Is It Time to Regulate Social Media?
In these increasingly polarised times, Facebook, Twitter, and Google have managed to attract disdain from both sides of the political spectrum. According to the progressive Left, social media is a lawless frontier where abusive trolls poison the atmosphere, racism and sexism are rampant, and various far-Right groups propagate fake news
Online Hate Speech and the Nazi Pug
In 1941, the German embassy in Helsinki interrogated a Finnish man accused of training his dog to raise its paw in response to the word “Hitler.” This act was considered disrespectful to the Third Reich but, fortunately for him, no witnesses were prepared to come forward and the prosecution was
The Internet Is Not a Children’s TV Channel
As we enter 2018, we are only a few months away from the British government’s proposed deadline for imposing age verification obligations on porn sites. The measures were introduced as part of the Digital Economy Act 2017, and require commercial providers of pornography to ensure that their material cannot
Internet Infrastructure is the New Battleground for Free Speech
In early August, Google engineer James Damore made headlines when his skeptical critique of Google’s diversity agenda was leaked to the public. While most of the tech media had a collective meltdown, Quillette published an intelligent response by four respected academics, defending some of the science underpinning Damore’s
Science, Sin, and Paternalism
A new study, published in July by University College London, has apparently revealed that men (but not women) who consume a large amount of sugar are at higher risk of long term mental illness. The scientists who carried out the study used their press release to support the British government’
Censorship, the Authoritarian's Snake Oil
Of all the many world-changing inventions that have come from the field of particle physics, few are more prominent than the World Wide Web. Invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee as a tool for sharing data with other scientists at CERN, the Web was based on a simple yet powerful
Denying Encryption To Terrorists Is A Fantasy
The script for responding to Western terror attacks is now so predictable that they might as well publish a schedule in the TV listings. First we get the platitudes: “praying for” the affected city, liking Facebook statuses, and projecting flags onto buildings. Next there is the denial stage, where the
Censorship-Free Social Media: the Next Big Thing, or Just Another Echo Chamber?
In July 2016, Breitbart Tech journalist and notorious right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter. It wasn’t his first run-in with the Twitter authorities, but this time the ban was permanent. The justification was that he had allegedly encouraged his 300,000-odd followers to harass Ghostbusters actress
