Deleting free speech
The German government’s Network Enforcement Act, the purpose of which is to fight hate crime online, is backfiring, writes Bernhard Rohleder in the Washington Post. The law essentially tried to curb “defamation, incitement and sharing unconstitutional symbols, such as the swastika.”
“But within just a few days of coming into effect, the inevitable has become apparent: legitimate expressions of opinion are being deleted. The law is achieving the opposite of what it intended: it is actually hampering the fight against crime,” Rohleder writes.
“But the most problematic issue is that the new law tasks private companies, not judges, with the responsibility to decide whether questionable content is in fact unlawful. In other words, the state has privatized one of its key duties: enforcing the law.”
Legal experts say that the law invalidates Article 5 of the German constitution, which guarantees the freedom of expression. “Determining what’s legal speech and what’s not is a tricky task, especially when it comes to satire and art. But we must not hand over this critical task to private companies — which, by the way, are often foreign companies. Private enterprises — including America’s largest tech companies — must not be allowed to decide how our basic rights to freedom of speech and opinion ought to be interpreted.”
But is there a feasible alternative? Simply deleting content isn’t enough, Rohleder says. “Yes, pluralism is hard work, and it is cumbersome to read and deal with all the comments people make online. But we must not throw certain principles overboard because of this.”
A Chinese Handmaid’s Tale
“In late 2015, when China eased its decades-long policy limiting most couples to having only one child, some heralded the change as a move toward greater reproductive freedom. But the government was only embarking on another grand experiment in population engineering: This time it was urging women — though only the right sort — to reproduce for China,” writes Leta Hong Fincher in the New York Times.
An aging population and a shrinking labour force is undermining China’s vast economic growth, which is why the one-child policy was relaxed, in the hope that 30 million works could be added to the labour force by 2050.
But there has been no such boom in labour. “Why? Because a critical mass of women appears to be in no rush to have babies, particularly urban, educated women — just the category that the C.C.P. is counting on to produce and raise a new generation of skilled, knowledge-based workers,” writes Fincher.
“The government has unleashed in recent years a propaganda blitz on women it considers to be gao suzhi, or of “high quality.” “Make sure you don’t miss out on women’s best years for getting pregnant!” warn some headlines in state media. Those years supposedly are between the ages of 24 and 29, according to the government; beyond that, it says, beware birth defects.”
Educated people are the exclusive targets for the latest campaign. At the same time, however, the government is trying to discourage unmarried women from having children, because the C.C.P still thinks a family is integral to social stability.
“The figures released last month by the National Bureau of Statistics do not provide a breakdown comparing, say, urban and rural birthrates, but polls and anecdotal information are revealing. In a May 2017 survey of more than 40,000 working women by Zhaopin, one of China’s largest online recruitment websites, about 40 percent of respondents who had no children said they did not want to have any, and nearly 63 percent of working mothers with one child said they did not want to have another one. The women surveyed said that the main reasons for these positions were lack of time and energy, the expense of raising children and “concerns over career development.””
“In other words, China’s latest family-planning policies aren’t just another violation of women’s rights; they are also an ineffectual means of promoting the government’s population-growth agenda. And so, even going by its own logic, the C.C.P. should abandon these measures,” writes Fincher.
The beginning of a dialogue
The Afghan Taliban has reached out to the Americans to parley on ending the 17 year war, urging them to withdraw troops from the war-torn country. “The dialogue offer comes almost a month after two deadly assaults in Kabul claimed almost 200 civilian lives,” writes Mudassir Ali Shah in Dawn.
“Even if snubbed by Washington and Kabul, the letter is reflective of a gradual evolution in Taliban’s propaganda war and concurrently represents a struggle between moderates and hardliners within the group. It may also resonate with anti-war Americans, who genuinely demand better utilisation of their tax dollars.”
“Objectively speaking, the invitation should demonstrably influence Washington’s new policy for South Asia. America’s positive response to the call for peace parleys would vindicate its claim of seeking a negotiated end to the war and stabilising the region at large,” Shah writes.
“Several rounds of fruitless negotiations between Afghan actors have taken place in Pakistan, Dubai, Russia, China and Turkey. But all such attempts have been scuttled by US actions, including the killing of Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a drone attack.”
“Pursuing an outright victory on the battlefield or bulking up US military resources in Afghanistan is going to be an untenable course of action. But Trump seemingly clings to his illogical position of ‘fight now, talk later’,” he writes.