Freedom of Jokes and the Freedom to Offend

I have been a fan of Stephen Fry for many many years and, ever since Twitter came into popularity, he's been a fan of the tweet. Seriously, he was on Twitter from the beginning. But now, he's left and he claims that Twitter has become a "stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous".

But what made Stephen feel this way?



It all started with a joke he told at the Baftas.

And then the hate started rolling in.

And these tweets are the nicer ones.

After receiving all that hate and all those demands for apologies, Stephen responded:

That was his nicer response. After receiving even more hate he came back with a much more frustrated response:

I can sympathize.

Eventually, Stephen deleted his Twitter account all together. He claims that "too many people have peed in the pool" and that Twitter's "tipping point has been reached and the pollution of the service is now just too much". Read Stephen's full explanation for his Twitter defection on his website.

I am talking about this issue because, as many of you know, I also used to get up on a stage and try to tell jokes. And many of my jokes fell horribly flat. I know what it feels like for a joke to not land the way you wanted or expected it to. It takes incredible bravery to do what Stephen has been doing and we shouldn't be policing every single one of his jokes.

Stephen's defection from Twitter comes at an apt time in Twitter history. As Twitter has just finished forming their Trust & Safety Council. A council which consists of primarily anti-free speech advocates who seek to censor the people they disagree with. These people include Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency and the Hollaback Organisation, both of whom want to end free speech on the internet. Their council does not include organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation which works to keep the internet free and open for all.

It is becoming increasingly clear that it isn't safe to simply speak your mind on the internet. It isn't even safe to tell a joke anymore. If the wrong person deems your opinion or joke "unsafe" you may be in for some serious trouble.

A specific story comes to mind about the Netherlands.

Dutch police have gone as far as to visit people's homes and offices telling them, "You tweet too much. We have orders to ask you to watch your tone. Your tweets seem seditious."

The word "seditious" conjures up images of the novel 1984 in my mind.

All in all, I think it's important that we fight for our right to free speech. And though Twitter is wholly within it's rights as a company to censor what people post on it, we should be telling them that we won't be censored. And if they continue to censor us, we will go somewhere else. But what happens when there's nowhere else to go?