America could potentially wage a pro-censorship battle against Elon Musk, similar to Brazil’s actions
Nothing is more threatening to a tyrant than free speech.
And so Elon Musk is Public Enemy No. 1 to authoritarians the world over.
Over the weekend, an overweening judge ordered Brazil’s approximately 40 million X users cut off, under threat of huge fines if they used VPN tech to access the platform anyway.
On Monday, the country’s Supreme Court upheld Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ order banning X because Musk refuses to block speech on his site from individuals Moraes wants silenced.
The judge specified some right-wing lawmakers and activists, but could easily name anyone he chose.
He’s also ordered $3.28 million in fines and shut down other Musk companies operating in Brazil.
And he demands X name a legal rep in the country; the company counters that de Moraes threatened the last rep “with imprisonment” and froze her bank accounts “even after she resigned.”
And much of the American left is cheering.
In an insane Guardian column, onetime former Labor Secretary Robert Reich called for “regulators around the world” to “threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”
Lies and hate — in Reich’s eyes, of course; he also insists, “Musk’s free-speech rights under the First Amendment don’t take precedence over the public interest.”
Nor, presumably, do the First Amendment rights of anyone else who . . . disagrees with Robert Reich.
And the Harris-Biden crowd seem to agree, though they’re not advertising it.
Harris said as much in 2020 campaign, bemoaning the lack of “any level of oversight or regulation” of speech on social media.
And of course this administration tried to set up a Ministry of Truth until public outrage shamed them out of it.
In the UK, the Labour government is jailing people for social-media posts; Facebook and Twitter bowed to federal censorship requests for years.
And as Musk bought Twitter and made X a safe haven for free speech, the administration has slammed his companies with investigations and lawsuits, waging 11 different regulatory and legal assaults to date.
No, not every criticism of a social-media company is an attack on free speech: Big Tech platforms can and have abused their power, with addictive and profitable algorithms that wind up promoting anorexia among young girls, for example.
But free speech is most centrally about political expression, and the way to fight “misinformation” and “hate speech” is with contrary speech, not censorship.
In the marketplace of ideas, the best ideas tend to win out.
Then again, Robert Reich and the modern Democratic Party have never seen a marketplace they didn’t want to control: They always insist it’s for the greater good; that it just happens to lock in their own power is pure coincidence.
