‘The Feds are creating a database to track “hate speech” on Twitter. What could go wrong, comrades?’

Hat tip to Hot Air, America’s Watchtower, and Sense and Snarkability, whence the title.  The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter.

The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online.

Free Speech in France Decided on a Case-by-case Basis

Apparently a restaurant owner in France has successfully sued a blogger/critic for hurting his business.

I would have thought that blogging under one’s own name and from a site with a reputation to maintain, non-anonymously, would guard against some of the worst tendencies of the Internet, but in this case the blogger’s choice to use her real name and make it possible to find her is in effect being punished.  Not for the first time, I wonder whether tort law inadvertently creates some pretty perverse incentives.

‘One reason the western world is sliding off the cliff is because of an excess of “conventional wisdom”’

Great line from Mark Steyn:

One reason the western world is sliding off the cliff is because of an excess of “conventional wisdom” on everything from unsustainable welfare programs to climate change to Islam. Yet, at precisely the moment when we need to be broadening the bounds of public discourse, in Britain, Canada, Australia, Europe and elsewhere the same ideologically insecure political class that got us into this mess is growing ever more comfortable in regulating what the citizenry is allowed to say, read, listen to — and, indeed, think. I say nuts to that.

Danish-cartoon-controversy Anniversary

On September 30th, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons relating to Mohammed and Islam.  One of the paper’s editors, Flemming Rose, was concerned about freedom of expression and about a growing trend of self-censorship in the West on the subject of Islam.  “That is why Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten has invited members of the Danish editorial cartoonists union to draw Muhammad as they see him,” Rose explained.