Internet
The Soft Totalitarianism of the Political Class
From Reason
Officials pursue an anti-liberty agenda through unofficial pressure and foreign regulators.
It’s no secret that governments around the world are chiseling away at people’s liberties. Rights advocates document a nearly two decade decline in freedom. Civil liberties activists warn of a worldwide free speech recession. And while American restrictions on government power hold the line better than pale equivalents elsewhere, the political class seems determined to end-run those protections and impose creeping totalitarianism by leveraging the authority of allies in other countries.
“Obrigado Brasil!” Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, wrote this week to thank that country’s authoritarian Supreme Court for its recent ban on the X social media platform.
The court demanded X censor political views it called “disinformation” and appoint a new legal representative to receive court orders—after threatening the previous one with arrest. Importantly, the ban threatens ordinary Brazilians with hefty fines if they evade the prohibition on the social media network. Nevertheless, demand for blockade-piercing VPNs surged in Brazil after the court decision.
Ellison serves alongside Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz, who is the Democratic candidate for vice president and has falsely claimed “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” He’s also not the only prominent politician to have a real hate-on for X and its CEO, Elon Musk.
“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration and one-time adviser to President Barack Obama, huffed in The Guardian. He cited the recent arrest in France of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov as a precedent. “Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist,” Reich sniffed.
But the animus doesn’t stop with X, Telegram, and their bosses.
“For too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability,” former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claimed in 2022. “The EU is poised to do something about it. I urge our transatlantic allies to push the Digital Services Act across the finish line and bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”
Leveraging Foreign Authoritarianism for Domestic Purposes
Why would a former U.S. presidential candidate cheerlead for European speech regulations?
“The Digital Services Act will essentially oblige Big Tech to act as a privatized censor on behalf of governments,” Jacob Mchangama, founder of the Danish think tank Justitia and executive director of The Future of Free Speech, warned in 2022. “The European policies do not apply in the U.S., but given the size of the European market and the risk of legal liability, it will be tempting and financially wise for U.S.-based tech companies to skew their global content moderation policies even more toward a European approach to protect their bottom lines and streamline their global standards.”
Now in effect, the law is used to squeeze online speech, including as an end-run around U.S. protections for expression. It’s not the only overseas bypass of U.S. law, either.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina “Khan can’t get Congress to pass her antitrust agenda and is losing in U.S. courts, so now she’s leaning on foreign governments to do the anti-business work for her,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board noted last year about Khan’s reliance on European regulators.
Behind-the-Scenes Pressure for Censorship
But attempts to impose control and stifle dissent in the absence of legal authorization or in defiance of constitutional protections also occur here at home. Days after Telegram CEO Durov’s arrest in Paris, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed what had already been revealed by the Twitter and Facebook
“Senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee. He also admitted to suppressing reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its incriminating contents under pressure from the FBI.
That implicates not only incumbent President Joe Biden, but also Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president. Harris has complained in the past that social media companies are “speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation.”
Oversight, it seems, is now applied through back-channel pressure, and regulation by governments in countries that lack serious protections for free speech. The result is to endanger the role of the United States as a haven for free speech and other liberties in a world growing ever-more authoritarian.
The Political Class Embraces an Increasingly Authoritarian World
“Global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023. The breadth and depth of the deterioration were extensive,” Freedom House cautioned in its 2024 annual report. “Political rights and civil liberties were diminished in 52 countries, while only 21 countries made improvements.”
“Today, we are witnessing the dawn of a free-speech recession,” Justitia’s Mchangama mourned two years ago. “Liberal democracies, rather than constituting a counterweight to the authoritarian onslaught, are themselves contributing to the free-speech recession.”
This erosion of protections for free speech and other rights occurs with the encouragement of American officials who want more control over our lives but have been (partly) stymied by American protections for liberty. In a world of global platforms and international travel, these officials are applying extra-legal pressure and relying on overseas friends to punish people for activities that are legal in the U.S.
Readers will notice that most if not all these officials are Democrats. Much ink has been spilled in recent years—rightly—about the authoritarian drift of the Republican Party. GOP vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance wants to punish ideological opponents and advocates that his allies “seize the administrative state for our own purposes” and that they “seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who’ve had their lives destroyed by the radical open borders agenda.”
But as illiberalism rises across the political spectrum, Democrats are leapfrogging authoritarianism to embrace a soft totalitarianism enforced by unofficial pressure and foreign allies subject to minimal restraints on their power. They ignore legal constraints and display contempt for this country’s protections for liberty in their quest to leave no refuge for dissent.
If liberty has a future in this country, it will be despite the best efforts of the political class.
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By A flurry of controversial bills in Canada, some of which became law, serve to cement this impression.
Now, as President Trump prepares to start his second term in office in the US, Canada’s “orphaned” ruling class continues with the “disinformation” narrative – either as a sign of long-term commitment or looking for new “disinformation partners” elsewhere in the world – or simply as a sign of inertia.
Time will tell, and it will be interesting to see, but for the moment, news out of Canada speaks about a report compiled by the House of Commons Heritage Committee, titled, “Tech Giants’ Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Globally.”
How about the tactics deployed in Canada – and globally – using all manner of intimidation and subversion to evade citizens’ right to free speech?
Maybe another day, by another ruling coalition.
Right now, the Liberals, the New Democratic Party, and Bloc Québécois stand behind statements such as this one, found in the cumbersomely-named report:
“The Government of Canada notes some individuals and groups create disinformation to promote political ideologies including extremist views and conspiracy theories or simply to make money.”
This looks like a call to combine (yet more) censorship with (yet more) deplatforming. And the ones to “fix” things for Canada’s current government are companies behind major social platforms, like Meta and Google.
But the group of Canada’s MPs behind the report believes so.
They want mechanisms put in place “to detect undesirable or questionable content that may be the product of disinformation or foreign interference and that these platforms be required to promptly identify such content and report it to users.”
Does Canadian parliament’s pressure on US tech companies not count as “foreign interference”? Unclear. Another thing that’s unclear – as in, undefined in the report – is what its authors have in mind when they mention “disinformation” and, “conspiracy theories.”
It’s as if these terms have become “art for art’s sake.”
Whatever that may be, Canada’s ruling parliamentarians want specific actions against these undefined phenomena to be enforced by tech companies.
“Failure to do so should result in penalties,” reads the document.
Censorship Industrial Complex
New Australian law, if passed, will make the gov’t the sole arbiter of truth’
From LifeSiteNews
By David James
The main purpose of the legislation is to silence critics of the Australian government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis. What they have done instead is demonstrate that Australia does not have adequate protection for free speech, nor is it a democracy.
In a crushing blow to free speech in Australia, the lower house of federal parliament has passed an amendment, known as the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992. It imposes obligations on digital communications platform providers to prevent the dissemination of content “that contains information that is reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive, and is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm of a specified type (misinformation and disinformation).”
Several dissenting politicians have expressed outrage and incredulity at the legislative move. Nola Marino, a member of the right-wing opposition Liberal Party said that she did not think that Australia, a liberal democratic society, would ever be “debating a bill that is explicitly designed to censor and silence the Australian people.”
National Party member Keith Pitt described the legislation as a “yawning chasm that is incredibly … dangerous to this country.” He expressed shock that the amendment was being put forward, adding that Western democracies such as Australia have been built on freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Such principled objections were ignored, however. The legislation now has only to pass in the Senate (the upper house) to become law.
The first and most obvious criticism of the law is that it puts the government authority, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in the ridiculous position of deciding what is and isn’t “false” information. That is not only absurd – how could ACMA, for example make judgements on subjects like vaccines or viruses – it means that the law cannot be applied universally.
Governments routinely put out false information, arguably more often than they put out true information. Will they be penalized? Of course not. Advertisers present information that is false. Will they fall under his law? No. It will only be directed at people who are saying things that the government does not like, especially in relation to health policy. It is politics, not law.
When governments distort the law for political ends, it inevitably ends up in badly crafted legislation, and that is what has happened here. The law depends for its integrity on clear semantics, words whose definition is clear. But two key words, “misinformation” and “disinformation” are misleading at best.
They are variants of the word “information”; the prefixes “dis” and “mis” have been added to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth (“information” being something objectively observable). It is a diversion. What is happening instead is that the law will target the intent of the writers.
Disinformation is defined as information that is “intended” to mislead and to cause harm. With misinformation there is no such intent; it is just an error, but even there it requires determining what is in the author’s mind. The aim is to outlaw thinking that is not congruent with the governments’ official position.
Determining a writer’s or speaker’s intent is all but impossible, however, because we cannot get into another person’s mind, only speculate on the on their motivations. Thus, someone who produces content that is deemed to be false and have caused damage could say that it was meant as irony, not literally. How is it possible to prove otherwise?
Pointing out this definitional slipperiness could be the basis for an effective rebuttal of the legislation. Courts are very poor at establishing intent.
A second problem: How do we know what meaning the recipients will get? Glance at the comments on social media posts and you will see an extreme array of views, ranging from approbation to intense hostility. To state the obvious, readers think for themselves and inevitably derive different meanings. Anti-disinformation legislation, which is justified as protecting people from bad influences for the common good, is not merely patronizing and infantilizing, it treats citizens as mere machines ingesting data – robots, not humans. It is legislation that is not just aimed at controlling the thoughts of the producers of the content, it is targeted at the thoughts of the recipients: two layers of absurdity. The result would be like targeting the “thought crimes” depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.
Censorship regimes operate on the assumption that if a sufficient proportion of the available content is skewed towards pushing state propaganda, then the audience will inevitably be persuaded to believe the authorities. But what matters is the quality of the content, not the quantity of the messaging. Repetitious expressions of the government’s preferred narrative eventually become meaningless, while sound analyses will cut through.
The main purpose of the legislation is to silence critics of the Australian government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. The aim is to ensure that in future health authorities and the political class are immune from scrutiny and criticism. It is unlikely to be effective. What they have done instead is demonstrate that Australia does not have adequate protection for free speech, nor is it genuinely a democracy.
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