Apt and inapt arguments commingle in a passionate defense of free speech.
The CEO of PEN America suggests how to protect free speech in a digital age.
As Nossel notes in her debut book, Herbert Marcuse argued that “creating a broadly tolerant society demands intolerance of certain ideas, including right-wing ideologies.” With far-right extremism on the rise, his view is making a comeback, writes the author, and she rebuts it in a defense of free speech that alternately hits the mark and wanders far afield from First Amendment issues, dealing instead with cultural insensitivity or noninclusive language. In much of the first half, Nossel serves up unedifying bromides on how to respond to “unintended offenses” such as stereotyping millennials as “snowflakes” or “asking a fellow party guest if she’s pregnant when she isn’t.” The narrative gains traction when the author addresses urgent questions such as how to protect free speech while responding effectively to harmful material like online revenge porn, terrorist recruitment, and deepfake videos. Nossel, who has also served as the COO of Human Rights Watch, shows in chilling detail how tech companies are failing to moderate content appropriately. Google and Facebook, for example, “demote problematic posts, limiting how often they are seen without excising them entirely,” or “shadow ban” them by “suppressing social media users so that, unbeknownst to them, their posts and content cannot be seen by others.” The social media giants must become more transparent, argues Nossel, partly by notifying users promptly if they face sanctions. Throughout the book, the author argues persuasively that “informal self-governance” protects free speech better than corporate or government restrictions, but after reading her accounts of abuses by Silicon Valley behemoths, few readers are likely to disagree with one of her conclusions: “Mandated transparency is one area where government regulation of online content may be a positive step and would not entail intrusions on content in violation of the First Amendment.”
Apt and inapt arguments commingle in a passionate defense of free speech.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296603-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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