I follow and contribute to The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) https://www.thefire.org and to Speech First https://speechfirst.org. Others might be inclined to do the same? Or support similar groups, who can use these donations to assemble legal teams that submit amicus briefs, threaten to file suit, or actually file cases in court against free speech encroachments. One front in a multi-front war.
A few items/questions from this post?
"Freedom of speech is the single most important freedom in a liberal democratic society. Without freedom of speech, all other freedoms become hollow." Some folks claim the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms (to resist foreign or domestic tyranny) is actually more important, but I think we would agree the the sequence of preference is still: soap box, ballot box, jury box, ammo box. Resort to arms is the last, final, irrevocable action to restore liberty against tyranny, but it must also be available and preserved. England had a long history in support of private ownership of arms, but they whiffed out on this "right" in the last few decades (or earlier?).
"We must demand the end of National Science Foundation financing for the development of censorship and disinformation." Perhaps we should modify this to something along the lines of "supporting research into how others might create or develop censorship capabilities and what we need to do technically, socially, and politically to counter it." Better that we are ahead of their games than coming up from behind and trying to recover. As always in such things, we end up with the conundrum of "who watches the watchers?". And if this should be from public or private funding.
"We must demand that all the emails between those officials, social media, and traditional media organizations be posted on the internet so that it is fully transparent and searchable to all." We should be able to make and enforce this demand on all of our "public servants", although some situations might require warrants issued by courts and/or SCIF restricted investigations by Congressional committees? Exploring further limits on (or transparency for) the FISA courts might also be warranted, but that path will also not be simple (and Congress recently reinstituted prior practices without the restrictions some desired? Form 702 or something?)
"We must demand that all major social media organizations publicly release their algorithms ... " But we might well also have to pay them for the privilege of releasing their intellectual property "for the greater good"? During the reign of newspapers and pamphlets, people understood the technology of printing and publishing and that a human was behind the decisions as to what was displayed. I agree we don't have that insight now, and we need more awareness of who, how, why, when, where, such restrictions are being employed by software, etc.
"We must also remove tax-except status from all those organizations as they are clearly political." It is not entirely clear to me just when a 501(c )3 organization might cross over into partisanship when also pursuing a politically motivated mission. For example The Heritage Foundation explicitly separates their 501(c )3 and (c )4 activities, but they are both oriented to conservative goals and aims, just not so explicitly pro Republican or anti Democrat in the first case. If you are suggesting the tax exempt status of all such "political" rather than "pure charity" organizations should be removed, I am willing to hear you out on that. But someone persuaded someone else about the merit of tax exemption in the past - I wonder what their rationale was for these groups?
Great post and topic - deserves deep and serious discussion and debate.
Great call to action.
I follow and contribute to The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) https://www.thefire.org and to Speech First https://speechfirst.org. Others might be inclined to do the same? Or support similar groups, who can use these donations to assemble legal teams that submit amicus briefs, threaten to file suit, or actually file cases in court against free speech encroachments. One front in a multi-front war.
A few items/questions from this post?
"Freedom of speech is the single most important freedom in a liberal democratic society. Without freedom of speech, all other freedoms become hollow." Some folks claim the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms (to resist foreign or domestic tyranny) is actually more important, but I think we would agree the the sequence of preference is still: soap box, ballot box, jury box, ammo box. Resort to arms is the last, final, irrevocable action to restore liberty against tyranny, but it must also be available and preserved. England had a long history in support of private ownership of arms, but they whiffed out on this "right" in the last few decades (or earlier?).
"We must demand the end of National Science Foundation financing for the development of censorship and disinformation." Perhaps we should modify this to something along the lines of "supporting research into how others might create or develop censorship capabilities and what we need to do technically, socially, and politically to counter it." Better that we are ahead of their games than coming up from behind and trying to recover. As always in such things, we end up with the conundrum of "who watches the watchers?". And if this should be from public or private funding.
"We must demand that all the emails between those officials, social media, and traditional media organizations be posted on the internet so that it is fully transparent and searchable to all." We should be able to make and enforce this demand on all of our "public servants", although some situations might require warrants issued by courts and/or SCIF restricted investigations by Congressional committees? Exploring further limits on (or transparency for) the FISA courts might also be warranted, but that path will also not be simple (and Congress recently reinstituted prior practices without the restrictions some desired? Form 702 or something?)
"We must demand that all major social media organizations publicly release their algorithms ... " But we might well also have to pay them for the privilege of releasing their intellectual property "for the greater good"? During the reign of newspapers and pamphlets, people understood the technology of printing and publishing and that a human was behind the decisions as to what was displayed. I agree we don't have that insight now, and we need more awareness of who, how, why, when, where, such restrictions are being employed by software, etc.
"We must also remove tax-except status from all those organizations as they are clearly political." It is not entirely clear to me just when a 501(c )3 organization might cross over into partisanship when also pursuing a politically motivated mission. For example The Heritage Foundation explicitly separates their 501(c )3 and (c )4 activities, but they are both oriented to conservative goals and aims, just not so explicitly pro Republican or anti Democrat in the first case. If you are suggesting the tax exempt status of all such "political" rather than "pure charity" organizations should be removed, I am willing to hear you out on that. But someone persuaded someone else about the merit of tax exemption in the past - I wonder what their rationale was for these groups?
Great post and topic - deserves deep and serious discussion and debate.
I may not agree with you, but I still want to hear your opinion.