Latest news with #freespeech
Telegraph
14 hours ago
- Business
- Telegraph
‘I was hounded out of my publishing job over gender-critical beliefs'
A publisher has claimed she was hounded out of her job because of her gender-critical beliefs. Ursula Doyle sued Hachette, a large publishing house, where she worked until coming under fire from pro-transgender activists for publishing the 2021 book Material Girls. The work by Kathleen Stock is critical of gender ideology, the belief that people can self-identify as men or women. Ms Doyle claimed she was 'effectively punished' by Hachette for publishing the book and for her own gender-critical beliefs. She resigned last year after being 'hounded out' of the company, which had 'created a hostile working environment for me and anyone else who shares my views'. 'Battle for sex realism' She claimed this included Hachette rolling out a transgender inclusion policy that allowed biological men to use women's bathrooms in the office. Following a legal battle funded by £63,000 in donations, Ms Doyle has now reached an undisclosed settlement with Hachette, according to her legal team. She said in a statement: 'In bringing this case, I hoped to demonstrate conclusively that employers cannot allow staff to be subjected to abuse because of their lawful views, nor ignore women's rights to single-sex spaces. 'The battle for sex realism continues,' she added. When launching her crowd-funded legal battle last year, Ms Doyle raised concerns that activists deliberately targeted the publishing industry to suppress free speech and stifle criticism of gender ideology. She wrote: 'When you consider the impact these books have had on the conversations around sex and gender, it is easy to understand why publishing has been a key strategic target for gender identity activists. 'Their attempts to suppress all dissent at source have made the sector a hostile environment for anyone who dares to stand up for reality and freedom of expression. 'These tactics mean it is difficult for gender-critical books to find a publisher, and almost impossible for any authors who want to sell books on other topics to speak up on this subject.' Online abuse Ms Doyle claimed Hachette did nothing to protect her from online abuse directed at her for publishing Material Girls. She said the policy allowed 'men who say they are women to use women's toilets and shower facilities', adding that it discriminated against women who worked for Hachette. She also claimed Hachette undermined her by shifting responsibility for the paperback editions of Material Girls to another part of the company, which damaged her reputation as a publisher. 'Heavy five o'clock shadow' Ms Doyle's legal battle came following a string of other rows over the influence of gender ideology in publishing. In 2023, Gillian Philip, the children's author, claimed she was dropped by her employer after publicly supporting JK Rowling's critical views on transgender issues. She ultimately lost her legal battle. That same year, Sibyl Ruth, the gender-critical editor, said she was dropped by a literary consultancy after stating that the idea of someone with a 'heavy five o'clock shadow' being a woman 'blows my mind'. Works by authors sceptical of transgender activism became the subject of an internal 'grievance' within the library service of Calderdale council, a local authority affiliated with the controversial LGBT charity Stonewall. The Telegraph revealed in 2023 that books critical of gender ideology were removed from public view by staff working for the council libraries service, and stashed out of sight in an off-limits storage space. Hachette has not admitted any liability, Ms Doyle said despite the settlement.
Japan Times
21 hours ago
- General
- Japan Times
European kindness is threatening the foundations of free speech
Britain and Europe have become "a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom,' according to Samuel Samson, a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. His punchy boss further threatens to bar European visitors to the U.S. for "censoring' Americans online. Vice President JD Vance also condemned European "backsliding' on basic democratic values in a speech that outraged his audience at the Munich Security Conference last autumn. It used to be liberal progressives and radicals who denounced the state for infringing freedom of speech. Now it's the turn of the populist right to rage against "woke' censorship. U.S. President Donald Trump's own respect for the democratic process is questionable and administration officials, contemptuous of academic and artistic freedoms at home, make unlikely ambassadors for human rights abroad. But what if these populists have a point? Alas, the U.K. and Europe should look hard at their protections of the rights of individuals to say whatever they please. Some governments who would regard themselves as liberal minded are in danger of stifling, if not killing, free speech, albeit out of kindness. That's where the muddle begins. In theory, all states, even totalitarian ones like North Korea and dictatorships like Russia, which murder truth-telling journalists, subscribe to Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights that states "everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference.' In practice, all states also have restrictions on freedom of speech, and rightly so. Shout "fire' in a crowded cinema out of mischief and you'll be held responsible for those trampled in the rush for the exit; incite a crowd to lynch a victim and you'll spend many years behind bars. Individuals also have the right to protection against libel, slander and harassment. This is the stuff of a thousand philosophy seminars. But balancing individual rights with social responsibility is harder than it looks. The U.S. Supreme Court has made a better fist of it than most by extending First Amendment protections for free speech in recent decades, ruling that the authorities may only prosecute inflammatory speech that's "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.' Several European governments, however, have now tilted in the wrong direction — toward censorship and overreach. Germany goes to absurd lengths to protect its political class from personal abuse, for instance. France and Italy have similar laws. In the U.K., however, the desire to promote social harmony and protect minorities has taken precedence over free speech. So, a retired police officer was arrested in his Kent home by a posse of former colleagues for a wry tweet about pro-Palestinian demonstrators. As his home was ransacked, the police commented on his suspiciously Brexit-y reading material. In another notorious incident that made the front pages, a couple were held for eight hours at a police station for writing WhatApp messages and posting salty criticism of their daughter's primary school. Unfortunately, these aren't isolated incidents of overzealous authorities. Another cause celebre of the populist right on both sides of the Atlantic is the case of Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councilor who was jailed for 31 months for a public order offense. Yet she's no free speech martyr. After three children were murdered in a knife attack in Southport last year, Connolly wrongly assumed the assailant was an immigrant — he was the son of refugees from Rwanda — and tweeted on X calling for mass deportations and inciting people to set fire to hotels housing immigrants. The post was viewed more than 300,000 times on a day when racist thugs attacked mosques and migrant hostels. Judges are the ultimate guardians of the rule of law, the fertile ground out of which both British and American democracy grew. The courts therefore come down hard on those who threaten public order. Connolly's sentence was intended to be exemplary, but it was at the extreme range of censure — and should have been reduced on appeal. Confused thinking and badly drafted legislation lies behind the U.K.'s recent illiberal tilt. Hate crime is now defined by law as "any criminal offense perceived by the victim or any person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.' Such vague, subjective criteria should have no place on the statute book. As Jonathan Sumption, a former supreme court justice puts it: "Words may now be criminal if they are abusive or even insulting, even if they are not threatening and put no one in danger.' At the root of much of this is poorly written legislation. The concept of "noncrime hate,' introduced after the racist murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence 30 years ago, also obliges the police to record incidents of so-called offensive speech that have no criminal penalty. The evidence, such as it is, can stay on file and be used in criminal record checks seen by potential employers. The College of Policing's Kafkaesque guidance states "the victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception' — a charter for aggrieved individuals to pursue private vendettas. Ten of thousands of police hours are devoted to noncrime hate; 13,200 incidents were recorded by police in the year to June 2024. It's easy to collect the evidence because most of it is posted online — far easier than tracking down violent criminals, burglars and fraudsters. So while police chiefs went public in the media this week with demands for more money from the Treasury, the government should be asking whether officers are making best use of their existing budgets. Unfortunately, things look likely to get worse before they get better. The Labour government's new employment bill includes provisions to require employers to take "all reasonable' steps to prevent harassment of staff at work by clients and customers, including "overheard conversations' — a boggy territory which strips out context and relies heavily on subjective impressions about what was heard. How will free speech in bars and pubs be monitored in practice? Prime Minister Keir Starmer made his reputation as a lawyer by taking on corporations trying to stifle free speech. He needs to be alert to the wider context in which this legislation is being proposed, ideally calling for a review that would halt the pernicious drift toward limiting freedom of speech for fear of causing minor offense. Martin Ivens is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Previously, he was editor of the Sunday Times of London and its chief political commentator.
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Hegseth Wins Praise But Asia Still Has Strong Doubts About Trump
After US military allies in Europe were torched by Vice President JD Vance in March over military spending, free speech and the war in Ukraine, America's partners in Asia warily awaited Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's arrival at a security conference in Singapore. Turns out there was little reason to worry, apart from the perpetual anxiety over President Donald Trump's social media feed.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Musk's X Implodes After Trump Praised It as ‘Free Speech Platform'
X, the social media platform bought by Elon Musk, experienced major disruptions today, shortly after President Donald Trump praised is as a 'free speech platform.' 'That was the worst outage I've seen,' one user wrote on X. 'App basically just became posts from exactly 24 hours ago'. Other users reported seeing the homepage welcome screen as if they weren't logged in, while feeds and the ability to post messages disappeared for thousands of users. Starting at roughly 3:45 p.m. ET, reports of outages across X began flooding into the online status-checking website Downdetector. Tens of thousands of users turned to the site, just one of many similar platforms logging website crashes, with reports peaking at 4:15 p.m. as 25,000 complaints came in from across the globe. The X Developer Platform status page reported a 'site-wide outage' noting that 'Some X API endpoints may be affected.' As of 6:15 p.m. reports to Downdetector site had dropped off significantly, although hundreds of outage complaints were still coming in. X Developers had updated their status by this time to note that 'all systems are operational.' The brief outage comes on the heels of Musk's (sort of) departure from the White House, at least in an official capacity, following the fulfillment of his contract as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). During an almost hour-long joint press conference in the Oval Office, Trump lavished praise on Musk, describing his 'service to America' as 'without comparison in modern history.' 'He's already running one of the most innovative car companies in the world... and the most successful space company in, I guess, in history, you would have to say, the largest free speech platform on the internet, etcetera,' Trump said. Outages at X are not uncommon. In fact, this is the third outage in a little over a week. On Monday, the platform suffered a major disruption following a fire in a U.S. data center owned by X. The week prior, another major outage was attributed by Musk, without evidence, to a 'massive cyber attack.' Since Musk took over the platform in 2022, outages and disruptions have been on the rise. In 2023, The Guardian found such issues had been increasing since the buyout as Musk's new tech employees tinkered with the X API, a service allowing other programs to interact with the site. As the world's richest man departs the White House, one might expect he would have more time to ensure that the products and services provided by the many companies he owns and runs are functional. However, as Trump warned during the press conference, 'Elon's really not leaving.' A full explanation has not been given by X for the disruption. The Daily Beast has reached out to X for comment.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The anti-woke warriors used to defend free speech. Now they make McCarthyism look progressive
Thoughts and non-denominational prayers to all the anti-woke warriors out there. It may seem as though everything is going their way now Donald Trump is back with a vengeance, but the poor things have run into a bit of a branding problem. For years, the anti-woke crowd positioned themselves as fearless free thinkers taking on the intolerant left. The journalist Bari Weiss wrote a fawning New York Times piece in 2018 describing rightwing voices such as Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens as 'renegades of the intellectual dark web' (IDW). Now, however, the people who used to position themselves as oppressed truth-tellers operating in what Weiss's article called an 'era of That Which Cannot Be Said', have a state-sanctioned microphone. They've won. But in winning they've made it difficult to continue the charade that they give a damn about 'cancel culture'. Look around: some of these self-styled free speech warriors are doing everything they can to ruin the lives of everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. Most conservatives don't seem to mind that their hypocrisy is now on full display. But, according to a recent piece on the news site Semafor, a handful of people within the anti-woke media ecosystem are starting to have something of an identity crisis. 'One didn't have to be especially prescient to spot those 'anti-woke' types who would just slowly become Maga flunkies,' said the libertarian journalist Michael Moynihan, who had a short stint at Weiss's publication the Free Press before becoming disillusioned. Remember when the right railed against people losing jobs for old comments they'd made? In 2018, for example, the Atlantic fired the conservative columnist Kevin Williamson after the backlash about a 2014 podcast appearance in which the 60-year-old had suggested women should face hanging for having an abortion. Cue a million furious tweets from the 'renegades of the IDW' about how, as Ben Shapiro put it on X, 'virtually everyone is vulnerable if they run afoul of the Left's interests'. Now, however, there's no denying that virtually everyone is vulnerable if they run afoul of the right's interests. Semafor's piece notes that 'One [Free Press] investigation that exposed two low-profile employees at PBS who had focused on diversity and got them fired rubbed even some of its allies the wrong way'. At least the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) employees at PBS 'only' got fired. Canary Mission and Betar US, two pro-Israel groups, have been compiling 'deportation' lists of pro-Palestinian activists on college campuses and sharing them with the Trump administration. Betar US has also warned that it is going to expand its focus beyond immigrants to naturalised US citizens. These organisations are just a couple of cogs in a massive dissent-crushing machine. The Christian nationalist Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded Project 2025, is behind a dystopian plan called Project Esther that cynically weaponises very real concerns about antisemitism to shut down criticism of Israel and quash pro-Palestinian activism. And you can bet these censorious projects won't end with Palestinians: at the rate we're going, pro-choice sentiment will soon be considered 'anti-Christian' and anyone espousing it will get deported. If that sounds far-fetched, let me remind you that last month the veterans affairs department ordered staff to report their colleagues for 'anti-Christian bias'. Drunk on their power to deport and defame, some on the right have officially lost the plot. For months a number of conservative voices have been engaged on a mission to cancel Ms Rachel, a children's entertainer whose real name is Rachel Accurso. If you have small children, Ms Rachel needs no introduction. For everyone else, she wears a pink headband and sings songs such as Icky Sticky Bubble Gum. Ms Rachel's videos have always been gently inclusive: she incorporates sign language and she has frequently had Jules Hoffman, a non-binary musician, on her show. On her personal social media she has also advocated for issues such as paid family leave. The right tried to cancel Ms Rachel over Hoffman's gender identity back in 2023. Now they're trying to cancel the beloved star again; this time for the 'crime' of speaking up about Palestinian kids and featuring a three-year-old double amputee from Gaza in a video. The fact Accurso is humanising Palestinian children is driving some rightwing voices so berserk that they're smearing her as antisemitic, asking the US attorney general for an investigation, and spreading the ridiculous and completely baseless lie (which the New York Times bizarrely chose to amplify) that she is being funded by Hamas. Welcome to our 'new era of That Which Cannot Be Said': one that may make McCarthyism seem progressive. It would seem the new renegades of the intellectual dark web are those of us who think you shouldn't bomb starving babies in their sleep just because they are Palestinian. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
