Twitter trolls: a gold medal for overreaction. The first week of the Olympics won’t be remembered for an avalanche of Team GB gold medals.
Beware the celebrity troll-hunters. Earlier this year, Twitter announced it had over 140million users firing out one billion tweets every three days.
Rather than just shouting at the telly, many thousands of people are now tweeting their thoughts about every aspect of it to the world. Free speech on Facebook? Think again. ‘He didn’t make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother.’
Talk about the understatement of the year. This wasn’t a teacher explaining to concerned parents about why their kid received low grades in a French GCSE oral exam. It was instead the explanation given by a West Yorkshire Police spokesman as to why 19-year-old Azhar Ahmed was arrested and charged for a ‘racially aggravated public-order offence’ after posting an angry rant on Facebook. Ahmed is due to appear in court next Tuesday, where the precise reason for the charge will be made clear. Spinoza and The First Amendment. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch thinker, may be among the more enigmatic (and mythologized) philosophers in Western thought, but he also remains one of the most relevant, to his time and to ours. He was an eloquent proponent of a secular, democratic society, and was the strongest advocate for freedom and tolerance in the early modern period. The SNP’s offensive against free speech. Yesterday, the Scottish National Party (SNP) pushed through a new law stipulating that people can be imprisoned for things they say.
So it’s a good moment to reflect on what the principle of free speech means in practice. While most of us claim to be proud to live in a liberal, tolerant society, it seems that our tolerance has limits. These limits are defined clearly in the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communication Bill, which seeks to criminalise ‘offensive’ songs and chants by football fans – especially fans of the two Glasgow clubs that dominate Scottish football, Celtic and Rangers. With prison sentences of up to five years, simply for things that are said or sung, this is one of the most draconian laws ever introduced. But aside from protests by church groups and football fans, opposition has been muted and free-speech advocates have been surprisingly quiet.
We need free speech for all - even bigots. Stephen Birrell doesn’t like Catholics, he doesn’t like Celtic Football Club manager Neil Lennon and he doesn’t like Celtic supporters.
These are not exactly unusual sentiments in certain parts of Scotland. But what is unusual is that last week Birrell was jailed for expressing such prejudices. His crime was to join a Facebook page and share his unpleasant views with the rest of us. Birrell’s pearls of wisdom included: ‘Hope they all die. Simple. Yet the 28-year-old football fan was charged with ‘religiously aggravated’ breach of the peace and sent to prison for eight months. The idea of sending someone to prison for expressing their personal hatreds seems bizarre in a society that claims to allow freedom of speech. 'My tram experience' is shocking – but should it be cause for arrest?
A screengrab shows a woman ranting against black and Polish people on a Croydon to Wimbledon tram.
Photograph: YouTube The video of the woman ranting against black and Polish people ("What has this country come to? Celtic fans: you’re not singing anymore. Imagine the scene.
A dawn raid. A vanload of police officers batter down a front door. A 17-year-old boy is dragged from his home and driven away. He is charged with a crime and appears in court. His lawyers apply for bail, but the court decides his crime is too serious for that. What was his crime? Why haven’t you heard about this case? This is far from an isolated case. In the absence of any criticism from civil liberties groups, it has fallen to fans themselves to take a stand against the proposed new laws.
Even before the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communication Act has been passed, the singing of songs has become a key target of heavy-handed policing. Brendan O’Neill - Plain packaging is an infringement of free speech. The Australian, 26 November 2011 WHY do people’s critical faculties go up in a puff of smoke when it comes to the debate about cigarettes?
In the name of “stamping out smoking”, it seems governments can be as bossy and intolerant and censorious as they like, and no one will raise an eyebrow. This week, it took Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, to do what liberals and libertarians should have done ages ago: challenge the Australian government’s plan to bring in plain packaging for cigarettes. As of December next year, it will be illegal in Australia to sell cigarettes in boxes branded with the evil logos of Marlboro, say, or Benson & Hedges. Instead, cigarettes will have to come in olive green packets free of branding. Philip Morris has accused the Australian government of “infringing on its trademark rights”. Yet Philip Morris is, if anything, being too polite. Let’s all be more like The Greatest. The 2008 HBO documentary, Thriller in Manila (see a review here ), tells the story of the epic rivalry between heavyweight boxers Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
In the battle for our sympathies, it was Frazier who won that particular fight. The film shows how Ali taunted Frazier, portrayed him as an establishment figure, an ‘Uncle Tom’.