FREEDOM IN FOCUS

Greetings from Strasbourg! In this video, I recap a few points I made at a hearing of the Council of Europe (Strasbourg, 23rd April) organised by the Special Committee on the New Democratic Pact. At the hearing, I suggested we should give greater scope for local actors to experiment with different solutions to housing, healthcare etc. You can share this video by re-posting on substack and X. It is also available on Youtube.

I just participated in a hearing of the Special Committee on the New Democratic Pact at the Council of Europe, and one of the issues that I underlined in my contribution was that politicians are not there to solve all of our problems. In fact, we have unrealistic expectations of our politicians and our political system. We think that they are going to solve all these immensely complex problems - the pension system, the welfare system, immigration, public finances, etc., from a central pivot point.

I made the point that if we are going to actually develop sustainable solutions to these problems, we have to promote structured experimentation. That means allowing local actors to try out different solutions, to be empowered with real decision-making power and real financial power, so that they can try out different solutions to our ageing problem, our healthcare problem, our housing problem, etc.

And we also need to reduce the regulatory burden, the red tape that is imposed on civil society initiatives and on economic initiatives. We need to reduce the paperwork that people need to plough through in order to get any kind of project off the ground. In Europe, we have a major problem of overregulation. And by the way, that is a problem that really affects the housing sector as well.

That is one of the often invisible causes, for a lot of people, of the housing crisis: overregulation, not underregulation, because it is very difficult to actually construct housing and to get housing projects off the ground within a reasonable time period in many major cities.

The problem of overregulation and excessive bureacracy is widely recognised as a plague on European societies. Until we tackle these problems head-on, we will not be able to win back citizens who are losing their confidence and trust in the public institutions of Europe.

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You can help me share this information about the emerging censorship regime in Europe by sharing this video widely, by re-posting on substack and X. It is also available on Youtube.

Your speech is being censored behind closed doors by the European Commission. Now, when I say “your,” I don’t just mean citizens of the European Union; I mean citizens across the world. Anyone who is using a social media platform such as YouTube, Facebook, or X is subject to censorship by the European Commission.

Now, what does this mean exactly? We’re not talking about the old, traditional type of censorship, where the censor lays out certain rules and says that if you criticize the Catholic Church, you’ll be censored, or if you criticize my regime, you will be censored. No, this is a much more subtle kind of censorship that is opaque to the majority of citizens. Most citizens will probably never be aware that they’re being censored using this method.

How it works is that, under the Digital Services Act, the European Commission can have private meetings with the heads of Big Tech platforms, with their managers and their content moderation managers, and they can indicate to them what sorts of “systemic risks” need to be managed or “mitigated.” They can also give them guidelines about how this should be done.

Let’s take some examples: A “systemic risk” could be “disinformation” or “misinformation.” It could be “public health misinformation.” It could be “hate speech” or “discriminatory” speech. It could be a potential harm to “civic discourse,” or something that might undermine public trust or trust in our public institutions.

Now, if you take any of these risks, they’re clearly very vaguely defined. They are readily susceptible to a political interpretation or a self-serving interpretation. They’re not well-defined legal categories. And it’s not the Commission itself that is going to be doing the censoring directly. The European Commission will be “guiding” the Big Tech platforms as they do the dirty work for the Commission.

And how will they be “guiding” them? They’ll be convening meetings with them, often in private, to review some of these risks and to indicate some of their “concerns.”

Fortunately, we have a U.S. House Judiciary report coming out of the U.S. House of Congress this February which reviews a lot of evidence showing quite conclusively that there is very close communication between Big Tech platforms and the European Commission in regard to censorship. Much of this is going on behind closed doors.

Some of that communication between Big Tech and the European Commission has now come to light through the work of the Republican House Judiciary Committee. We now know from the House Judiciary reports that TikTok censored or removed a substantial amount of content on its platform that supposedly constituted “misinformation” on issues such as climate change, migration, LGBTQ rights, and security.

Clearly, this is political content. This is lawful political speech that is being censored under the auspices of the Digital Services Act and under the supervision of the European Commission.

It’s not done through public and transparent rules. It’s done through discretionary judgments made by the Commission and by Big Tech officials that are completely opaque to the average citizen.

But if there’s one thing we can be pretty certain of, it’s that those judgments will track the politics of the European Commission—the ideological proclivities of the European Commission.

Compliance with the European Commission’s wishes is certainly not optional, because there is a very hefty fine associated with non-compliance: a fine of up to 6% of global annual turnover for these companies. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of euros or dollars that these companies will have to pay if they’re found to be non-compliant with the Digital Services Act, which in practice means non-compliant with the wishes of the Commission—its guidelines and its suggestions for how to mitigate these risks.

Why does this apply to the whole world and not just to the European Union? Basically, it’s because it would be a logistical nightmare for social media companies to have to implement different censorship rules for every region, or to have a special European Union regime.

So, in practice, we’re seeing that this censorship is occurring not only in the European Union but in the United States as well, because the platforms have uniform community guidelines, and it would be extremely costly for them to tailor those guidelines to every region separately.

So everyone should be concerned. Anyone who cares about free speech should be deeply concerned about this opaque way in which the European Commission is now censoring our speech. Much of this has only come to light because of information that was subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee.

We should not depend on a U.S. House Judiciary Committee to discover whether or not the European Commission is censoring our speech. That should be on record. It should be transparent. It should be public information.

But instead, it’s all done behind closed doors. This is the direction we’re going with the Digital Services Act.

If you’re a European citizen and you care about freedom of expression, then my advice to you is to vote accordingly. Vote for candidates, both at the national and the European level, who are going to fight for your right to speak in public without being censored. Vote for candidates who are going to expose the censorious conduct of the European Commission and the ugly underbelly of the Digital Services Act.

The Digital Services Act is now in place. It’s been voted on. It’s in operation. All we can do is draw attention to how nefarious this act is and how much discretion it gives to the European Commission to censor public speech behind closed doors.

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Immigration is now a major political issue. And one of the obstacles to a proper, transparent public debate about this issue is a series of myths about immigration that are perpetuated by the political class and by many journalists. So in this video, I'd like to bust six myths about immigration.

Myth #1: It’s better to hand control over immigration to a transnational authority.

The first myth is that it's better to hand control over immigration to a transnational authority. And this myth is particularly commonplace in Europe. You'll hear it said that it's going to be chaos if we don't have a central coordinating authority. But of course, there's an ambiguity here, because it's one thing to say that we need some kind of international coordination, and quite another thing to say that nations should be handing decisive control over immigration to a transnational authority that would decide exactly how many migrants they should take, under which conditions, and so on.

That is essentially what we have with Europe's migration pact. But national governments must retain the prerogative to admit or not admit migrants, because the conditions in each country are unique and distinctive, and the people of each country deserve a say over who gets to come in and who doesn't get to come in, and which criteria should be applied, and whether their public services and their housing infrastructures are prepared for the numbers of migrants who are coming in.

Myth #2: Any filter applied to the admission of migrants is a form of unjust discrimination.

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Some potentially huge news for free speech, as Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has recently announced that he will be significantly scaling back the censorship of “misinformation” and “hate speech” on Meta.

This is something to be welcomed, irrespective of what you might think of Zuckerberg's motives or the timing of this decision, because it's going to affect a massive number of users of Meta. Currently, roughly a third of the world's population, if not more, is estimated to be users of Meta. That's a third of the planet Earth. A massive number of users, a massive number of citizens, will be affected by these changes.

And what are the changes that he's proposing? One is to basically dump fact-checking as a policy—I imagine that means firing fact-checkers, so that industry will not be very happy about that—and shifting to the community notes system, which is currently used on X. This system is a more democratic method for flagging content, contextualizing it, and critiquing it.

In general, Zuckerberg has said that he wants to allow for freer discourse on Meta. He wants to return to the original mission, if you will. He wants much less question-begging sorts of censorship of politically sensitive information, and he wants to allow more political debate on Meta.

Now, of course, the timing is very convenient—you know, Trump has just been elected—so obviously this is politically convenient and it's probably good business. We shouldn't forget that this is the man who is responsible for a platform that engaged in systematic censorship of medical debate and political debate over recent years. But putting that aside, whatever you might think of Zuckerberg, and even if you rightly think that he has done an awful lot of harm to citizens, this change in Meta’s policies is a big win for free speech.

To those who say, “that's just words, he hasn't done anything yet,” I would say, well, we can't be sure exactly how he will implement this on the Meta platforms in the coming months and years. It might not be everything we're looking for, but the fact that he's declared it publicly means that he has to do something. He has to make a change, otherwise he loses all credibility as a businessman.

So I believe that this is very significant and credible. We are going to see a lot more discussion of sensitive, controversial issues, on the Meta platforms in the coming months and years.

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"The line separating good and evil passes not between political parties but right through the human heart."

So said Russian author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Many people commenting on the U.S. presidential elections would do well to ponder these words. If you follow some of the commentary critical of the outcome of the election, you'll find a simplistic view of good and evil. They often project evil onto 50% of the U.S. population—or perhaps a mix of evil and ignorance—preserving themselves as the enlightened ones, above brainwashing, ignorance, hatred, and evil.

Last year, with all major political parties backing it, I assumed Ireland's Hatred & Hate Offences Bill was unstoppable. Now, I see that David can beat Goliath. Goliath will be back very soon, but for now, he has been sent away with his tail between his legs.

In April 2023, the Hatred and Hate Offences Bill passed through the lower house of the Irish Parliament by an overwhelming majority: 110 votes in its favor and just 14 votes against.

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When it reached the Senate, several senators raised concerns about its implications for civil liberties. Over the past year and a half, the bill has gained so much notoriety that the Irish government has backed away from it and dropped the bill entirely, at least those elements that concern hate speech.

This is a very encouraging victory for free speech advocates and for the free speech movement internationally. What would have happened if a coalition of activists, journalists, and business people had not lined up against this bill - people such as Senator Michael McDowell, Free Speech Ireland, Gript, and ADF Alliance Defending Freedom, and, of course, Elon Musk?

This is what would have happened: the existing hate speech regime in Ireland, based on the 1989 Prohibiton of Incitement to Hatred Act, would have been strengthened and made considerably more draconian. The maximum penalties for hate speech offences, for example, would have increased from two years to five years. The list of protected characteristics would have been significantly expanded, and the threshold for prosecution would have been lowered. Instead of having to show intent to incite hatred or prove that the person was aware of inciting hatred, it would only be necessary to show “recklessness,” which is a much lower bar for prosecution.

There are several lessons to draw from this victory. The first is that going from a bill having overwhelming support in Parliament to being defeated is very impressive, and it shows the efficacy of a high-profile campaign. As long as you have significant allies in Parliament and the media, even if they're in the minority, you can drum up enough notoriety and bad press for a bill to get it defeated.

Secondly, we need to be on guard more than ever before because the fact that this draconian bill passed overwhelmingly through our Parliament initially shows that our politicians either don't care or do not exercise due diligence on these matters. But for now, I would like to congratulate everyone, from ordinary citizens to high-profile business people, senators, TDs, journalists, and political activists who put so much work into defeating this bill.

What we have on our side is conviction and passion. We believe in what we're doing because we understand that free speech is one of the fundamental pillars of constitutional democracy and of the rest of our civil liberties. Without free speech, we cannot have a voice in the public square, defend the truth, or hold politicians accountable. Without free speech, we slide very quickly into authoritarianism, and the rest of our liberties are easily dismantled.

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The W.H.O. has declared a “public health emergency of international concern,” in relation to an upsurge of monkeypox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a growing number of countries in Africa. It does not take much digging to discover that monkeypox should not be high up on most people’s list of things to worry about. Here's the information I got from a quick inquiry using ChatGPT, and which simply summarises what is fairly standard knowledge about monkeypox:

For the general population, the risk of contracting monkeypox is generally considered low. The majority of cases are concentrated in specific groups, particularly among men who have sex with men and those who engage in high risk sexual behaviors. That said, cases can still occur outside these groups, so awareness and precautions remain important.…While monkeypox can cause painful and unsightly lesions, the majority of cases have been mild, with low mortality rates in Europe and the United States.

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So as far as I am concerned, most of us can just get on with our lives, and expend our mental and emotional energy on more pressing matters.

Was the WHO justified in declaring this a public health emergency? Is there a risk they may use up their credibility and be taken less seriously next time a genuine emergency of international concern comes around? Perhaps. But that is not what I wish to discuss here.

For there is a much more important question that we should we asking, everytime the WHO opens its mouth to share advice on matters of public health: should we be relying on the World Health Organization to inform our actions in relation to public health?

Judging by the behaviour and interventions of the WHO since 2020, the answer is a hard “no.” Any information or guidance coming out of the World Health Organization should now be labeled with a health warning. It is dangerous and misguided to follow the World Health Organization's advice on issues that affect your health, the health of your family, and the health of your children, for a number of reasons:

First of all, there are some major conflicts of interest inside the World Health Organization. One of their major donors is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has significant investments in the vaccine industry, including mRNA vaccines. How could you possibly expect an organization, one of whose major donors has investments in the vaccine industry, to give reliable and disinterested advice about vaccines and about medical treatment?

In addition, the track record of the world Health Organization, particularly in recent years, shows it to be a scientifically incompetent and ethically corrupt organization. To begin with, the World Health Organization completely went against the standard guidelines regarding pandemic preparedness that came out of its own experts in 2019.

That plan in no way, shape, or form contemplated large-scale lockdowns or the paralysis of social life. And yet, the head of the World Health Organization publicly praised the Chinese lockdown experiment. This helped to create an international atmosphere more favourable to lockdowns, which predictably had devastating effects on healthcare, on the economy, on mental health and on education.

Second, bizarrely, it began to recommend community masking in 2020, defying its own meta-analysis of masking studies, which suggested that the evidence for the efficacy of community masking was inconclusive at best.

Third, the WHO misled the public about the safety of mRNA vaccines because it continued to sell mRNA vaccines as safe and effective even after some very worrying, adverse effects were uncovered, including myocarditis in young men.

Fourth, the WHO conspicuously failed to defend the principle of informed consent, standing aside and allowing a coercive international regime of vaccine passports to be instituted in the European Union in the full knowledge that this would pressure healthy young adults to take an experimental vaccine that they didn't really need.

It also supported vaccine mandates for healthcare personnel, in spite of the fact that the adverse effects of Covid vaccines were not well understood and could not be well understood because they had not been tested at the level of the general population.

So for all of these reasons, any information coming from the World Health Organization should have a giant health warning attached to it. And whenever I hear anything from the World Health Organization, whether it be about monkeypox, masking, or pandemic threats, I will be corroborating and checking it to make sure that it's sound.

I most certainly will not be taking at face value anything that comes out of an organization that is riddled with conflicts of interest and has shown itself to be ethically corrupt and scientifically incompetent.

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Last Monday (12/8), EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton published an open letter to Elon Musk on Twitter/X, warning Musk to take measures to contain “harmful content.” Addressing himself to Musk, Mr Breton said he was writing “in the context of recent events in the United Kingdom and in relation to the planned broadcast on your platform of a live conversation between a US presidential candidate and yourself, which will also be accessible to users in the EU.”

Now, on its face, it sounds reasonable that platforms should have to restrict “harmful content.” If we were dealing with things like child pornography or terror plots, we could understand that Twitter/X is under a legal obligation to remove harmful content. However, it is much harder to understand how a social media platform could reasonably find itself under a legal obligation to remove or restrict a public interview with a U.S presidential candidate. What could be the vital public interest that would justify curtailing political discourse of that nature?

How exactly might the Musk-Trump interview fall foul of the Digital Services Act? Well, the Digital Services Act considers “harmful” content in need of “mitigation measures” to include, among other things, “incitement to hatred,” threats to “civic discourse,” the threat of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” and threats to “public security.” All of these terms are notoriously ambiguous and open to abusive and self-serving interpretations. They could easily be stretched to include a political interview with a U.S. presidential candidate.

For terms such as “disinformation,” “hate speech,” and “civic discourse,” are essentially political terms, not legal terms. They have no clear and widely accepted meaning in the law and certainly none in the context of lively public debates. As such, it was only a matter of time before they would be used to further the political ideology and interests of the European Commission.

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Have you ever noticed how these days, during a public crisis, be it a pandemic or rioting in the streets, that the knee jerk reaction of Western politicians is to recommend further restrictions on speech? So now, with the rioting in the UK, we see Keir Starmer coming out and saying that we have to get tough on hate speech and we have to prosecute people who have been guilty of sharing hateful content or content that could “incite hatred.”

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There are two problems with all of this:

First, nobody actually knows what hate speech is because nobody is prepared to give a clear definition of hate speech.

The second problem is that there's no reason to believe that governments or public officials are competent to distinguish between acceptable and reasonable public discourse, and unacceptable and unreasonable discourse. Why would you believe that a politician would be in a position to impartially arbitrate public political debate'? - the same politicians who make self-serving claims, disingenuous claims, and often false claims in the public sphere.

If you're prepared to hand the keys to freedom of expression to your politicians, then with all due respect, you must be very, very naive because that assumes that your political representatives have a kind of moral and epistemic superiority and can stand above the flow of public discourse and decide which interventions are true or false or hateful or non-hateful, or morally responsible or irresponsible.

Do we want that sort of society? Do we want a society in which there's a special class of people who are constantly erasing and preemptively censoring discourse that they don't like or that they find offensive? Is that the sort of society we want to live in?

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In this video, you will find my reflection, in 5 minutes, on the significance of three mayors’ attempts to shut down a conservative conference in Brussels this week. Click here to share this video on Twitter/X, and help me get the word out about this critical free speech victory for Europe.

For my latest post on this matter, see below:

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