Freedom of speech

Travel Bloggers Arrested in Iran For Flying Drone Without a Permit

Two Australian travel bloggers have been arrested in Iran for flying a hobby drone without a permit. The bloggers often take photos with their drone and publish them to social media, but the couple disappeared from the internet in June after posting from Pakistan. The bloggers, Jolie King and Mark Firkin, operate the website The…

Who Has the Most Censored Internet?

Certain platforms might take down your homemade pornography, or censor your conspiracist podcast, but in the U.S. the internet is a fairly open place. As long as what you’re peddling isn’t actively illegal—or as long as you’re not peddling illegal wares too flagrantly—you’re free to set up shop elsewhere. Whether ours is the best of…

YouTube Has a New Naughty Corner for Controversial Religious and Supremacist Videos

Today, YouTube clarified how it plans to handle videos that don’t violate any of its policies but still contain offensive religious and supremacist content: hide them and make sure they can’t make any money. The news comes as a status report on the promises made by Google general counsel Kent Walker in a June Financial…

New German Law Forces Facebook To Remove Hate Speech or Pay Over $50 Million

Germany’s parliament passed a law on Friday that forces social media sites to quickly take down illegal and slanderous content or face a fine of 50 million euros ($57 million). The new rule affects Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites with more than 2 million users. Under the Network Enforcement Act, which goes into effect…

Leaked Facebook Rules Reveal Why It Won’t Protect Black Children From Hate Speech

On Wednesday, ProPublica published dozens of startling training documents reportedly used by Facebook to train moderators on hate speech. As the trove of slides and quizzes reveals, Facebook uses a warped, one-sided reasoning to balance policing hate speech against users’ freedom of expression on the platform. This is perhaps best summarized by the above image…

House GOP Passes New Rules to Punish Livestreaming Protests from Congress

Voting largely along party lines, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved new fines on Tuesday against lawmakers who use electronic devices to take pictures or broadcast from the chamber, prompting a barrage of flashes as Democrats snapped photos in defiance of the rules. Majority Leader Paul Ryan proposed the fines in response to one of…

Twitter CEO Secretly Forced Censorship Of Abusive Tweets During Obama Q&A: Report

Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to create an algorithm to filter out abusive and hateful language during a company-sponsored Q&A with President Obama in 2015 according to a Buzzfeed report. The story cites one former senior Twitter employee who alleges Costolo ordered a team of employees to build a new algorithm, feed…

Thanks for clearing that up: Harlem, Georgia’s Born Again Independent Baptist Church has a special message for everyone during the holiday season about free speech and two different men in red suits. The sign is, unsurprisingly, controversial in the community (a youth director at the nearby Harlem United Methodist Church worried that the sign was…

So, What’s Satan Been Up To Lately? 

Well, he’s been modeling for this statue that’s (hopefully) gonna be placed next to a Ten Commandments statue on the lawn in front of Oklahoma’s state capitol, courtesy of those noted holiday-cheer-spreaders, the Satanic Temple. Vice has hella (sorry) more under-construction pics of the statue, right this way. Elsewhere, Old Scratch has also been bumming…

Florida Agrees That Satanists Must Have Equal Representation In Capitol

The Satanic Temple scored a free-speech victory in its quest for equal representation among the Florida state capitol building’s religious-themed holiday displays. The Satanic Temple — not to be confused with the Church of Satan, with which TST is not affiliated — describes its mission as “facilitating the communication and mobilization of politically aware Satanists,…

The Most Convoluted DMCA Takedown Request of All Time

Anti-Gay group Straight Pride UK is abusing the DMCA takedown process to censor work by a journalist. No surprise there—the DMCA is twisted for all kinds of dumb purposes. The inexplicable part? The hate group filed a takedown on… its own press release. How dare you say that we said the words that we wrote…

Censored NBC-Slamming Journalist Guy Adams Is Back On Twitter (Updated)

Guy Adams—the journalist banned by Twitter after slamming NBC’s Olympics coverage again and again—is back in the game. His Twitter account has been activated again, as this image shows. https://deadspin.com/nbc-says-it-was-twitters-idea-to-kick-that-nbc-critical-5930429 Adams, a journalist working for the British newspaper The Independent, was kicked out of Twitter after the latter advised NBC to file a protest against…