The totalitarianism we warned of is happening

By Michael Shellenberger

Credit : 'Michael Shellenberger

The European Union is at this moment forcing big tech companies secretly to engage in mass censorship. Google and Facebook are, apparently, going along with it. Only Elon Musk’s X, among the major platforms, is resisting.

A few hours ago, Musk said, “The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us. The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not.”

And so now, the EU is preparing to punish X with massive fines — up to 6% of total global revenue. I can't imagine a more egregious form of foreign interference in our domestic affairs than foreign governments demanding mass secret censorship for ideological and political purposes.

Most terrifying is the apparently direct involvement of government intelligence and security agencies, and their intermediaries, in demanding censorship. This is all happening at the very moment that the same governments, including our own, warn of Russian disinformation through spam accounts that hardly anybody ever sees.

Don’t be fooled by the EU and others

Don’t be fooled by what is happening. Governments and former intelligence officials in Europe, Australia, Israel, Brazil, and Ukraine and other nations are not only demanding censorship but also often spreading their own disinformation.

For example, the EU claims that there is more false information on X than on other platforms, and more censorship would reduce it. This is false. Only X has the open-source Community Notes system, which allows for real-time corrections to false information. A recent study in JAMA, the Journal of American Medicine, found that 97.5% of the Community Notes were entirely accurate, 2%, partially accurate, and 0.5%, inaccurate.

It’s not perfect. I myself sometimes disagree with them. And of course, science is never standing still, so what appears accurate today might not be accurate in the future. However, X’s Community Notes uses more speech, not censorship, to provide context to controversial content. You can still agree or disagree with the content, even with a Community Note attached.

What the EU wants is for its committees of experts, not Community Notes, to secretly decide what we can read and say online. This is unethical and unconstitutional.

Just who are these arbiters of free speech?

Another key part of the EU’s disinformation is that ‘researchers’ should have access to X’s internal data, which Musk cut off when he bought Twitter. But those people who want the data aren’t researchers. They’re censorship activists, many of whom have deep relationships with governments in general and intelligence agencies in particular.

If the EU succeeds in censoring X, Facebook, Google, and every other major Internet platform, then there is no free speech. There is only government-controlled speech.

Many people rightly worry about the implications of a single man, Elon Musk, being all that stands between us and foreign governments’ totalitarian censorship plans. I worry about that, too. Our speech is inalienable. It is not something governments give to us.

We need to fight back

While we should be grateful to Musk for standing up to the totalitarians in Europe, Brazil, and Australia, we must build a citizen’s movement to fight back.

There’s three things you can do. First, share this video to raise the alarm. Second, add your email to our list here, so we can involve you in the future. And, third, consider making a donation to build the free speech movement and urge Congress and other social media companies to stand up for free speech against foreign interference.

- Michael Shellenberger, 12 Jul 2024