speech

Facebook said Tuesday it removed 7 million posts in the second quarter for sharing false information about the novel coronavirus, including content that promoted fake preventative measures and exaggerated cures. Facebook released the data as part of its sixth Community Standards Enforcement Report, which it introduced in 2018 along with more stringent decorum rules in …

About three-fifths of Americans believe that the national political climate prevents them from voicing certain opinions, according to a yearly survey by the Cato Institute. The survey, conducted in July 2020, found that 62 percent of respondents either “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the statement, “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things …

Ben & Jerry’s and Eddie Bauer have joined a Facebook advertising boycott over concerns about how the social-media giant handles hate speech. The ice-cream brand and the sportswear retailer pledged Tuesday to pause Facebook and Instagram ad spending for July in support of the “#StopHateForProfit” campaign launched by a coalition of civil-rights groups. In a …

Twitter will not label President Trump’s renewed claims that the 2020 election “will be the most RIGGED Election in our nations history” due to mass vote-by-mail, despite fact-checking the president last month for similar claims. Trump tweeted multiple times Monday criticizing the push for increasing remote voting through mail-in ballots for the November election. “RIGGED …

Protesters in many countries may find themselves facing down state forces with extralegal powers and a muzzled press. Sixteen Latin American countries severely restricted their borders in mid-March, creating a physical firewall against the coronavirus that they hope will allow them to avoid the fate of countries such as Italy, Spain, and the United States. …

A number of U.S. civil-rights groups are calling on major advertisers to pull their ads from Facebook to protest what they say is the mammoth social media company’s “repeated failure” to adequately address the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation on its platform. The Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP along with four other groups announced …

Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) on Wednesday called to revoke liability protections for social media companies in a move that could have far-reaching ramifications for the regulation of speech on the internet. “It’s pretty simple: if Twitter and Google and the rest are going to editorialize and censor and act like traditional publishers, they should …

President Trump on Wednesday threatened social-media companies with regulation and even closure over past alleged election interference, a day after Twitter fact-checked two of the president’s tweets, a first for the company. In several tweets on Wednesday morning, the president accused social-media companies of silencing conservatives, as well as interfering in the 2016 election. “Republicans …

In the last lecture, we looked at those arguments that won the debate for free speech. Historically, those arguments were nested in different philosophical contexts, and they were often tailored to audiences hostile in varying degrees to free speech. So let me summarize, in contemporary language, the elements of those arguments that are still with …