Grappling with the free speech purists

Alexei Navalny, the most prominent critic of Vladimir Putin and his regime, has been undergoing a long prison sentence, yet has generally managed some communication with the outside world.

On December 6, 2023, however, he went silent: nothing came through on social media. After about three weeks, he was able to tweet the alarming news that he had been transferred to a more remote prison in the town of Kharp, above the Arctic Circle. It’s about 1900km from Moscow and is notorious for its harsh conditions. That Navalny was transferred and was incommunicado for some time speaks to the harshness of Putin’s authoritarian rule. That Navalny could come back on X speaks to the power of social media. But what of social media in democratic nations?

I canvassed on Newsroom in October 2022 the prevalence on New Zealand social media of abuse directed at individuals. I argued that much of this reflected the lack of any consequences for the often-anonymous perpetrators, plus the tendency for pile-ons – one piece of abuse encouraging others. Although ‘free speech’ in New Zealand tends to be defended in general and sometimes grandiose terms, a lot of what is enabled on social media is nasty, insulting and personal. Nonetheless, censoring this material would likely just send it to less accessible sites on the dark web, where anything genuinely dangerous might be missed. That’s the best argument for letting through much of what’s on social media, rather than its affinity with the words of say, Alexei Navalny.

But are the free speech champions themselves consistent in their views?  A couple of recent experiences of my own suggest otherwise. Supposedly high-minded people can be as fallible as the rest of us and feel the yen to suppress views that they oppose.

The website of the New Zealand Centre of Political Research, like other websites, wished its followers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in late December. It’s run by former Act MP Dr Muriel Newman and has been very antagonistic towards the former government. So the Christmas message welcomes, not the Christ child,  but what Newman calls “the end of Labour’s destructive authoritarian rule”, and goes on to warn the site’s supporters that there are still dangers ahead, especially dangers relating to Māori. He Puapua, Newman claims, had been “the road map for a tribal coup that had the objective of replacing democracy with Māori rule by 2040” with the proposed co-governance arrangements set to establish “tribal totalitarianism”. (Eat  your heart out, Vladimir!) The Labour government might be gone, but “the radical elements in Parliament are stronger and growing more extreme”, in cahoots with the left-wing “mainstream media”.

None of this surprised me, having encountered the organisation’s Facebook page earlier in the year. The content there was no more strident, but there was quite a bit of dog-whistling, and the NZCPR’s brand thereof was targeted at Māori. What especially disturbed me, however, was not the overtly political commentary, but a story about a road-rage incident in the Auckland suburb of Beach Haven. Two teenagers are now facing murder charges after the death of a local man. The dog-whistling drew on the fact that the teenagers were from the Far North – we all know what race they’re likely to be, don’t we? – and of course the commenters got this message and piled on. No one really cared about the dead man. The trial is to take place in 2024, and as is common with teenage defendants, the pair have name suppression, so of course their ethnicity has not been specified either.

Eventually, I commented a couple of times on the page that it was anti-Māori. Promptly, I was blocked, and can still not access it. Since then, the website (which I can access) has been featuring a free speech petition, not initiated by the NZPCR and promoted by some estimable people. But does the organisation itself really believe in free speech, or only the free speech of those they agree with?

And how about the land of the free and the home of the brave? The most salient recent case in New Zealand concerning harassment and hate speech has been that of Auckland University academic Dr Siouxsie Wiles. She has alleged in court that her employer did not take sufficiently seriously the barrage of abuse and threats that she received when commenting on the Covid-19 pandemic. News about this case was conveyed to a US free-speech-orientated site called ‘Whyevolutionistrue’, run by Professor Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago; it was accompanied by an article critical of Wiles from a New Zealand journalist. The tenor of all this was that free speech is a fundamental value, and that Wiles had herself been a hypocrite back in 2021 because she sponsored a petition directed against the seven authors of the letter to the Listener about Western versus Māori knowledge.

I wanted to turn the focus away from the individual case to the general question of the risks run by female academics who comment on controversial issues. Late one night New Zealand time, I made a contribution to the discussion. I was startled to get an immediate response from Coyne himself, presumably in Midwest time. He emphasised the distinction between verbal abuse and action that might lead to police intervention, and thus stressed the primacy of free speech. I wrote a post explaining what I thought was at stake for female academics, and he came back with, “You did not reply by showing that restrictions on free speech are justified. You have said enough on this issue”.  In a further message, he asserted, “You are trying to dominate this thread, which is not permitted”. Domination sought in the space of less than an hour, when few or no locals were likely to be online? Then finally, Coyne declared, “You have had your say on this thread now”.

Coyne’s behaviour left me thinking that evolution may well be true, as his website claims, but that some males hadn’t yet evolved from both ignoring women’s words and mansplaining at them. Meanwhile, Dr Newman’s webpage and Facebook presence manifested little of what I’d call political research. But I shouldn’t get personal. The bigger issue is to do with avoiding pontification, and remaining true to one’s declared values, especially when there’s no real pushback for failing to do so. That is, after all, hardly the case for Alexei Navalny.

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