Like her or loathe her, the Allison Pearson row shows why we all have a stake in defending free speech, writes Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, in today’s Notebook
We all have a stake in defending free speech
Should three police forces and a specialist police “gold group” spend their time and our money investigating deleted tweets? A story that got everyone talking this week is that journalist Allison Pearson is being investigated by Essex Police over something she posted, and subsequently deleted, on X (formerly Twitter) last year.
Pearson said Essex Police has not told her which of her posts is under criminal investigation for “causing racial hatred”. But the alleged complainant anonymously told The Guardian that it was a reposting of a photo of people of colour holding the flag of the Pakistani political party founded by Imran Khan, alongside smiling police officers. Pearson allegedly reposted the image with the words, “How dare they. (…) Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters”. She apparently mistook them for Palestine demonstrators.
To publicly call anyone racist based on the colour of their skin is unwise and very feasibly a racist assumption to make.
But in today’s race politics, sweeping comments are often made about race and people’s political views by commentators and academics across the political spectrum.
Consider heralded white “anti-racist” Robin DiAngelo, author of bestseller White Fragility, whose central premise is that white people endemically suffer from racism and “fragility” when confronted with it.
People often make assumptions about the views of people on demonstrations, sometimes based on misunderstandings of flags and signs and sometimes based on race. Racist assumptions are often most harmfully targeted at minorities. But recall too the comments made about white people at the Brexit marches, and claims that the Canadian trucker protesters (many of whom were Sikhs) were ‘white nationalists’.
Consider too the recent prosecution of a British teacher for a racially aggravated offence because she took a placard to a pro-Palestine demo allegedly inferring that Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman were “coconuts”, i.e. internally “white” as a result of their views.
Thankfully, she was cleared. And I have little doubt the investigation into Pearson will be dropped too. It’s not feasible that she intended to cause racial hatred with her post, not least not because she reportedly deleted it soon after being corrected.
The bar for criminality is, rightly, much higher than ignorant assumptions. We should all be grateful for that. Because while posts, placards and statements of these types may well be offensive, misguided, wrong and arguably racist, societies best combat such views by debating them in the open.
Right or left, love or loathe Pearson or DiAngelo – we all have a stake in defending free speech.
Can Musk run ‘DOGE’ and X?
President-elect Donald Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk as head of ‘DOGE’ – Department of Government Efficiency – raises big questions for the future of X.
‘DOGE’ appears to be a Department in name only, essentially chosen as a meme to honour Musk’s favourite cryptocurrency. Reportedly, it will be an advisory committee.
However, Musk appears to be becoming part of the machinery of the US Government. And as the owner of X, that will make the social media site a de facto US government-associated platform.
If he is to maintain the claim that X is an independent free speech platform, he will have to either very strictly limit his government work or separate from the company.
Some needed light reading
With Ukraine firing US-made missiles into Russia, and President-elect Trump warning listeners on his Joe Rogan podcast that “the biggest threat we have in the world today is nuclear weapons”, what better Christmas gift this year is there than a (somehow hilarious) book on surviving the apocalypse?
New release A Short History of the Apocalypse: The vital guide to your future survival by comedian Frankie Boyle and comedy writer Charlie Skelton has had me giggling with existential dread for days.