19 Jun 2018 | Artistic Freedom, Music, News and features
The right to freedom of expression is considered by many to be a cornerstone of a modern democratic society. Countries that fail to adequately protect this hallowed right – routinely censoring journalists, writers and musicians whose speech challenges and offends those in power – are rightly regarded by the West to be the worst examples of dictatorial, autocratic regimes.
But right here in the UK, artists are fighting the censorship of their work by global corporations bowing to pressure from and, arguably, colluding with the state and its organs. In May of this year YouTube, the video streaming platform owned by Google, succumbed to pressure from the Metropolitan Police and took down 30 music videos made by drill artists. The Met had been trying to persuade YouTube for almost two years to take down between 50 and 60 videos, alleging the material was contributing to the increase in violent crime on London streets.
This attack on the freedom of expression of musicians who make drill music does not stop at the removal of their videos from YouTube. Defendants convicted in criminal cases may in the future be banned from making music for a period up to three years if the offender is under 18 and indefinitely for adult offenders under criminal behaviour orders[1]. Crucially, the prosecution can use evidence to support the making of an order that would not have met the strict rules of admissibility as in a criminal trial[2]. The threat to freedom of expression goes further. The Met have expressed publicly their intention to push for new legislation, similar to anti-terrorism laws, that will criminalise the making of drill videos.
Drill is not for everyone. The lyrics are violent. There is liberal use of expletives. Descriptions of acts of violence using knives and guns are common themes. The images portrayed in the accompanying videos are similarly hard-hitting. Large groups of mainly young, mainly black men can be seen inhabiting the screen wearing hoodies and tracksuit bottoms – the uniform of the young in some sections of society.
Drill DJs are not, however, pioneers of explicit lyrics and violent images in music. The genesis of what is known as drill in the UK today sprang from a trap-style rap that originated in Chicago in the early 2010s. The hip hop of the 1980s and the gangsta rap of the 1990s are all part of the same family tree of poetic verse poured over a thumping beat. Drill is a close relative.
Nor is it new to blame this type of music for inciting violence. In the 1990s C. Delores Tucker campaigned against violent lyrics aimed at women in rap music. Then, as now, there was little direct evidence of a causal link between rap music and particular acts of violence. What the critics of this music fail to grasp is that the lyrics of this genre of music are inspired by, and not the cause of, the violence that infects the lives of many of these young men.
Censorship of a form of music which affords an already marginalised minority a rare opportunity to express themselves publicly is an attack against their fundamental rights as human beings.
Looked at in its true context then, drill is less about inspiring violence and more about providing a narrative of lives defined by violence. They are telling the stories of their lives, minus the sugar-coating, just as other writers, poets and musicians have done before them.
The courtroom has often been the battleground of the clash between the values of the young minority against those of the old majority. In 1960 Penguin Books was prosecuted under the Obscenity Act 1959[3] for the publication of a book entitled Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The prosecution’s case was that the book had a tendency “to deprave and corrupt” those who read it in daring to portray the affair of a married woman with the family’s gamekeeper. Penguin Books was acquitted[4].
In 1971, the publishers of a satirical magazine were prosecuted when an issue of the magazine featured a sexualised cartoon of the children’s literary character Rupert the Bear. Known as the Oz trial, the three defendants were convicted by the Crown Court but were then acquitted on appeal[5].
Today, UK common law has arguably been strengthened by the enactment of the Human Rights Act 2000 by enshrining in law article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights[6]. One former Court of Appeal judge said this of the importance of freedom of expression: “Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.”[7]
You or I may not wish to stream drill music videos on our mobile device. Many people may find the content offensive. The videos may even be performed by individuals who are suspected of a crime or have criminal convictions[8]. None of this should confer on the state, aided and abetted by global corporations, a wide-ranging power that ultimately infringes the right of musicians to express themselves freely.
This censorship of a form of music which affords an already marginalised minority a rare opportunity to express themselves publicly is an attack against their fundamental rights as human beings.
We all need to sit up and take notice.
1. Under Part 2 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. Such an order may contain requirements for the defendant to inform the police of any activity that may be in breach of the order. The order may be varied, reviewed or discharged. Breach of the order is in itself a criminal offence.
2. An CBO was made recently against 1011 members Micah Bedeau, Jordean Bedeau, Yonas Girma, Isaac Marshall and Rhys Herbert. They are required under the CBO to inform the police 24 hours in advance of their intention to publish any videos online and are required to give a 48 hours warning of the date and locations any live performance.
3. The 1959 Act is still on the statute books.
4. R v Penguin Books Ltd. [1961] Crim LR 176.
5. R v Neville, Dennis & Anderson, The Times, 24 June 1971.
6. Article 10 (1) ECHR states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent states from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.” Article 10 (2) sets out limitations to this right.
7. Sir Stephen Sedley in Redmond-Bate v Director of Public Prosecutions [1999] Crim LR 998.
8. A number of successful high-profile rap artists have criminal convictions.
21 Aug 2014 | Digital Freedom, Digital Freedom Statements, News and features, Uncategorized
Tributes to James Foley were placed at the War Correspondents Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery (Photo: Cynthia Rucker/Demotix)
On Thursday, after a video emerged of U.S. photojournalist James Foley being beheaded by Islamic State (ISIS) militants, the Metropolitan Police in London suggested that anyone who watched the video could be committing a crime. This takes us well beyond the realms of the #ISISmediablackout being urged by social media users, many of them journalists themselves, and does go to the heart of why censorship of such material is deeply problematic.
Questions of free speech and free expression are rarely clear-cut: the human rights laid out in the Universal Declaration frequently grate up against one another. Balancing the right to a privacy, for example, with the right to free expression and the public‚s right to know can be a high wire act; as is the balance between protecting children online from exposure to graphically violent or sexual content, and full-scale censorship.
And so deciding whether sharing, or even watching, a video of a criminal act, created as a deliberate piece of propaganda, rightly raises important questions. Are those disseminating this information playing into the hands of propagandists, so furthering their cause? Or are they raising awareness of their practices to a wider audience, leading to a better informed public? It is understandable that Twitter should want to respect the wishes of James Foley’s family by encouraging people not to share it. It is also understandable that Twitter and others would not want to be seen to be promoting propaganda that potentially glorifies terrorism and acts of horrific violence. It is also understandable that many social media users want to encourage an ISIS blackout, arguing that by sharing the Foley video, sharers simply give the group the oxygen of publicity and encourage more such acts.
But there is a difference between individuals exercising their right not to view or share the video, and companies such as Twitter — or indeed the police force — denying people the right to view it. If the Met police is right that just by watching the video individuals are committing a crime (and they have yet to show how or why this is), then David Cameron has broken the law. Barack Obama has also seen the video. As have I. As have a number of the journalists writing about the video in today’s papers: something they needed to do to be able to describe its full horror to others. We should not feed the flames of the propagandists by mindlessly sharing their videos, but nor should we make the mistake of assuming that global corporations, or indeed police forces, should decide who sees what. Because that simply plays into the hands of all those who want to end societies in which dissent and difference is tolerated; the kind of societies that celebrate and cherish the work of men like James Foley.
This article was posted on August 21, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
20 Dec 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
In my months covering the Leveson Inquiry, a clear and startling picture was painted of closed, secretive police forces, tense in their relationship with reporters on local and national papers and fiercely protective over the flow of information.
Justin Penrose of the Sunday Mirror described a “state of paralysis” in police-press relations. The Times’ crime editor Sean O’Neill said that “in the current climate, if you arranged to meet an officer you’d be looking over your shoulder the whole time.” The Guardian’s Sandra Laville cited an “over-reaction” by the Metropolitan police in response to the Inquiry, adding that “open lines of communication, which have been there for many years, are being closed down.”
So it is worrying that some of the more terrifying passages of the Leveson report that could perpetuate this closed culture, chill investigative journalism and also have grave implications for whistleblowers have gone almost unnoticed.
First, Leveson recommends increasing sentencing powers for breaches of section 55 of the Data Protection Act and also suggests that paragraph 2 (b) of schedule 1 the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) be repealed. The latter means that police should only request journalistic material as a last resort; repealing it would make it far easier for them to do so. As Index wrote in a policy note published today, the work of journalists who cover crime or terror stories could be compromised if this proposal is followed through, and sources that require protection might feel less confident in dealing with the press as a result.
O’Neill told me he finds the proposed change to PACE “terrifying”, calling it a “landgrab of massive new powers” that could force journalists to disclose their sources.
Add to this Leveson’s suggestion for an internal whistleblowing hotline, which would, in his view, get rid of the need for confidential briefings to journalists on internal police issues. The judge also recommends that “it should be mandatory for ACPO [Association of Chief Police Officers] rank officers to record all of their contact with the media”, and proposes an end to off-the-record briefings.
“This is music to the ears of people in the Met,” O’Neill said. “They think they should be the guardians of what transparency is.”
“Leveson has effectively just endorsed the approach the Met adopted post-phone hacking, when it went into complete lockdown,” he added.
Leveson might well strive for a more transparent environment — after all, it was the shady culture of collusion between editors, police officers and politicians that allowed reprehensible newsroom practices to fester and helped to severely dent public trust. This is rightly being investigated. But there is nothing wrong with an officer talking to a journalist: contact between them is just one of the ways reporters can scrutinise those in power, and the informal kind might provide more “texture” and “colour” that official sources might not give, as Laville told the Inquiry last March. Both parties are humans, and need to be able to discuss matters openly and without fear if information is to flow freely.
For their part, both David Cameron and Nick Clegg expressed strong concern over the data protection recommendations when they responded to the report last month. Yet amid the recent arrest of an officer in connection with a leak that spurred the “plebgate” row and resignation of Tory chief whip Andrew Mitchell, there is greater concern over how police officers and journalists navigate the murky post-Leveson world, as Vikram Dodd alluded to this week.
The reality is that this unsavoury mix of uncertainty and landgrabs fits a wider pattern of a culture yearning for a firmer grip on information: from disciplining a police officer for tweeting to plans for secret courts in the Justice and Security Bill currently under consideration in the House of Lords, there seems to be an appetite for perpetuating secrecy.
It’s hard to know what’s more worrying: that Leveson — so adamant was he about protecting freedom of speech — suggested these alarming proposals, or that so few seem bothered by the prospect of information becoming such a shackled commodity.
Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index. Follow her on Twitter: @martaruco
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Read our latest policy note in response to the Leveson Report
