EU’s Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton and Elon Musk (Credit: Zero Hedge)
“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.”
(…) 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.
(Read more: Zero Hedge/Jonathan Turley, 11/02/2022) (Archive)
April 2022 – (…) As is often the case, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stripped away any niceties or nuance. Clinton called for the European Union to pass the Digital Services Act (DSA), a measure widely denounced by free speech advocates as a massive censorship measure. Clinton warned that governments need to act now because “for too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability. The EU is poised to do something about it.”
Clinton’s call for censoring disinformation was breathtakingly hypocritical. President Obama was briefed by his CIA Director John Brennan on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” The intelligence suggested it was “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
Moreover, her call for censorship came just weeks after special counsel John Durham offered more details about the accusation that her campaign manufactured a false Russian collusion theory. One of Clinton’s former lawyers is under indictment for the effort. Clinton personally tweeted out the disinformation that is the subject of the federal prosecution. And the Federal Election Commission recently fined her campaign for hiding the funding of the Steele dossier.
Given that history, it would be easy to dismiss Clinton’s calls as almost comically self-serving. However, the 27-nation EU just did what she demanded. It gave preliminary approval to the act, which would subject companies to censorship standards at the risk of punitive financial or even criminal measures.
If implemented, it might not matter if Musk seeks to restore free speech values at Twitter. Figures like Clinton are now going to the EU to effectively force companies to continue to censor users.
Faced with liability across Europe, the companies could be forced to base their policies on the lowest common denominator for free speech.
Countries like Germany and France have spent decades criminalizing speech and imposing speech controls on their populations. That is why the premise of the DSA is so menacing.
European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager was ecstatic in declaring that it is “not a slogan anymore, that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.”
Sound familiar? Freedom is tyranny, and democracy demands speech controls. (Jonathan Turley, 4/29/2022) (Archive)