Britain first & free speech?

[SpringHen]

Britain first & its leaders banned from facebook

I think there should be a stike system and zero tolerance for certain posts but think facebook should put in the work and deal with it on an individual basis.

Where does this policy of banning a whole group and its leaders leave other controversal groups like TERFs.

I dont in any way condone Britain First but I dont condone the extreme far left either and if FB continues down this road, social media risks becoming a far left echo chamber with noone to counter challenge.

Thoughts?

I don't like Lauren Southern or her views. But where does this end? Who decides what is and isn't allowed?

The racist material from what I've read was a poster saying 'Allah is a gay god'. Yeah not particularly nice, funny or clever. Provocative yes, but is it any different from The Charlie Hebdo cartoons?

A friend criticised me when I posted TR talk at Oxford Union on my FB page.When I questioned her this was based only on his rep. To me hes an example of how the police can gang up on the outsider especially working class male. And I would be surprised if he DID get equal treatment from police for this attack. I see the EDL is coming to my town-this is second time, last was 2014. I believe free speech is precious. I saw on utube that( I think it was Danish)some LGBTs insisted on marching through the islam part of town(rather than the prescibed route) to sort of put it in the face of the religious right. This infuriated me! I saw the TRA footprint! I live in the Asian part of my town so I just hope the EDL stay in the town center and not target my area. If they come to my area I'll feel duty bound to engage with them.

@SunsetBeetch ah ok, so you don't consider what she did to be racist. If she did do something that could be considered to be inciting racial hatred, would you still welcome her into the UK?

Mocking god or allah is not a crime in this country (thank your deity of choice.) if the statement could be considered homophobic then that could be hate crime but to ONLY say ‘allah is a gay god’ is not a crime.

Tony Blair tried to make blasphemy a crime and was thankfully defeated (I believe roman Atkinson was one of the main opposers.)

There must have been actual racist comment / incitement on the poster.

For example, these ‘punish a muslim’ letters being sent out - that is clear incitement to violence and needs to be investigated and the perpetrators caught because its inciting violence against -actual people

Taking the piss out of a god or ideology is not the same as inciting violence against real people. I’d argue that our right to mock ideologies (again not the people who hold them, the ideology itself) is a vital part of defence against religious dominance

I 've just googled the Lauren Southern leaflet.

There must be more to it?!

The leaders of this group have just been sentenced to prison for incitement to violence. While I can imagine a crazy future where gender critical views are proscribed as a hate crime, right now the law has proscribed the action and words of Britain First and its leaders as such. I do understand the concerns over free speech but I've got no problem with Facebook banning the group on those grounds.

I would like to stress also that sharecropping is always a risky undertaking - don't build your brand, your outreach, your marketing or even your entire online presence on someone else's land lest they throw you off it. This happened to me in relation to my work and I've learned my lesson.

Free speech is great, but there need to be limits. Targeting hate/ encouraging violence towards groups in society should have consequences such as these.

@SpringMayHaveSprung not that I could find. Happy to be corrected though.

@AssassinatedBeauty what @KochabRising said really (it was well put I thought).

If you read the details of why this woman was refused entry, she and her friends were intent on inciting hatred through the various activities they had planned. Nothing to do as it turns out with the poster she had previously been distributing. She's made the letter of refusal available online.

While I can imagine a crazy future where gender critical views are proscribed as a hate crime

That future is already here! We do have limits to free speech, but I think we still need to be sceptical when it comes to who decides what is hateful or encouraging violence. There are plenty of people whose views I find abhorrent, but I would rather they were aired and challenged. No-platforming doesn't mean people won't hold those views. Blanket bans should be the exception.

I'm on some radfem groups on fb.
There have been bannings and suspensions of people writing gender critical comments.

Then the poster is a red herring. Nice PR work to paint herself as a victim?

I have a big problem with nonplatforming especially in universities. I went to uni last century and used to attend all sorts of events - factual, things I agreed with and things I didn’t. Speakers often got a really hard time with students asking very penetrating questions that exposed idiocy/hateful ideologies. I asked a few very awkward questions myself (I once made a senior cabinet member speechless he was so discombobulated...)

By no platforming we are putting our students in an echo chamber where they are never made uncomfortable, never exposed to ideas that shock them and most crucially never able to develop the logical/debating skills needed to engage with and argue against ideologies they disagree with.

We do not fight hatred with hatred or book burnjng. We fight it with open dialogue, clear reasoning and logic.

@KochabRising would you support someone's right to incite violence against others, as free speech?

Women are a disadvantaged group that work to preserve their own rights. Britain First are not a disadvantaged group and they work against the rights of others. I dont think its helpful to conflate the two.

Broadly this.

We do already have hate speech laws. The problem we have at the moment is that we've also got a sustained, shameless propaganda machine that is constantly insisting that the ones inciting the hate (the TRAs) are the victims, and the ones getting punched and silenced (gender-crit women) are the hate group.

We also keep getting accused of getting into bed with the far right, when much of what the far right promote (gender roles strictly enforced, women in their place, and gay people not existing at all) is also what the TRAs are promoting, too.

Lauren Southern caused a furore a while back trying to interrupt rescue missions of refugees off the coast of Italy. The organisation she was part of claimed it was in part because the rescuers were working with trafficking groups, although I don't believe that claim has been substantiated.

Lauren and a few others fall into the category of what some call alt lite, so a sub set of alt right or far right. They tread a careful line to not appear racist but they are most definitely pro white people and pro nationalism.

I suppose the question is to what extent is that acceptable and are people like Lauren held to different standards than other groups? That takes us into discussions about the structure of oppression, claim, systemic structures etc..

I don't find a lot of her views align with mine but I did discover via looking her up on twitter that she has been a strong campaigner about the farm murders in SA which has resulted in the Australian government today saying they are considering taking the Afrikkaners as refugees.

Would she have cared if they were black South Africans? Perhaps not but never the less I think she did achieve some good because the stories of murder and torture that have been happening to entire families are horrific and apparently at a rate of about one a week. I've not seen anything about it mentioned in the MSM.

I'm on the fence with whether detaining her was reasonable or not. She has a history of various 'stunts' one was getting her gender changed to male in the space of a couple of hours to show how ridiculous self ID is in Canada. That I agree with, others I don't. Not sure she is dangerous in the grand scheme of things though and I think the detention played straight into what she was hoping for.

*classism

assassinated no I would not. That’s illegal. If Britain first want to stand and rant about how all non white prople are awful then that’s shit but it’s free speech. If they start any kind of rabble rousing, or specific incitement the law can and should step in. Most of these groups deliberately skirt a fine line,

I mean nonplatforming speakers people find distasteful or abhorrent. Any specific incidences of inciting hatred should be subject to the law. I’m trying to think of an example I’ve seen recently 🤔

For example the ‘punish a Muslim’ letter sent out recently - clear incitement to hatred. Illegal.
Charlie Hebdo mocking Islam as an ideology - not inciting violence against actual people. Not illegal.

Isn't this down to interpretation of what constitutes "rabble-rousing". If you rant about non-white people being less the human or whatever, then isn't that rabble rousing as it encourages people who agree to take action beyond what they would have done otherwise? Or if you rant about that in front of a mainly non-white audience who were otherwise going about their day, isn't that hate speech directed at those people? Or is that ok and you would defend people's right to do that?

My opinion: You either believe in freedom of speech or you don’t. Britain First are not a group I would ever consider supporting but I support the right of people to hold views and express them. So I think is wrong to ban them. Once you accept the principle that people don’t always have the right to express their views the question then becomes which views are OK and which aren’t and who gets to decide? The answers to that are, whoever is in the required position of authority in any given time and place gets to decide and any view that this authority thinks is OK to express is allowed and any view they don’t think it is OK to express is illegal. If you support censoring the free speech of others it could just be a matter of time before you yourself are censored. That might sound alarmist but I don’t believe it is. The UK has already accepted the concept of hate speech, so I see no reason why TERF ideas for example couldn’t be considered by those in power to be at first non-inclusive, then bigoted, then hateful and then illegal. Incidentally, as a far right party Britain First wouldn’t believe in freedom of speech. If Britain First were in power they would do to the far left the same sort of things that the far left seek to do to them. But the far left and the far right are actually remarkably similar, two sides of the same totalitarian coin.

asassinated that’s a very good question. And I don’t think it’s easy to answer.

I feel that free speech is important and that the law in the uk is generally quite sensible. I also want to distinguish very clearly that saying that someone has a right to say something does NOT mean you support their views in any way.

Britain first are about as far from what my own views are as it’s possible to get. They’re horrible racist thugs. At the same time if they are not meeting the uk definition on hate speech in that theoretical speech they’re giving then yes, they have a right to free speech.

They are not protected from the consequences of what they say. If what they say is proven to incite hatred or a danger to the public (the yelling fire in a theatre concept) then they face the consequences.

Everyone had the same right to free speech within the bounds of the law - was it Voltaire who said something like I disagree with what you say but I defend your right to say it ?

@ovahere. If you look at YouTube you’ll discover that this week Lauren Southern was detained under section 7 of the terrorism act and banned from entering the UK. Her ‘crime’ was a what she claimed was a social experiment after she read an article saying Jesus Christ was probably gay. She decided to see what would happen if she said that about other Gods. The police took her leaflets away for being offensive to some and she thought that was the end of it but then discovered she was on a list of people banned from UK. Lauren is conservative and provocative but not a racist.

@DrumDrum that leaflet isn't mentioned in the refusal letter. It describes what she was intending on doing this time and that is what has resulted in the refusal of entry.

drumdrum

Interesting. I can see a case being made for denigrating gay people (gay should not be used as a term of insult and it’s wrong to do so) but in this country blasphemy is not illegal, nor is any religion confined to one race. It’s not a crime to insult a religion or its prophets (maybe if said prophet was alive?) a religion is an ideology and has no protection. The people holding those beliefs rightly have protection from discrimination for hiding them. People are protected, not ideology or dogma.

So if that’s the extent of what she did (and I don’t know enough about her to judge that) then no, she should not be banned.

Blasphemy is not and hopefully never will be a crime in Britain - we are out of the dark ages (hopefully...)

@Kochabrising “It’s not a crime to insult a religion or its prophets (maybe if said prophet was alive?) a religion is an ideology and has no protection.”

The leaflet that was taken away by the police insulted God (Allah), not a person. In the Christian religion Jesus is God as is the father and spirit, in the Muslim religion Allah is the name of God. Some people might not think the leaflet was insulting but I can see why some would take offense, it basically said “Allah is all of us” on a rainbow flag. Blasphemy is effectively becoming illegal because if someone takes offence and perceives someone else’s words or actions to come from a place of hatred there could be legal trouble, surely? What do you think a hate crime is and how do you think it is defined?

@assassinatedbeauty

Watch her interview and what she claims she was told. Do you think she is telling any lies? What was Lauren intending to do that we shouldn’t be allowed to do? As far as I know she has never incited violence or racial hatred or threatened people in the past. Is there any evidence that she was going to do something she has never done before? She is just a young conservative provocateur to my mind.