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Wednesday, September 30
Global Free Speech

Rescuers at Minab school. Photo by: Mehr News Agency, CC BY 4.0 What actually happened when the Minab school in Iran was bombed matters. For a few moments last week I thought the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante had died. She hadn’t. It was fake news, spread on X. Before her death was debunked, thousands had engaged with the “news”. Stories like this (and there have been plenty of other faux celebrity deaths) do so well because of our inherent cognitive bias. We see them, we get very emotional – Ferrante is a beloved author – and in that moment we short-circuit critical thinking and head straight to a response – outrage, upset, even schadenfreude. It’s a similar story with Iran. Israel, the USA, the Iranian regime – all elicit strong emotions, which partly explains why the responses to what happened at the Minab school bombing have been so tense and contradictory. Major public figures, from politicians to comedians, have amplified their version of what they think happened. It’s prompted the New York Times and others to try and decipher, in this incredibly challenging media landscape, just what exactly did take place. Because facts matter. Few would publicly disagree with this principle and yet cognitive bias today is extending to how people approach fact-checkers. For some they’re censorious liberals, intent on silencing right-wing voices. For others they’re essential soldiers fighting for democracy, and indeed free speech, in the age of Russian troll machines. Index has always sought to identify issues with handling mis- and disinformation – false flags and stories that change as new evidence emerges. Ultimately we believe that with advances to artificial intelligence and ample examples of online deception, we need a lot more people investigating, highlighting and contextualising where our information comes from. The Trump administration isn’t with us. Since Donald Trump’s return to power, not only respected journalists and media outlets, but mis- and disinformation researchers have been in his firing line. These researchers have battled federal funding cuts, a surge in abuse, even death threats. In December five people were denied visas to the USA, accused of being part of the “global censorship-industrial complex”. More could fall prey. Plans are afoot for non-citizens working in the space to have their visas revoked or denied and face detention and deportation. The researchers are fighting back. This week the Knight First Amendment Institute and Protect Democracy filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR), challenging the constitutionality of the new immigration policy. The claimants argue that it violates their First Amendment rights and is intended to chill independent research about social media and other internet platforms. “This policy is meant to censor researchers into silence and keep the public in the dark, and that’s exactly what it’s doing,” said Brandi Geurkink, executive director at CITR. We agree. A viral post suggesting Ferrante is dead doesn’t matter hugely. Information on how the war is being conducted in Iran does. Experts who can spot the red flags and contextualise the information we receive aren’t free-speech enemies and branding them as such is a less than subtle way to silence them. READ MORE

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Rescuers at Minab school. Photo by: Mehr News Agency, CC BY 4.0 What actually happened when the Minab school in Iran was bombed matters. For a few moments last week I thought the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante had died. She hadn’t. It was fake news, spread on X. Before her death was debunked, thousands had engaged with the “news”. Stories like this (and there have been plenty of other faux celebrity deaths) do so well because of our inherent cognitive bias. We see them, we get very emotional – Ferrante is a beloved author – and in that moment we short-circuit critical thinking and head straight to a response – outrage, upset, even schadenfreude. It’s a similar story with Iran. Israel, the USA, the Iranian regime – all elicit strong emotions, which partly explains why the responses to what happened at the Minab school bombing have been so tense and contradictory. Major public figures, from politicians to comedians, have amplified their version of what they think happened. It’s prompted the New York Times and others to try and decipher, in this incredibly challenging media landscape, just what exactly did take place. Because facts matter. Few would publicly disagree with this principle and yet cognitive bias today is extending to how people approach fact-checkers. For some they’re censorious liberals, intent on silencing right-wing voices. For others they’re essential soldiers fighting for democracy, and indeed free speech, in the age of Russian troll machines. Index has always sought to identify issues with handling mis- and disinformation – false flags and stories that change as new evidence emerges. Ultimately we believe that with advances to artificial intelligence and ample examples of online deception, we need a lot more people investigating, highlighting and contextualising where our information comes from. The Trump administration isn’t with us. Since Donald Trump’s return to power, not only respected journalists and media outlets, but mis- and disinformation researchers have been in his firing line. These researchers have battled federal funding cuts, a surge in abuse, even death threats. In December five people were denied visas to the USA, accused of being part of the “global censorship-industrial complex”. More could fall prey. Plans are afoot for non-citizens working in the space to have their visas revoked or denied and face detention and deportation. The researchers are fighting back. This week the Knight First Amendment Institute and Protect Democracy filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR), challenging the constitutionality of the new immigration policy. The claimants argue that it violates their First Amendment rights and is intended to chill independent research about social media and other internet platforms. “This policy is meant to censor researchers into silence and keep the public in the dark, and that’s exactly what it’s doing,” said Brandi Geurkink, executive director at CITR. We agree. A viral post suggesting Ferrante is dead doesn’t matter hugely. Information on how the war is being conducted in Iran does. Experts who can spot the red flags and contextualise the information we receive aren’t free-speech enemies and branding them as such is a less than subtle way to silence them. READ MORE

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What actually happened when the Minab school in Iran was bombed matters.

For a few moments last week I thought the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante had died. She hadn’t. It was fake news, spread on X. Before her death was debunked, thousands had engaged with the “news”. Stories like this (and there have been plenty of other faux celebrity deaths) do so well because of our inherent cognitive bias. We see them, we get very emotional – Ferrante is a beloved author – and in that moment we short-circuit critical thinking and head straight to a response – outrage, upset, even schadenfreude.

It’s a similar story with Iran. Israel, the USA, the Iranian regime – all elicit strong emotions, which partly explains why the responses to what happened at the Minab school bombing have been so tense and contradictory. Major public figures, from politicians to comedians, have amplified their version of what they think happened. It’s prompted the New York Times and others to try and decipher, in this incredibly challenging media landscape, just what exactly did take place. Because facts matter.

Few would publicly disagree with this principle and yet cognitive bias today is extending to how people approach fact-checkers. For some they’re censorious liberals, intent on silencing right-wing voices. For others they’re essential soldiers fighting for democracy, and indeed free speech, in the age of Russian troll machines.

Index has always sought to identify issues with handling mis- and disinformation – false flags and stories that change as new evidence emerges. Ultimately we believe that with advances to artificial intelligence and ample examples of online deception, we need a lot more people investigating, highlighting and contextualising where our information comes from.

The Trump administration isn’t with us. Since Donald Trump’s return to power, not only respected journalists and media outlets, but mis- and disinformation researchers have been in his firing line. These researchers have battled federal funding cuts, a surge in abuse, even death threats. In December five people were denied visas to the USA, accused of being part of the “global censorship-industrial complex”. More could fall prey. Plans are afoot for non-citizens working in the space to have their visas revoked or denied and face detention and deportation.

The researchers are fighting back. This week the Knight First Amendment Institute and Protect Democracy filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR), challenging the constitutionality of the new immigration policy. The claimants argue that it violates their First Amendment rights and is intended to chill independent research about social media and other internet platforms.

“This policy is meant to censor researchers into silence and keep the public in the dark, and that’s exactly what it’s doing,” said Brandi Geurkink, executive director at CITR.

We agree. A viral post suggesting Ferrante is dead doesn’t matter hugely. Information on how the war is being conducted in Iran does. Experts who can spot the red flags and contextualise the information we receive aren’t free-speech enemies and branding them as such is a less than subtle way to silence them.

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Global Free Speech

The BBC clearly sees the value of television series That Mitchell and Webb Look. Marking the 20th anniversary of its original screening, the Beeb has re-released the series on iPlayer. But – and there is very often a “but” with these things – they’ve removed around 11 sketches from the BAFTA award-winning show. The official word is that these sketches don’t “work today”, which is polite speak for “they may cause offence”. The episodes singled out include scenes featuring a battle reenactment with characters in blackface, a contestant on a show wearing a burka and a lost tribe” in a garden centre. These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them; but 20 years on, this distinction seems to have been lost along the way. I’m a bit uncomfortable about this. I find it infantilising, to say the least. Can’t we trust audiences to make up their own minds, to switch off if they find the sketches in question unpalatable? Does the BBC think that we are just passive consumers, unable to disaggregate the mocking of racism from racism itself? These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them This act of censorship is distorting – of the shows, whose narratives and rhythms were built to include these sketches, and more broadly too. Conversations we were having 20 years ago have been erased, as if to suggest that they never happened. But they did! And with this erasure, the opportunity for thoughtful engagement and learning from our past is gone. “Let’s just pretend we were all lovely 20 years ago. It’s better that way” seems to be the message. Speaking as a minority myself, I find that knowing the nasty stuff that people said before – and indeed, still say today – is much more useful than pretending it never happened. This approach, I think, is also inconsistent. What it reveals is a cherry-picking (intended or not) of the groups that we can mock, and those that we can’t. Let’s face it, gender stereotypes are rarely deemed to have aged beyond the pale – if that were the case, we would have to wave goodbye to half the television made before the mid-2010s. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists, namely that what they’re creating today may hold less value tomorrow. Or, even worse, that future audiences may deem them bigots – that Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of any creative paying attention to the discourse of the moment. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists The BBC’s decision reaffirms a broader trend. In 2020, Little Britain was removed from the iPlayer platform for similar reasons. It has since been reinstated – minus some sketches. Meanwhile, the UK’s arts space more broadly is seeing a retreat to the land of “safe”, as Index recently revealed in a year-long investigation into self-censorship in UK theatre. The BBC, it must be said, does remarkable stuff. The ongoing podcast investigation into the disappearance of US journalist Austin Tice is just one example. But this does not mean, however, that they don’t sometimes get it wrong. Chopping at That Mitchell and Webb Look is one example. Sure, the removal of the material isn’t the life-or-death story that Index often works on. Sure, Mitchell and Webb aren’t the faces of persecuted artists – they have huge platforms and agreed to the changes themselves. Still, one can’t help but think that the decision came from a place of conservatism, perhaps even fear. This is weak and dispiriting, indeed the very opposite of what enables creativity in the arts. We shouldn’t be encouraging this cultural timidity. Rather, we should harness culture and creativity as the starting points of a conversation about our here and now. That’s what the arts are for, after all. READ MORE

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