD, “Elite Panic” about lies and disinformation goes back millennia. And there are strong historical reasons why democracies long saw laws against fake news as a cure worse than the disease.

Here's PART 1: Elite panic about the spread of false beliefs has always erupted when new ideas or technologies challenge the status quo or marginalized groups finally find a voice. Let’s go back over 2000 years.

1/Maybe the most absurd hate speech case to come out of the UK (yet). A woman of South-Asian heritage with a placard calling two senior government ministers of SA heritage (incl PM) for "coconuts" is charged with racism. THEN 2/ ....protestors at Hussain's trial with coconut placards saying "THIS IS SATIRE" are arrested on suspicion of same offense.

1/ One of my pet-projects is countering US free speech pessimism. This includes disspelling the myth that European democracies are "the adults in the room" who wisely "balance" free speech against competing interest. Recent events once again demonstrate the flaws of this model🧵 2/I recently explained why both the Right and the Left should reject the natural urge to cancel people for offensive jokes/statements about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

https://x.com/JMchangama/status/1815838121004826848

1/ Seeing a lot of posts on this app about how cancel culture from the right is A-OK because “the Left started it.” But cancel-culture is a human phenomenon, and PLENTY has come from conservatives throughout history. Let’s explore some prominent examples in this THREAD🧵



2/🕰️ 1791: Joseph Priestley, the English scientist and Unitarian preacher (barring him from Oxford and Cambridge) hailed the French Revolution and championed free discussion of religion. As a response, his house and library were burned by an angry mob. Priestley fled to America.

1/ THREAD 🧵Elite panic over A.I. disinformation and deepfakes in the EU elections was rampant. But did democracy drown in tidal wave of disinformation? 🔎Let’s take a look. 2/In Jan 2024, the @wef called disinformation the largest global risk: “The nexus between falsified information and societal unrest will take centre stage amid elections in several major economies that are set to take place in the next two years.” weforum.org/press/2024/01/…

MEGA🧵 The U.S. House has passed a bill that would deem certain viewpoints as antisemitic discrimination in the Civil Rights Act, no doubt to crack down on campus protests.

But Europe’s experience with similar laws shows why this would be a mistake. apnews.com/article/israel… The response to pro-Palestinian protests in the U.S. has been disproportionate and extreme in places like Texas, but the slogans and speech espoused by protestors are prohibited in many parts of Europe.

https://twitter.com/TheFIREorg/status/1783862350019252458

1/ It is hardly unprecedented (no pun intended) for University Presidents to resign following accusations of plagiarism. Results of a quick Google search:

in 2021 University of SC president resigned after a rambling speech that was partially plagiarized

npr.org/2021/05/13/996… 2/In 2018 the president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges resigned after allegations of plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation

1/ Disastrous day for global free speech: After relentless pressure from the Islamic states of the @OIC_OCI, attacks on embassies and NGOs, the governments of D🇩🇰 and Sweden🇸🇪 announce their intention to legally ban protests involving Quran burnings. english.alarabiya.net/News/world/202… 2/ Live on TV 🇩🇰 Foreign Minister @larsloekke said that national security and interests require limiting the right to mock other countries, their values and religions. This is a grotesque statement from a public official in one of the world´s most free and progressive countries.

1/ It is not a coincidence that populations and governments in Sweden and Denmark have very different attitudes towards the desecration of "sacred books" than in Iraq and and Turkey where violent protests and government pressure have ramped up due to Scandinavian Quran burnings 2/ Scandinavian countries are WEIRD in the extreme and value "Self-Expression" and "Secular" values higher than anywere else and MUCH higher than in most Muslim-Majority countries, where "Survival" and "Traditional" values are prized.

🧵1/This @nytimes story is a great example of “Elite Panic” that leads to bad policy on SoMe. The alarming rise in hate speech post @elonmusk sounds frightening. But does the story provide sufficient evidence to reach that conclusion?
nytimes.com/2022/12/02/tec… 2/ First up. We´ve been here before. In 2016 this article in @USATODAY relied on an @ADL report to claim that Trump´s 2016 presidential campaign had led to a “massive rise in hate speech”.
eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/new…

1/Ville Ranta - a hard hitting cartoonist at Finnish newspaper @iltalehti_fi - is being investigated for "incitement to hatred" for cartoons including mocking Iran´s theocratic leaders after the attack on Salman Rushdie and skewering Erdogan´s political islamism 2/ The Erdogan cartoon says "haha this will bring europe to its knees and raise the islamic world to new glory", the Iranian one says (translated from Danish) "I just feel it all the way down in my balls that our religion is gaining more and more respect".

1/ This is wildly inacurate and misleading. Apartheid censorship and repression was extreme and explicity racist. Government propaganda is not "free speech". If so N. Korea, China and Russia are free speech bastions. A thread on censorship, free speech and apartheid:

https://twitter.com/jeligon/status/1522146732745936896

2/ As I show in my book white supremacy in both the US and South Africa relied heavily on repression of speech.

1/ In 1917 the trustees of @Columbia fired two professors for oppossing American involvement in WW1. A @nytimes editorial praised Columbia for purging "poisonous teaching...dangerous to the community and nation". 2/ The angry reactions to the recent @nytimes editorial on #freespeech suggests that many NYT subscribers and substantial parts of Twitter would prefer the NYT´s 1917 definition over it´s 2022 version of free speech nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opi… think

1/ America struggles with how to counter violent extremism in a deeply polarized country with a fractured information environment where conspiracy theories and disinformation has taken hold. Some have compared this state of affairs to Weimar Germany. 2/ So allow me to share a few excerpts on the Weimar Republic´s failing struggle to rein in totalitarian agitation, from a draft chapter of my forthcoming book on the history of #freespeech. Contrary to popular accounts Weimar Germany was NOT indifferent to fanatical agitation