This dissertation examines how games have been construed legally and publicly and compares the nature of games to the de facto legal criteria: in order for games to receive free speech protection, games must inform and communicate. In Chapter I, I review the literature surrounding the effects of violent video games. This literature review serves as a foundation for the rhetorical nature of the legal controversy since the controversy has no clear-cut answer to the effects of video games. Instead of a clear "Yes"€ or "€œNo"€ answer, game effects researchers can only posit "Maybe"€ and "No"€ findings. Game antagonists employed long-shot and shoddy research to argue their case that violent games produce violent people. The next two chapters lay a foundation for justifying why games have become increasingly controversial to date. In Chapter II, I outline a history of games and argue that games became communicative in the early 1990s. As a response to graphically communicative games and congressional bullying, the video game industry created a self regulatory rating board which should have quelled the public controversy. It did not. In Chapter III, I argue that Columbine changed the face of the game industry in the eyes of the public, as a matter of public morality. Before 1999, the public viewed games in a positive light, embodying one of America'€™s pastimes and helping the disabled with their motor skills. After the events at Columbine, the public saw the video game industry as an unruly and rogue force. In Chapter IV, I explain the legal hurtles the game industry faces in becoming protected speech. While video games have become communicative and informative, they likely will not receive free speech protection because of the public scapegoating of the industry during the last two and a half decades. I conclude by discussing the latest Grand Theft Auto "€œHot Coffee"€ controversy and how game developers remain gun-shy about the free speech issue.

No one seems to be against freedom of speech. We have profound disagreements, nonetheless, about what people should be allowed to say. Superficially, these disagreements seem to be independent of our own personal views on larger moral issues such as the desirability of state neutrality and the possibility of promoting certain views of the good life. This perception, however, misrepresents the deeper connections that one's views on free speech have with one's interpretation of political morality; connections which shape the very way in which one reasons about free speech. In order to understand these connections, it is important to be conscious of the rich and complex history of the very notion of freedom of speech. While sometimes represented as a modern ideal, the very fabric of the modern view on free speech is the result of earlier social practices and of competing moral claims. To understand how we think about free speech today it is not enough to look into our own world. Some aspects can only be made vivid by revisiting the history of this notion. But not only that. Aside from reconstructing the history of the modern notion of freedom of speech, we also have to grasp the place of liberalism in shaping our views on these matters. Questions of paternalism, neutrality, and the good life, and of liberalism's relationship to these ideas, are all important in defining what it means to have free speech. Any articulation of free speech which disregards these points would be missing an important aspect of the discussions surrounding what we should be allowed to say. To reason about free speech, we need to go beyond the normal justifications for the freedom of speech. Truth, democracy, and autonomy are the familiar reasons for defending freedom of speech, but they are not the defining aspects of one's free speech reasoning. For that, we need to look elsewhere. This is what the argument in the thesis is set to do: to explore and explain how our free speech reasoning is shaped by historical experiences and by the gradual evolution of a certain view of the moral world. By engaging in a reconstruction of the different forms of reasoning on these issues, the argument sets out a systematic account of the competing ways of reasoning about free speech. The argument has four parts. In Part One, I set out the history of the social practices and moral claims which gave birth to the modern idea of freedom of speech and claim that they are still an integral part of what it means to have free speech. Part One shows how some of the normative positions (liberties, claim-rights, and immunities) which are thought to be part of the freedom of speech were the result of certain historical experiences. Then, in Part Two, I introduce some key theoretical distinctions with regard to liberalism, which provide the argumentative platform for the rest of the thesis. In developing the distinction among different strands of the liberal tradition, the variable role and meanings of principles of neutrality is of particular significance. Part Three then goes on to connect the different strands of the liberal tradition with the justifications for valuing freedom of speech, showing how opposing versions of the arguments for a defense of free speech reflect underlying assumptions about political morality. Finally, Part Four explores the three core aspects of the modern view on free speech: the formalization of moral reasoning, the role of a set of individual rights in the identification of neutral reasons, and the place of one's view on political morality in the delimitation of the meaning of the freedom of speech. It is not the purpose of the argument to defend one particular form of reasoning over the others, but to examine the different argumentative resources that are available within competing strands of the contemporary debate. Put simply, this thesis seeks to show that - and the ways in which - our free speech reasoning is fundamentally shaped by our deeper views about political morality.

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This thesis contributes to the debate on hate speech by arguing for a compromise solution. It breaks with the absolutist solutions under which either all hate speech should be banned or all should be protected. The prohibition of some hateful expressions is assumed to be legitimate. This follows the European constitutional tradition. However, the prohibitionist norm should be reconciled with the right to political speech. This flows from the normative importance of free political expression that is widely endorsed. The research relies on three theoretical pillars. First, it defines the strongest democratic justificatory case for political speech in liberal democracies. Then, it argues for a richer understanding of what should count as political speech. The proposed approach assigns more weight to the political circumstances than to the sheer content of speech. The argument then proceeds through investigating the strongest objections against protecting hate speech. These prohibitionist arguments assert that hate speech incites against, silences or vilifies vulnerable groups, moreover that hate speech harms democracy. The thesis disputes these objections as applied to political hate speech. The conclusion is that political hate speech narrowly defined should be an exception from the otherwise legitimate ban on hate speech. In the final two chapters, the theoretical findings are applied to the case law of the ECtHR and to the United Kingdom's statutory hate speech regulation. The critical evaluation of hate speech judgments and statutes is coupled with suggestions how to reform the broadly prohibitionist position that these jurisdictions had come to endorse.

Freedom of Speech and its Postmodern Challenges in Perspectives of European and American Theory and Case Law Abstract This dissertation entitled Free Speech and its Postmodern Challenges in Perspectives of European and American Theory and Case Law joins a vibrant conversation about the changing nature of free speech in the digital era. The internet, both as a communication technology and a multimedia platform, has fundamentally transformed the world around us: political, legal, media, economic and other important dimensions of our postmodern society. As internet expanded and became almost omnipresent, it also emerged as an essential domain for freedom of speech, becoming a new public square, newspapers, radio and TV. This new and inter- connected digital cosmopolis introduced brand-new legal challenges, reflecting the inherent tension between the global virtual community and local legal rules and systems. The purpose of this disseration is to modestly contribute to the current discourse and to introduce some complexities of this brave new world of digital free speech. The internet, particularly Internet 2.0 in the era of social networks, redefined the rules of the game, transformed the field as well as the players. The new pluralist model of digital free speech can be portrayed as a structure with complex...

Spaces for protests, demonstrations, and activism are shifting under contemporary social, cultural, and governance structures. While particular conditions for physical space were once fairly unified in their ability to establish space for activism and dissent; social media and digital platforms have fundamentally changed the nature of those areas. This thesis aims to investigate frameworks of space-making that can potentially reposition spaces of activism as everyday events that represent the mood of the society. This in turn will also help in revisiting the terms of human engagement with the help of spaces that facilitate a deeper understanding of the people around us and conceive a sense of empathy within our social conversations.

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No / Traditional Millian theory posits that free speech is the most important mechanism to achieve a greater tolerance of difference and thus create a dynamic marketplace for truth to flourish. In responding to maledictive hate, theorists such as Gelber (2002) and Butler (1997) have recommended that marginalized speech actors engage with a process of speaking back, of returning the gaze to make perpetrators¿ contributions to the marketplace of ideas marginal and aberrant. However, as will be demonstrated by an analysis of maledictive force and effects, the ideal speech situations of communicative action theory, and the recasting of terms of abuse by ¿speaking back¿, require both rational speech actors ¿something clearly absent in many acts of maledictive hate¿and an institutional validation of the authenticity of marginalized subjects and their speech. Constructing new truths in the marketplace of ideas is both socially and politically contingent. As such, the capacity for marginalized subjects to contribute to the marketplace rests on their ability to be able to speak with authority and to be authorized to speak.