EU Warns Twitter Not To Restore Free Speech Protections After Calls From Clinton & Other Democratic Leaders
EU Warns Twitter Not To Restore Free Speech Protections After Calls From Clinton & Other Democratic Leaders
Authored by Jonathan Turley, November 2, 2022
We have been discussing how
Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton called on foreign companies to pass
censorship laws to prevent Elon Musk from restoring free speech protections on
Twitter. The EU has responded aggressively to warn Musk not to allow greater
free speech or face crippling fines and even potential criminal enforcement. After
years of using censorship-by-surrogates in social media companies, Democratic
leaders seem to have rediscovered good
old-fashioned state censorship.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) declared Musk’s pledge to
restore free speech values on social media as threatening Democracy itself. She
has promised that “there
are going to be rules” to block such changes. She is not alone.
Former President Obama has declared “regulation has to be part of the answer”
to disinformation.
For her part, Hillary Clinton is looking to Europe to
fill the vacuum and called upon her European counterparts to pass
a massive censorship law to “bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern recently repeated this
call for global censorship at the United Nations to the applause of diplomats
and media alike.
EU
censors have assured Democratic leaders that they will not allow free speech to
break out on Twitter regardless of the wishes of its owner and customers.
One of the most anti-free speech figures in the West, EU’s
Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton has been raising the alarm that
Twitter users might be able to read uncensored material or hear unauthorized
views.
Breton himself threatened that
Twitter must “fly by [the European Union’s] rules” in censoring views deemed
misleading or harmful by EU bureaucrats. Breton has been moving publicly to
warn Musk not to try to reintroduce protections that go beyond the tolerance of
the EU for free speech. Musk is planning to meet with the EU censors and has
conceded that he may not be able resist such mandatory censorship rules.
The hope
of leaders like Clinton is the anti-free speech
measure recently passed by EU countries, the Digital
Services Act. The DSA contains mandatory “disinformation” rules for censoring
“harmful” thoughts or views.
Breton has made no secret that he views free speech as a danger
coming from the United States that needs to be walled off from the Internet. He
previously declared that, with the DSA, the EU is now able to prevent the
Internet from again becoming a place for largely unregulated free speech, which
he referred to as the “Wild West”
period of the Internet.
It is a
telling reference because the EU views free speech itself as an existential
danger. They reject the notion of free speech as its own protection where good
speech can overcome bad speech. That is viewed as the “Wild West.”
Many of us are far more fearful of global censors than some
whack job spewing hateful thoughts from his basement. That is why I have described myself
as an Internet Originalist:
The alternative is “internet originalism” — no censorship. If
social media companies returned to their original roles, there would be no
slippery slope of political bias or opportunism; they would assume the same
status as telephone companies. We do not need companies to protect us from
harmful or “misleading” thoughts. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not
approved speech.
If Pelosi demanded that Verizon or Sprint interrupt calls to
stop people saying false or misleading things, the public would be outraged.
Twitter serves the same communicative function between consenting parties; it
simply allows thousands of people to participate in such digital exchanges.
Those people do not sign up to exchange thoughts only to have Dorsey or some
other internet overlords monitor their conversations and “protect” them from
errant or harmful thoughts.
The
danger of the rising levels of censorship is far greater than the dangers of
such absurd claims of the law or science — or in this case both. What we can do
is to maximize the free discourse and expression on the Internet to allow free
speech itself to be the ultimate disinfectant of disinformation.
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