Trolling, Free Speech and the Law

Turkey has blocked all access inside the country to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, one of the world's most popular websites.

It was not initially clear why the ban had been imposed.

The Turkey Blocks group said the site was inaccessible from 08:00 (05:00 GMT) by order of the Turkish authorities.

People in Istanbul were unable to access any Wikipedia pages without using a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

"After technical analysis and legal consideration based on the Law Nr. 5651 [governing the internet], an administrative measure has been taken for this website," Turkey's Information and Communication Technologies Authority was quoted as saying.

Blocking websites is a common tool of the Turkish authorities: Twitter, Facebook and You Tube have suffered the same fate several times, and numerous anti-government sites are inaccessible.

Critics say it smacks of Turkey's repression of free speech: over half of all requests to Twitter to remove content have come from Turkey, and the country now ranks 155 of 180 in the press freedom index of the watchdog Reporters without Borders.

Social media was in uproar as news of the ban emerged, with some users speculating that it might be a bid to suppress criticism on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Wikipedia page.

One Twitter user noted that the Wikipedia page on Turkey's referendum has a section on "controversies and electoral misconduct", and cites claims that the government suppressed the 'No' campaign through "arrests, control of the media and political suppression".

Turkey has temporarily blocked popular social media sites including Facebook and Twitter in the past, especially in the wake of mass protests or terror attacks.

The government has previously denied censoring the internet, blaming outages on spikes in usage after major events.

Wikipedia has also faced censorship in other countries, including a temporary ban in Russia, and repeated crackdowns in China.

White and Crandall recruited hundreds of participants via the Amazon Mechanical Turk service, conducting several interrelated studies where participants responded to descriptions of recent news events or readings involving someone being punished for racist speech. The racial attitudes of the respondents themselves were gauged using the Henry and Sears Symbolic Racism 2000 scale, a standard measure of racial prejudice in social psychology and political science.

One finding suggests many who defend racist speech using the "free speech argument" might not extend the same principle of free speech to negative comments aimed at authority figures or the public in general.

"You might think that, 'Maybe people who defend this racist speech are just big fans of free speech, that they're principled supporters of freedom,'" Crandall said. "Well, no. We give them a 'news' article with the same speech aimed at police — and prejudice scores are completely uncorrelated with defending speech aimed at police — and also uncorrelated with snarky speech aimed at customers at a coffee shop, but with no racial content."

White and Crandall wondered whether prejudiced people felt personally threatened when they hear about someone getting fired for expressing their attitudes; maybe they felt they'd be punished for their own beliefs.

"We wondered why people would go out on a limb to defend someone else's misbehavior," Crandall said. "We thought, maybe they felt personally implicated — they're defending an extension of themselves. We did three studies and found no evidence for this idea at all." "We thought that people would rush to the defense of people fired for saying prejudiced things because, firstly, people know they're prejudiced and, secondly, watching someone getting punished for that same prejudice makes them feel like bad people," White said. "Across three experiments, we found exactly no support for this idea.

"It isn't so much that these controversies make prejudiced people feel bad about themselves; instead, it seems to be driven partially by prejudiced people feeling like they are not free to live how they want to live and say what they want to say — they feel as if their freedom is under attack," he said.

Indeed, people with high levels of prejudice were very sensitive to their own freedom of expression.

"They weren't defending their own attitudes, as much as 'defending to the death their right to say it,'" Crandall said. "Just so long as the 'it' is the prejudiced speech they share."

Do claims of “free speech” provide cover for prejudice? We investigate whether this defense of racist or hate speech serves as a justification for prejudice. In a series of 8 studies (N = 1,624), we found that explicit racial prejudice is a reliable predictor of the “free speech defense” of racist expression. Participants endorsed free speech values for singing racists songs or posting racist comments on social media; people high in prejudice endorsed free speech more than people low in prejudice (meta-analytic r = .43). This endorsement was not principled—high levels of prejudice did not predict endorsement of free speech values when identical speech was directed at coworkers or the police. Participants low in explicit racial prejudice actively avoided endorsing free speech values in racialized conditions compared to nonracial conditions, but participants high in racial prejudice increased their endorsement of free speech values in racialized conditions. Three experiments failed to find evidence that defense of racist speech by the highly prejudiced was based in self-relevant or self-protective motives. Two experiments found evidence that the free speech argument protected participants’ own freedom to express their attitudes; the defense of other’s racist speech seems motivated more by threats to autonomy than threats to self-regard. These studies serve as an elaboration of the Justification-Suppression Model (Crandall & Eshleman, 2003) of prejudice expression. The justification of racist speech by endorsing fundamental political values can serve to buffer racial and hate speech from normative disapproval.

One finding suggests many who defend racist speech using the "free speech argument" might not extend the same principle of free speech to negative comments aimed at authority figures or the public in general.

That’s why studies that investigate “obvious” social science questions are a good sign, not a bad one. They’re not a sign that clueless researchers have no idea about these basic things and can’t be bothered to ask a Real Marginalized Person; they’re a sign that researchers strongly suspect that these effects are happening but want to be able to make an even stronger case by including as many Real Marginalized People in the study as financially/logistically possible.

"Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet," [the Tory Manifesto] states. "We disagree."

The plans will allow Britain to become "the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet", the manifesto claims.

It comes just soon after the Investigatory Powers Act came into law. That legislation allowed the government to force internet companies to keep records on their customers' browsing histories, as well as giving ministers the power to break apps like Whats App so that messages can be read.

While much of the internet is currently controlled by private businesses like Google and Facebook, Theresa May intends to allow government to decide what is and isn't published, the manifesto suggests.

The new rules would include laws that make it harder than ever to access pornographic and other websites. The government will be able to place restrictions on seeing adult content and any exceptions would have to be justified to ministers, the manifesto suggests.

The manifesto even suggests that the government might stop search engines like Google from directing people to pornographic websites. "We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm," the Conservatives write.

The laws would also force technology companies to delete anything that a person posted when they were under 18.

But perhaps most unusually they would be forced to help controversial government schemes like its Prevent strategy, by promoting counter-extremist narratives.

"In harnessing the digital revolution, we must take steps to protect the vulnerable and give people confidence to use the internet without fear of abuse, criminality or exposure to horrific content", the manifesto claims in a section called 'the safest place to be online'.

The plans are in keeping with the Tories' commitment that the online world must be regulated as strongly as the offline one, and that the same rules should apply in both.

The Conservatives will also seek to regulate the kind of news that is posted online and how companies are paid for it. If elected, Theresa May will "take steps to protect the reliability and objectivity of information that is essential to our democracy" – and crack down on Facebook and Google to ensure that news companies get enough advertising money.

If internet companies refuse to comply with the rulings – a suggestion that some have already made about the powers in the Investigatory Powers Act – then there will be a strict and strong set of ways to punish them.

"We will introduce a sanctions regime to ensure compliance, giving regulators the ability to fine or prosecute those companies that fail in their legal duties, and to order the removal of content where it clearly breaches UK law," the manifesto reads.

"While we cannot create this framework alone, it is for government, not private companies, to protect the security of people and ensure the fairness of the rules by which people and businesses abide," the document reads. "Nor do we agree that the risks of such an approach outweigh the potential benefits."

If enacted, the bill will add "gender expression or identity" as a protected ground to the Canadian Human Rights Act, and also to the Criminal Code provisions dealing with hate propaganda, incitement to genocide, and aggravating factors in sentencing.

any speech that incites attacks on an individual or group based on the population they belong to.