The Free Speech Discussion Forum is an annual event that is designed to bring together prominent scholars from all over the world to discuss cutting-edge free speech issues. The 2021 meeting was hosted by the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. Two major topics were discussed at the 2021 forum: "Robotic Speech" and "Contemporary Threats to Speech." The "Robotic Speech" topic included examination of such things as "chatbots," data-driven speech, "deep fakes," and the potential for internet speech to interfere with democratic elections. The "Contemporary Threats to Speech" focused on a variety of topics, including the growth and power of social media platforms. This compendium includes selected articles that were discussed at the Forum. It also honors the long-standing faculty exchange of the University of Mainz's School of Law and die Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

All of us grumble, from time to time, about the ever-increasing commercialization of American life. Whether in the form of overt corporate sponsorship--as evidenced by the "branding" of every major sporting event--or the less conspicuous role of commercial interests in the funding of the arts, America's corporations are a ubiquitous presence.

While debates rage over the televising of liquor ads and the degree to which Joe Camel encourages adolescent smoking, of far greater concern, R. George Wright argues, should be the passivity with which we accept excessive commercialization. For many, the spread of commercialization by any means other than fraud or deception today seems merely a reflection of the capitalist pursuit of well-being. Yet owning and spending, for the middle- class consumers Wright discusses, is at best only weakly related to their happiness.

In recent years, corporate America has shrewdly sought shelter from reasonable regulation by embracing the First Amendment. Focusing on such flashpoint issues as the Internet, tobacco advertising, and intentionally controversial ads, and exposing the dangerous elephantiasis of our commercial culture, Selling Words serves up a forceful warning about the perils of conflating commerce with First Amendment rights.

This book addresses a range of issues surrounding the search for scientific truths in the study of international conflict and international political economy. Unlike empirical studies in other disciplines, says Seung-Whan Choi, many political studies seem more competent at presenting theoretical conjecture and hypotheses than they are at performing rigorous empirical analyses. When we study global issues like democratic institutions, flows of foreign direct investment, international terrorism, civil wars, and international conflict, we often uncritically adopt established theoretical frameworks and research designs. The natural assumption is that well-known and widely cited studies, once ingrained within the tradition of the discipline, should not be challenged or refuted. However, do such noted research areas reflect scientific truth? Choi looks closely at ten widely cited empirical studies that represent well-known research programs in international relations. His discussions address such statistical and theoretical issues as endogeneity bias, model specification error, fixed effects, theoretical predictability, outliers, normality of regression residuals, and choice of estimation techniques. In addition, scientific progress made by remarkable discoveries usually results from finding a new way of thinking about long-held scientific truths, therefore Choi also demonstrates how one may search for novel ideas at minimal cost by developing new research designs with original data. Here is a valuable resource for students, scholars, and policy makers who want to quickly grasp the evolutionary pattern of scientific research on democracy, foreign investment, terrorism, and conflict; build their research designs and choose appropriate statistical techniques; and identify their own agendas for the production of cutting-edge research.

A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 'I can't stop talking about this book' Jamie Klingler, co-founder #ReclaimTheseStreets 'What a gem. ... Makes you look at the world, and yourself, afresh.' Minna Salami, author of Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone 'A generous combination of passion and practicality that is not easily resisted. A rare book that might actually change our minds' Daniel Hahn OBE 'A book at once vigorous and generous, pleasurable and galvanising' Sophie Hughes, International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator What does it really mean to speak freely? A wise, beautifully written book that explores the way language shapes our lives and how we see the world - and what happens when we learn new words, and new ways of speaking to each other. Language opens up our world, and in the same instant, limits it. What does it mean to exist in a language that was never meant for you to speak? Why are we missing certain words? How can we talk about our communal problems without fuelling them? What does it actually mean to speak freely? As a writer and activist fighting for equality, Kubra Gumusay has been thinking about these questions for many years. In this book she explores how language shapes our thinking and determines our politics. She shows how people become invisible as individuals when they are always seen as part of a group, and the way those in the minority often have to expend energy cleaning up the messy thinking of others. But she also points to how we might shape conversations to allow for greater ambiguity and individuality, how arguments might happen in a space of learning and vulnerability without sacrificing principles - how we might all be able to speak freely.

Was Salman Rushdie right to have written The Satanic Verses ? Were the protestors right to have done so? What about the Danish cartoons? This book examines the moral questions raised by cultural controversies, and how intercultural dialogue might be generated within multicultural societies.

Six-time New York Times bestselling author, FOX News star, and radio host Mark R. Levin "trounces the news media" (The Washington Times) in this timely and groundbreaking book demonstrating how the great tradition of American free press has degenerated into a standardless profession that has squandered the faith and trust of the public. Unfreedom of the Press is not just another book about the press. In "Levin's finest work" (Breitbart), he shows how those entrusted with news reporting today are destroying freedom of the press from within--not through actions of government officials, but with its own abandonment of reportorial integrity and objective journalism. With the depth of historical background for which his books are renowned, Levin takes you on a journey through the early American patriot press, which proudly promoted the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is followed by the early decades of the Republic during which newspapers around the young country were open and transparent about their fierce allegiance to one political party or another. It was only at the start of the Progressive Era and the 20th century that the supposed "objectivity of the press" first surfaced, leaving us where we are today: with a partisan party-press overwhelmingly aligned with a political ideology but hypocritically engaged in a massive untruth as to its real nature.

The freedom to think what you want and to say what you think has always generated a pushback of regulation and censorship. This raises the thorny question: to what extent does free speech actually endanger speech protection? This book examines today's calls for speech legislation and places it into historical perspective, using fascinating examples from the past 200 years, to explain the historical context of laws regulating speech. Over time, the freedom to speak has grown, the ways in which we communicate have evolved due to technology, and our ideas about speech protection have been challenged as a result. Now more than ever, we are living in a free speech paradox: powerful speakers weaponize their rights in order to silence those less-powerful speakers who oppose them. By understanding how this situation has developed, we can stand up to these threats to the freedom of speech.

By examining the highly contested legal debate about the regulation of pornography through an epistemic lens, this book analyzes competing claims about the proper role of speech in our society, pornography's harm, the relationship between speech and equality, and whether law should regulate and, if so, upon what grounds. In maintaining that inegalitarian pornography generates discursive effects, the book contends that law cannot simply adopt a libertarian approach to free speech. While inegalitarian pornography may not be determinative of gender inequality, it does contribute, reinforce, reflect and help maintain such unfairness. As a result, we can place reasonable gender-based regulations on inegalitarian pornography while upholding our most treasured commitments to dissident speech just as other liberal democracies with strong free speech traditions have done.

A powerful portrait of the greatest humanitarian emergency of our time, from the director of Human Flow In the course of making Human Flow, his epic feature documentary about the global refugee crisis, the artist Ai Weiwei and his collaborators interviewed more than 600 refugees, aid workers, politicians, activists, doctors, and local authorities in twenty-three countries around the world. A handful of those interviews were included in the film. This book presents one hundred of these conversations in their entirety, providing compelling first-person stories of the lives of those affected by the crisis and those on the front lines of working to address its immense challenges. Speaking in their own words, refugees give voice to their experiences of migrating across borders, living in refugee camps, and struggling to rebuild their lives in unfamiliar and uncertain surroundings. They talk about the dire circumstances that drove them to migrate, whether war, famine, or persecution; and their hopes and fears for the future. A wide range of related voices provides context for the historical evolution of this crisis, the challenges for regions and states, and the options for moving forward. Complete with photographs taken by Ai Weiwei while filming Human Flow, this book provides a powerful, personal, and moving account of the most urgent humanitarian crisis of our time.

Most people believe that the right to privacy is inherently at odds with the right to free speech. Courts all over the world have struggled with how to reconcile the problems of media gossip with our commitment to free and open public debate for over a century. The rise of the Internet has made this problem more urgent. We live in an age of corporate and government surveillance of our lives. And our free speech culture has created an anything-goes environment on the web, where offensive and hurtful speech about others is rife.
How should we think about the problems of privacy and free speech? In Intellectual Privacy, Neil Richards offers a different solution, one that ensures that our ideas and values keep pace with our technologies. Because of the importance of free speech to free and open societies, he argues that when privacy and free speech truly conflict, free speech should almost always win. Only when disclosures of truly horrible information are made (such as sex tapes) should privacy be able to trump our commitment to free expression. But in sharp contrast to conventional wisdom, Richards argues that speech and privacy are only rarely in conflict. America's obsession with celebrity culture has blinded us to more important aspects of how privacy and speech fit together. Celebrity gossip might be a price we pay for a free press, but the privacy of ordinary people need not be. True invasions of privacy like peeping toms or electronic surveillance will rarely merit protection as free speech. And critically, Richards shows how most of the law we enact to protect online privacy pose no serious burden to public debate, and how protecting the privacy of our data is not censorship.
More fundamentally, Richards shows how privacy and free speech are often essential to each other. He explains the importance of 'intellectual privacy, ' protection from surveillance or interference when we are engaged in the processes of generating ideas - thinking, reading, and speaking with confidantes before our ideas are ready for public consumption. In our digital age, in which we increasingly communicate, read, and think with the help of technologies that track us, increased protection for intellectual privacy has become an imperative. What we must do, then, is to worry less about barring tabloid gossip, and worry much more about corporate and government surveillance into the minds, conversations, reading habits, and political beliefs of ordinary people.
A timely and provocative book on a subject that affects us all, Intellectual Privacy will radically reshape the debate about privacy and free speech in our digital age.

In Politics, Taxes, and the Pulpit, Nina J. Crimm and Laurence H. Winer examine the provocative mix of religion, politics, and taxes involved in the controversy over houses of worship engaging in electoral political speech. The authors analyze the dilemmas associated with federal tax subsidies benefiting nonprofit houses of worship conditioned on their refraining from political campaign speech. The Supreme Court's recent Citizens United decision invalidating federal campaign finance restrictions on corporations' political campaign speech makes the remaining, analogous restrictive tax laws constraining many nonprofit entities all the more singular and problematic, particularly for houses of worship. Crimm and Winer explore the multifaceted constitutional tensions arising from this legal structure and implicating all fundamental values embodied in the First Amendment: free speech and free press, the free exercise of religion, and the avoidance of government establishment of religion. They also examine the history and economics of taxation of houses of worship. The authors conclude that there exists no means of fully resolving the irreconcilable clashes in a constitutionally permissible and politically and socially palatable manner. Nonetheless, Crimm and Winer offer several feasible legislative proposals for reforming tax provisions that likely will generate considerable debate. If Congress adopts the proposed reforms, however, the revised system should substantially ameliorate the disquieting constitutional tensions induced by the current tax laws and curb the growing emotionally charged atmosphere about the role of religion in the public sphere.

Free Speech and Hate Speech in the United States explores the concept and treatment of hate speech in light of escalating social tensions in the global twenty-first century, proposing a shift in emphasis from the negative protection of individual rights toward a more positive support of social equality. Drawing on Axel Honneth's theory of recognition, the author develops a two-tiered framework for free speech analysis that will promote a strategy for combating hate speech. To illustrate how this framework might impact speech rights in the U.S., she looks specifically at hate speech in the context of symbolic speech, disparaging speech, internet speech and speech on college campuses. Entering into an ongoing debate about the role of speech in society, this book will be of key importance to First Amendment scholars, and to scholars and students of communication studies, media studies, media law, political science, feminist studies, American studies, and history.

In 1969, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas called free speech in public schools a ""hazardous freedom,"" but one well worth the risk. A half-century later, with technology enabling students to communicate in ways only dreamed about in Fortas' time, that freedom seems more hazardous than ever. Yet still worth the risk, given equal respect for students' First Amendment rights and the requirements of an orderly educational institution. This book provides educators, administrators, school board members and parents a starting point in creating student speech policies that encourage the responsible exercise of constitutional freedoms, while respecting the learning environment. The author discusses the history, sociology, law and philosophy surrounding student speech, demonstrating that free speech and effective teaching and administration in public schools are not mutually exclusive.

Although nudity is something that everyone has experience with, public nudity is still largely considered taboo. Public Nudity and the Rhetoric of the Body examines instances of public nudity where sexuality is at the forefront of public body display. It presents a range of case studies: the legal aspects of sexualized public nudity as it relates to communication theory and the First Amendment; the controversies surrounding the work of photographer Jock Sturges; the public performance art of Milo Moire; the topless protests of FEMEN; the social media activism of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy; the ritualized flashing during Mardi Gras in New Orleans; and the sexual displays of Folsom Street Fair, the largest leather pride festival. Taken together, these cases teach much about identity, self-determination, and sexuality, and illustrate the complicated rhetorical nature of the human body in the public sphere.

More than any other people on earth, we Americans are free to say and write what we think. The press can air the secrets of government, the corporate boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. This extraordinary freedom results not from America's culture of tolerance, but from fourteen words in the constitution: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment.

In "Freedom for the Thought That We Hate," two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis describes how our free-speech rights were created in five distinct areas--political speech, artistic expression, libel, commercial speech, and unusual forms of expression such as T-shirts and campaign spending. It is a story of hard choices, heroic judges, and the fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face to face with one of America's great founding ideas.

Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning are key figures in the struggles playing out in our democracies over internet use, state secrets, and mass surveillance in the age of terror. When not decried as traitors, they are seen as whistle-blowers whose crucial revelations are meant to denounce a problem or correct an injustice. Yet, for Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, they are much more than that. Snowden, Assange, and Manning are exemplars who have reinvented an art of revolt. Consciously or not, they have inaugurated a new form of political action and a new identity for the political subject. Anonymity as practiced by WikiLeaks and the flight and requests for asylum of Snowden and Assange break with traditional forms of democratic protest. Yet we can hardly dismiss them as acts of cowardice. Rather, as Lagasnerie suggests, such solitary choices challenge us to question classic modes of collective action, calling old conceptions of the state and citizenship into question and inviting us to reformulate the language of critical philosophy. In the process, he pays homage to the actions and lives of these three figures.

Shaheed Nick Mohammed's Communication and the Globalization of Culture: Beyond Tradition and Borders provides a unique perspective on the concept of culture and its fate in the globalized, mediated environment. Acknowledging widespread fears of cultural erosion at the hands of dominant global forces, Mohammed argues that what we understand as culture has always been the product of global forces, including those of trade and exchange. Our very conceptions of culture are questioned. The sanctity of tradition, religion, and heritage, the book suggests, should give way to an appreciation of the quite mundane origins of cultural artifacts, invented often as matters of political or social expedience, adopted sometimes in accidents of history and canonized by time into the catechisms of cultural belief. Communication and the Globalization of Culture also suggests several mechanisms by which pragmatic social practices and fictional discourses make their way into the cultural beliefs and traditions of societies. Shaheed Nick Mohammed examines how the modern globalized environment gives rise to cultural practices that demonstrate cultural inventions, imagined communities, and manufactured cultural products, suggesting that such inventions and imaginations are not uniquely modern but rather a continuation of cultural inventions that long pre-date our media-globalized environment.

Although there has been a lot written about how counter-terrorism laws impact on human rights and civil liberties, most of this work has focussed on the most obvious or egregious kinds of human rights abrogation, such as extended detention, torture, and extraordinary rendition. Far less has been written about the complex ways in which Western governments have placed new and far-reaching limitations on freedom of speech in this context since 9/11. This book compares three liberal democracies - the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, in particular showing the commonalities and similarities in what has occurred in each country, and the changes in the appropriate parameters of freedom of speech in the counter-terrorism context since 9/11, achieved both in policy change and the justification for that change. In all three countries much speech has been criminalized in ways that were considered anachronistic, or inappropriate, in comparable policy areas prior to 9/11. This is particularly interesting because other works have suggested that the United States' unique protection of freedom of speech in the First Amendment has prevented speech being limited in that country in ways that have been pursued in others. This book shows that this kind of argument misses the detail of the policy change that has occurred, and privileges a textual reading over a more comprehensive policy-based understanding of the changes that have occurred. The author argues that we are now living a new-normal for freedom of speech, within which restrictions on speech that once would have been considered aberrant, overreaching, and impermissible are now considered ordinary, necessary, and justified as long as they occur in the counter-terrorism context. This change is persistent, and it has far reaching implications for the future of this foundational freedom.

In recent years, the Russian government has dramatically expanded its restrictions on the internet, while simultaneously consolidating its grip on traditional media. The internet, however, because of its transnational configuration, continues to evade comprehensive state control and offers ever new opportunities for disseminating and consuming dissenting opinions. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, including media law, human rights, political science, media and cultural studies, and the study of religion, this book examines the current state of the freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and media freedom in Russia, focusing on digital media and cross-media initiatives that bridge traditional and new media spheres. It assesses how the conditions for free speech are influenced by the dynamic development of Russian media, including the expansion of digital technologies, explores the interaction and transfer of practices, formats, stylistics and aesthetics between independent and state-owned media, and discusses how far traditional media co-opt strategies developed by and associated with independent media to mask their lack of free expression. Overall, the book provides a deep and rich understanding of the changing structures and practices of national and transnational Russian media and how they condition the boundaries of freedom of expression in Russia today.

Emma Goldman's Supreme Court appeal occurred during a transitional point for First Amendment law, as justices began incorporating arguments related to free expression into decisions on espionage and sedition cases. This project analyzes the communications that led to her arrest-writings in Mother Earth, a mass-mailed manifesto, and speeches related to compulsory military service during World War I-as well as the ensuing legal proceedings and media coverage. The authors place Goldman's Supreme Court appeal in the context of the more famous Schenck and Abrams trials to demonstrate her place in First Amendment history while providing insight into wartime censorship and the attitude of the mainstream press toward radical speech.

This book offers a political economy analysis of the development and degradation of freedom of the press in Taiwan since 1949, exploring how state-business elites and foreign hegemons interacted to shape the evolution of Taiwan's media. It examines why freedoms increased alongside democratization in the 1990s but deteriorated after the second peaceful turnover of power in 2008 and why significant improvements accompanied Taiwan's close economic connections with the US during the Cold War, only to become eroded as the country developed deeper economic ties with China in the 21st century. Presenting both a domestic and international perspective, this study of the controversial case of Taiwan ultimately argues in favor of three factors. First, state power is not the only threat to press freedom, as corporate organizations and market forces may also play a role in curtailing it. Second, cross-national economic connections do not always improve human and civil rights but may cause damage when they involve more powerful authoritarian countries. Third, just as norms diffuse from liberal contexts to repressive states, repressive norms are also likely to diffuse from powerful authoritarian countries to more liberal but politically and economically weaker ones. Providing a new viewpoint on China's media control overseas, The Political Economy of Press Freedom will be useful for students and scholars of Chinese Studies and Taiwan Studies as well as comparative politics, international relations and Media Studies.

Decentering Citizenship follows three groups of Filipina migrants' struggles to belong in South Korea: factory workers claiming rights as workers, wives of South Korean men claiming rights as mothers, and hostesses at American military clubs who are excluded from claims-unless they claim to be victims of trafficking. Moving beyond laws and policies, Hae Yeon Choo examines how rights are enacted, translated, and challenged in daily life and ultimately interrogates the concept of citizenship. Choo reveals citizenship as a language of social and personal transformation within the pursuit of dignity, security, and mobility. Her vivid ethnography of both migrants and their South Korean advocates illuminates how social inequalities of gender, race, class, and nation operate in defining citizenship. Decentering Citizenship argues that citizenship emerges from negotiations about rights and belonging between South Koreans and migrants. As the promise of equal rights and full membership in a polity erodes in the face of global inequalities, this decentering illuminates important contestation at the margins of citizenship.

No Free Speech for Fascists explores the choice of anti-fascist protesters to demand that the opportunities for fascists to speak in public places are rescinded, as a question of history, law, and politics. It explains how the demand to no platform fascists emerged in 1970s Britain, as a limited exception to a left-wing tradition of support for free speech. The book shows how no platform was intended to be applied narrowly, only to a right-wing politics that threatened everyone else. It contrasts the rival idea of opposition to hate speech that also emerged at the same time and is now embodied in European and British anti-discrimination laws. Both no platform and hate speech reject the American First Amendment tradition of free speech, but the ways in which they reject it are different. Behind no platform is not merely a limited range of political targets but a much greater scepticism about the role of the state. The book argues for an idea of no platform which takes on the electronic channels on which so much speech now takes place. It shows where a fascist element can be recognised within the much wider category of far-right speech. This book will be of interest to activists and to those studying and researching political history, law, free speech, the far right, and anti-fascism. It sets out a philosophy of anti-fascism for a social media age.