The Burden of Freedom

It's hard not to take issue with the news in this morning's Guardian Unlimited (which you can read here) that plans are afoot to introduce a programme of "civility enforcement" throughout the blogsphere. The need for a set of guidelines on how to behave within the online community is perhaps timely, though it does raise the issue of to what extent freedom of speech can be exercised in a forum that is at once private and public.

Freedom of speech is something of a problematic concept. In the West, newspapers claimed that freedom of speech gave them the right to publish potentially inflammatory cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. It seemed (at least in the press here) that many people were surprised at the scale of the backlash in the Muslim world against these "innocuous" cartoons. People failed to see that, under the banner of freedom of speech, Muslims were exercising their right to say that they found the publication of this material offensive. Freedom (of speech or any other kind) is a subjective category and has to work both ways, something that blogger 901am is quoted on in the article in today's Guardian (though I fail to see what the issue of censorship has to do with "rabid feminists"... Explain?) Freedom of speech gives the BNP the "right" to whip up tension in volatile areas of the country and spread a message of hatred and intolerance; David Irving and others like him have the dubious "right" to deny the Holocaust if they wish. Orhan Pamuk most certainly has the right to touch upon unfortunate aspects of Turkish history.

At the Edinburgh International Book Fair in August last year I went to an event held by the International PEN, an association "promoting literature, defending freedom of expression". There are far more journalists around the world facing prison sentences than we can imagine. The list of examples on PEN's website of journalists imprisoned for doing their job is too long to comprehend. In the light of this, the idea that blogs too should be censored, and that those who breach the "contract of civility" criminalised, is hard to swallow. Freedom of expression comes in many forms. Murdered journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Veronica Guerin felt not only a right but a duty to expose facts for what they are and to hold those responsible to account. Guerin was murdered by the very criminals she was writing about, and as for Politkovskaya...