Paul Chan, the top finance official of Hong Kong, traveled to Paris, London, Frankfurt and Berlin last September to lure foreign investors. Last month he abolished taxes on foreigners’ purchases of Hong Kong real estate. And he is soon set to host an international art show, as well as conferences for big money funds and […]
Read MoreTag: Freedom of Speech and Expression
Supreme Court Seems Likely to Side With NRA in First Amendment Case
A majority of the Supreme Court appeared on Monday to embrace arguments by the National Rifle Association that a New York State official violated the First Amendment by trying to dissuade companies from doing business with it after a deadly school shooting. The dispute, which began after a gunman opened fire in 2018 at Marjory […]
Read MoreWhite House’s Efforts to Combat Misinformation Face Supreme Court Test
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday on whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in combating what it said was misinformation on social media platforms. It is the latest in an extraordinary series of cases this term requiring the justices to assess the meaning of free speech in the internet era. The […]
Read MoreLong Lines of Russian Voters Signal Discontent With Vladimir Putin’s Rule
Long lines of voters formed outside polling stations in major Russian cities during the presidential election on Sunday, in what opposition figures portrayed as a striking protest against a rubber-stamp process that is certain to keep Vladimir V. Putin in power. Before he died last month, the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny had called […]
Read MoreSupreme Court Sets Rules for Blocking Citizens From Officials’ Accounts
The Supreme Court, in a pair of unanimous decisions on Friday, added some clarity to a vexing constitutional puzzle: how to decide when elected officials violate the First Amendment by blocking people from their social media accounts. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the court in the lead case, said two things are required before […]
Read MoreRussia Strengthens Its Internet Controls in Critical Year for Putin
Russia is ratcheting up its internet censorship ahead of elections this weekend that are all but assured to give President Vladimir V. Putin another six years in power, further shrinking one of the last remaining spaces for political activism, independent information and free speech. The Russian authorities have intensified a crackdown against digital tools used […]
Read MoreAttempts to Ban Books Accelerated in 2023
After several years of rising book bans, censorship efforts continued to surge last year, reaching the highest levels ever recorded by the American Library Association. Last year, 4,240 individual titles were targeted for removal from libraries, up from 2,571 titles in 2022, according to a report released Thursday by the association. Those figures likely fail […]
Read MoreTikTok Turns to Creators to Fight Possible Ban
Facing a possible ban in the United States, TikTok has scrambled to deploy perhaps its most powerful weapon: its creators. The hugely popular video service began recruiting dozens of creators at the end of last week, asking them to travel to Washington to fight a bill being debated in Congress. Under the proposal, TikTok’s Chinese […]
Read MoreHouse Passes Bill to Force TikTok Sale From Chinese Owner or Ban the App
The House on Wednesday passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the hugely popular video app or be banned in the United States. The move escalates a showdown between Beijing and Washington over the control of technologies that could affect national security, free speech and the social […]
Read MoreA Conservative Court Rebukes Republican Censorship
March 5, 2024, 1:29 p.m. ET March 5, 2024, 1:29 p.m. ET “I was a little disappointed that Katie Porter chose to run,” Karl Rubin, an emeritus professor of math, told me on the patio of a community center on the campus of the University of California, Irvine, on Monday morning. He said that Porter, […]
Read MoreNew Online Speech Law Could Chill Political Humor in Sri Lanka
Even in the darkest of times, Sri Lankans held on to their humor. In 2022, when the island nation’s economy collapsed and the government announced a QR code system to ration gasoline, a meme spread online: “Scanning Fuel QR Code Now Makes You Forget Last Three Months.” And when public anger forced the strongman president […]
Read MoreCivil Discourse on Campus Is Put to the Test
The same week that a U.C. Berkeley protest ended in violence, with doors broken, people allegedly injured, a guest lecture organized by Jewish students canceled and attendees evacuated by the police through an underground passageway, a group of academics gathered across the bay at Stanford to discuss restoring inclusive civil discourse on campus. The underlying […]
Read MoreChina Scraps Premier’s Annual News Conference in Surprise Move
China’s premier will no longer hold a news conference after the country’s annual legislative meeting, Beijing announced on Monday, ending a three-decades-long practice that had been an exceedingly rare opportunity for journalists to interact with top Chinese leaders. The decision, announced a day before the opening of this year’s legislative conclave, was to many observers […]
Read MoreHe Cursed at a Police Officer. Now He’s Caught in a Free Speech Fight.
Tony Rupp didn’t intend to become a fighter for the First Amendment. He was really just out for some pasta. In December 2016, Mr. Rupp, a Buffalo-area lawyer, was leaving Chef’s Restaurant, a popular Italian place in the city’s downtown, when he said he saw a black SUV — its lights off — bearing down […]
Read MoreSupreme Court to Decide How the First Amendment Applies to Social Media
The most important First Amendment cases of the internet era, to be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday, may turn on a single question: Do platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and X most closely resemble newspapers or shopping centers or phone companies? The two cases arrive at the court garbed in politics, as they […]
Read MoreWhat to Know About the Supreme Court Case on Free Speech on Social Media
Social media companies are bracing for Supreme Court arguments on Monday that could fundamentally alter the way they police their sites. After Facebook, Twitter and YouTube barred President Donald J. Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol, Florida made it illegal for technology companies to ban from their sites […]
Read MoreThe Fight Over Academic Freedom
Academic freedom is a bedrock of the modern American university. And lately, it seems to be coming under fire from all directions. For many scholars, the biggest danger is at public universities in Republican-controlled states like Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has led the passage of laws that restrict what can be taught and spearheaded […]
Read MoreAmazon’s ‘Expats’ Was Filmed in Hong Kong, But People Can’t Watch It There
At the height of Hong Kong’s Covid restrictions, the government gave Nicole Kidman and several others a rare exemption from the weeks of hotel quarantine required for travelers so that they could film a series about the malaise of privileged expatriates. That series from Amazon Prime, “Expats,” which stars Ms. Kidman, aired its first two […]
Read MoreCollege Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech.
I have served happily as a professor at Yale for most of my adult life, but in my four-plus decades at the mast, I have never seen campuses roiled as they’re roiling today. On the one hand are gleeful activists on the right, taking victory laps over the tragic tumble from grace of Harvard’s president, […]
Read MoreBarnard College’s Restrictions on Political Speech Prompt Outcry
Three weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College in New York posted a statement on its departmental website in support of the Palestinian people. Below the statement, the professors posted links to academic work supporting their view that the struggle of Palestinians […]
Read MoreNew York City Schools Will Teach About Antisemitism and Islamophobia
New York City will offer new curriculum materials on antisemitism and Islamophobia in its public schools and train principals and teachers on how to have difficult conversations about politically charged issues, officials said on Monday in response to criticism that the system has done too little to address the Israel-Hamas war. In higher education, colleges […]
Read MoreWhen States Try to Take Away Americans’ Freedom of Thought
Universities have always been a home for the world’s great arguments. Professors and students are supposed to debate the issues of the moment, gaining understanding of the other side’s views, refining and strengthening their positions, and learning how to solve problems. Argument thrives in a culture of openness, and maintaining that culture ought to be […]
Read MoreOpposing D.E.I. Does Not Mean Opposing Diversity
There are few national conversations more frustrating than the fight over D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become […]
Read MoreLawsuit Challenging University of California’s D.E.I. Statements Is Tossed
The Latest A federal judge threw out a lawsuit that challenged the University of California system’s requirement that applicants for faculty positions must file diversity statements. The court, which issued the ruling on Friday, did not rule on the merits, but said that the plaintiff lacked standing to sue because he never actually applied for […]
Read MoreM.I.T.’s President Has Weathered the Storm, for Now
As the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were pushed out of their jobs in recent weeks, it was an open question whether the president of another prestigious institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would suffer the same fate. But Sally Kornbluth, who testified alongside her two colleagues in a tense congressional hearing […]
Read MoreHarvard President’s Resignation: The Word That Undid Claudine Gay
In retrospect, Claudine Gay’s fate was sealed by a single word. (She resigned the presidency of Harvard on Tuesday, just six months into her tenure.) It wasn’t “plagiarism” or “genocide” — the fearsome fighting words most publicly associated with her case — but rather a careful, neutral piece of language that struck some listeners as […]
Read More‘It’s State Propaganda’: Ukrainians Shun TV News as War Drags on
Since the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the people of Ukraine have had access to a single source of television news — an all-day broadcast packed with footage of Ukrainian tanks blasting Russian positions, medics operating near the frontline and political leaders rallying support abroad. The show, Telemarathon United News, has been […]
Read MoreThey Said ‘I Do’ in a Moscow Prison
Nadezhda Shtovba did not wear a white dress to her wedding. There were no bridesmaids or groomsmen. She and her husband, Yegor, did not exchange wedding bands either — rings are banned in Butyrka prison. That is where Yegor Shtovba has spent the past 15 months in pretrial detention. In September 2022, he had read […]
Read MoreWisconsin University Chancellor Fired Over Pornographic Videos With His Wife
The chancellor of a state university in Wisconsin was fired this week after posting pornographic videos with his wife online. The University of Wisconsin System’s Board of Regents unanimously decided to dismiss the chancellor, Joe Gow, who had led the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse since 2007 and was its longest-tenured leader since the 1960s. Carmen […]
Read MoreColumbia Symbolized Campus Strife Over the Israel-Hamas War. What Changed?
In the weeks after Oct. 7, Columbia University was the scene of rising tensions over the Israel-Hamas war on American college campuses. A Jewish student said he was assaulted after putting up posters of hostages. Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students accused one another of support for genocide in a series of heated protests and counter-protests. But […]
Read MoreKerala Cinema Offers a Subtler View of India
It is an Indian film without song and dance. The lovers don’t share a word, their main interaction a fleeting moment of eye contact in the monsoon rain. There are no car chases and no action stunts. The men are vulnerable. They cry. And yet when “Kaathal — The Core,” a film in the Malayalam […]
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