In February, Vice President J.D. Vance surprised many at the Munich Security Conference by raising concerns about the erosion of democratic values among our allies. He explicitly stated, “In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” This caused no small amount of consternation on both sides of the Atlantic, but it needed to be said. Even as American voters returned free speech advocates to the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives — the European Union has passed and is rapidly implementing troubling censorship laws such as the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The American Spectator, was founded in 1924 and has published many of the most respected writers ever to appear in print.
The DSA has been billed by its authors as a badly needed legal tool that will finally make it possible to render order out of the chaos that allegedly characterizes the digital sphere. Inevitably, like many censorship projects launched in the U.S. by the Obama and Biden administrations, DSA’s ostensible purpose is to “protect democracy” from the ever-present threat of disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech. Moreover, it can and does indirectly impose a censorship regime on the U.S. by insisting that large American-owned companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and X — abide by its terms.
How? According the European Commission’s website, “If the Commission definitely establishes a breach of the DSA, it may adopt a decision imposing fines up to 6 percent of the global turnover of the VLOP [Very Large Online Platform] or VLOSE [Very Large Online Search Engine] concerned, and order that provider to take measures to address the breach by the deadline set by the Commission.” For the large platforms noted above, this would mean billions of euros, and even they aren’t big enough to ignore such fines. And you will no doubt be deeply shocked to discover that the very first formal DSA investigation targeted X.
On the basis of the preliminary investigation conducted so far, including on the basis of an analysis of the risk assessment report submitted by X in September, X’s Transparency report published on 3 November, and X’s replies to a formal request for information, which, among others, concerned the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel, the Commission has decided to open formal infringement proceedings against X.
But gigantic social media platforms and search engines are by no means the only American entities the DSA can reach out and touch. The EU funds various international NGOs that purport to identify purveyors of “disinformation” and warn advertisers not to associate their brands with “high risk” online news and opinion sites. Among the most notorious of these nonprofit watchdogs is the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), whose primary product is its “dynamic exclusion list.” The British publication UnHerd produced the following graphic, which exposes it as nothing but an old fashioned McCarthyite blacklist:
This juxtaposition of the “least dangerous” and “most dangerous” websites renders all too obvious how GDI defines disinformation. Every publication in the latter column will be recognized by regular consumers of political news and commentary as conservative, libertarian, or studiously neutral. That RealClearPolitics is labeled “dangerous” is absurd. It’s a news and opinion aggregator that often links to outlets listed in the “least dangerous” column. The publication you are now reading, The American Spectator, was founded in 1924 and has published many of the most respected writers ever to appear in print.
Every publication listed in the right-hand column combines high quality content with careful attention to factual accuracy. In many cases, such as the New York Post’s original reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the “most dangerous” news outlets get their facts right when the “least dangerous” conspicuously fail to do so. Consequently, the only possible way for GDI to see the outlets in the right-hand column as “dangerous” is by viewing disinformation through what its website describes as “the lens of adversarial narrative conflict.” This lens allows GDI to focus on a vast range of “harmful” speech that must be suppressed:
The harms from adversarial narratives are increasingly evident across the world. From burgeoning hate speech and harassment to conspiracy theories and extremism, individuals are harmed emotionally, financially and physically as a result of toxic online content. At a societal level, increasing division and distrust of each other and of the institutions that make up our societies is eroding democratic progress, giving populists and authoritarians increasing visibility and power.
Censorship Protects ‘Smelly Little Orthodoxies’
GDI’s description of adversarial narrative conflict seems familiar, does it not? It uses many of the same terms progressives deploy against any organization or media outlet that fails to conform to what George Orwell famously called “the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” Thus, any criticism of gender ideology is “hate speech,” any objection to the depredations of the deep state is to trade in “conspiracy theories,” and any claim that open borders are harmful to the nation is to engage in “extremism.” Adversarial narratives also empower “populists and authoritarians” to endanger democracy.
The tragic irony here is that the U.S. taxpayers, as well as the hapless subjects of the EU, have been paying GDI to promulgate this nonsense and to censor news and commentary outlets that engage in wrongthink. The good news, as Vice President Vance’s Munich speech illustrated, is that the Trump administration is determined to put a stop to it. They know censorship is the real threat to the republic. Moreover, the administration is full of smart, energetic people who also understand the stakes. Censorship is a virulent form of cancer that is indeed metastasizing globally. Nonetheless, it is curable with the right doctors and treatment.
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