So, anyone know how this ban is going to be enforced? Or attempted to be enforced?
I'm guessing government forced removal from mobile app stores, but then what about people who already have the app? Or who side-load it on their Android phones. Or use a web app?
"University administrators from Texas to California moved to clear protesters and prevent encampments from taking hold on their own campuses as they have at Columbia University, deploying police in tense new confrontations that already have led to dozens of arrests.
At the same time, new protests continued erupting in places like Pittsburgh and San Antonio."
"This week may end up marking the moment when Republicans and the far-right hijacked the campus protest movement and tried to turn it into the same bogeyman they made of Black Lives Matters protests in 2020.
Radical lefties needing to be taken down by force plays to the right’s pre-existing authoritarian tendencies, and is a handy election-year cudgel for Republicans."
"A group of students assembled on the University of Texas at Austin campus to call for an end to the war in Gaza. They did not engage in violence. They did not disrupt classes or occupy administrative buildings. They set up tents on a lawn. They were met with a militarized response, ordered by Governor Abbott, and supported by University administrators. Students and journalists were arrested."
"Greg Abbott is one of many on the right that has bemoaned the death of free speech on campus. He signed a law to protect such speech in 2019. And then he calls for peaceful protestors to be arrested.
So how can Abbott justify such a reversal to his call for free speech? The protestors are anti-semitic, he says. Really? How does Abbott and the police wading through the crowd know the students are anti-semitic?"
“In this new book, [Jonathan] Haidt is coddling the American parent: providing them with a clear, simple, and wrong solution to what is ailing their children. But—as with historic moral panics—parents, schools, and politicians will embrace it, absolving themselves of their own failings in raising children in our modern world and pointing to an easy villain.” @mmasnick
“A doctor, arrested and jailed for her involvement in Just Stop Oil protests, has had her medical licence suspended for five months
(…)Doctors' Association UK said: "This is a story of a clinician being punished for raising serious concerns about dangerous inaction on the greatest threat to global health we have ever, or will ever
experience”
“The British Medical Association (BMA) has said it is "very concerned" by a tribunal's finding that a doctor's participation in Just Stop Oil protests amounted to professional misconduct
… She said: [BMA] "Climate change has been declared the biggest potential health crisis in the world by the World Health Organisation (WHO)
Note that these college administrators arresting, suspending, and slandering pro-palestinian student protesters and the same administrators who were screaming free speech when they were hosting actual antisemites, white supremacists, and fascists on their campuses. Mask is off. #fascism#FreeSpeech#Gaza
Your right to #freeSpeech doesn't mean you're allowed to infringe on other people's speech or expression. If you want to #protest and advocate for #Hamas, knock yourself out. But when you cross the line, and destroy expressions you don't agree with, you're no longer a peaceful protester operating within the bounds of free speech.
"The lack of right of reply for groups that fall under the new definition [of extremism] shows the UK government is using it for political point scoring and playing to the populist gallery, rather than any meaningful attempt to protect public safety."
As the new extremism definition hasn't been introduced through UK legislation and Parliamentary scrutiny, there's room for confusion over its application by public bodies.
This may result in even more people being swept under the Prevent programme for surveillance and data misuse.
The redefinition of extremism adds to the authoritarian lurch of recent years in the UK, as seen in restrictions on the right to protest, sweeping new police powers and the censorship of online expression.
We're left asking whose free speech is protected and who must keep quiet under the threat of being labelled an extremist?