The Platform, Free Speech and Contempt

<p>For the next issue of How To Sleep Faster, Arcadia Missa is offering a space for essays, poems, artworks and conversations about ideas around the platform, free speech and contempt – who gets offered a platform, who doesn’t and who, perhaps, shouldn’t? How do online platforms and their face to face equivalents prioritise certain voices? Which voices are we prioritising while allowing others to go unheard, whether out of intent or neglect? Is ‘noplatforming’ people a useful tool for fighting controversial and hateful ideologies?</p> <p>‘Free speech’ is the rallying cry of the far-right, with a willful commitment to restrict the freedoms of others. An act of ‘free speech’ can easily be one of hate. Gradually (and hopefully) we are starting to see online platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube reacting to the hate speech flooding their sites; Twitter is reforming it’s verification process to cut back on the controversial figures getting blue ticks and Facebook and YouTube have just de-platformed one of America’s most successful bigots, Alex Jones.</p> <p>How do these online platforms relate to the atmosphere in the meat world? As people become ever more comfortable with publicly voicing opinions that were once sequestered in the margins of the internet, are the divisions between real life and ‘online’ discourse narrowing? How can we see the impacts of a global ‘virtual conversation’ manifested in the real world – whether through violence, compassion or indifference?…</p>