On Avoiding Conflation of Political Speech and Hate Speech

If you're one of the people in the software freedom community who is attending O'Reilly's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) next week here in Portland, you may have seen debate about O'Reilly and Associates (ORA)'s surreptitious Code of Conduct change (and quick revocation thereof) to name “political affiliation” as a protected class. If you're going to OSCON or plan to go to an OSCON or ORA event in the future, I suggest that you familiarize yourself with this issue and the political historical context in which these events of the last few days take place.

First, OSCON has always been political: software freedom is inherently a political struggle for the rights of computer users, so any conference including that topic is necessarily political. Additionally, O'Reilly himself had stated his political positions many times at OSCON, so it's strange that, in his response this morning, O'Reilly admits that he and his staff tried to require via agreements that speakers … refrain from all political speech. OSCON can't possibly be a software freedom community event if ORA's intent … [is] to make sure that conferences put on for the exchange of technical information aren't politicized (as O'Reilly stated today). OTOH, I'm not surprised by this tack, because O'Reilly, in large part via OSCON, often pushes forward political views that O'Reilly likes, and marginalizes those he doesn't.

Second, I must strongly disagree with ORA's new (as of this morning) position that Codes of Conduct should only include “protected classes” that the laws of a particular country currently recognize. Codes of Conduct exist in our community not only as mechanism to assure the rights of protected classes, but also to assure that everyone feels safe and free of harassment and hate speech. In fact, most Codes of Conduct in our community have “including but not limited to” language alongside any list of protected classes, and IMO all of them should.

More than that, ORA has missed a key opportunity to delineate hate speech and political speech in a manner that is sorely needed here in the USA and in the software freedom community. We live in a political climate where our Politician-in-Chief governs via Twitter and smoothly co-mingles political positioning with statements that would violate the Code of Conduct at most conferences. In other words, in a political climate where the party-ticket-headline candidate is exposed for celebrating his own sexual harassing behavior and gets elected anyway, we are culturally going to have trouble nationwide distinguishing between political speech and hate speech. Furthermore, political manipulators now use that confusion to their own ends, and we must be ever-vigilant in efforts to assure that political speech is free, but that it is delineated from hate speech, and, most importantly, that our policy on the latter is zero-tolerance.

In this climate, I'm disturbed to see that O'Reilly, who is certainly politically savvy enough to fully understand these delineations, is ignoring them completely. The rancor in our current politics — which is not just at the national level but has also trickled down into the software freedom community — is fueled by bad actors who will gladly conflate their own hate speech and political speech, and (in the irony that only post-fact politics can bring), those same people will also accuse the other side of hate speech, primarily by accusing intolerance of the original “political speech” (which is of course was, from the start, a mix of hate speech and political speech). (Examples of this abound, but one example that comes to mind is Donald Trump's public back-and-forth with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz.) None of ORA's policy proposals, nor O'Reilly's public response, address this nuance. ORA's detractors are legitimately concerned, because blanketly adding “political affiliation” to a protected class, married with a outright ban on political speech, creates an environment where selective enforcement favors the powerful, and furthermore allows the Code of Conduct to more easily become a political weapon by those who engage in the conflation practice I described.

However, it's no surprise that O'Reilly is taking this tack, either. OSCON (in particular)