Ah, tradition! Isn’t it grand?
I refer to two recent events – the warning by French EU commissioner Thierry Breton to Elon Musk prior to his interview with Donald Trump and the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov by the French government. Both fit snugly into the long, rich French tradition of censorship of ideas and intimidation of anyone rash enough to voice them.
Of course France is rightly remembered for its amazing advances in science and philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries and the resulting decline in the power of the Roman Church and the French monarchy. Like almost no other time in history up to then, free thinking prospered, knowledge burgeoned and more and more people had access to that knowledge. The result was a questioning of- and confrontation with- authority like never before.
But, when we remember the greatness of the Enlightenment, we often forget the virulent opposition to it by state and Church. We remember Voltaire, but perhaps not that he spent much of his life fleeing prosecution for his ideas, taking refuge in Prussia, Switzerland and elsewhere. The encyclopedist Diderot was jailed and D’Holbach feared execution. Many contributors to the Encyclopedia simply quit writing in terror of the Church and the Catholic state that enforced its doctrines. Popes and kings feared the loss of power to those brandishing ideas.
Today, French authorities like Breton and Macron don’t have God on their side, so their censorship of ideas is plainly seen as just an exercise of naked state power enforcing precepts entirely of their own making and, as such, always subject to change.
In his letter to Musk, Breton took as given that false claims on social media – that the killing of three girls in the town of Southport in the U.K. had been committed by immigrants – were what caused the ensuing riots. That may well have been wrong, but, quite bizarrely, he went on to suggest that, because Donald Trump criticizes limitless immigration, somehow his words might contribute to riots that haven’t yet happened and therefore the person giving him a platform, Musk, could be arrested, charged, tried and convicted of allowing prohibited speech to occur on X.
Then there’s Durov, the Russian ex-patriot, arrested by the Macron government, not for anything he’s done, but for allowing others to use Telegram to further allegedly criminal behavior like selling drugs and trafficking kiddie porn. Durov’s crime, if it is one, is Telegram’s encryption service that shields user’s identities from everyone, including the police.
Tellingly, a similar arrest is exactly what Durov fled Putin’s Russian to avoid. Plus, the practice of encrypting to protect users is the very thing that makes the Internet safe (to the extent that it is). Do French authorities really want social media users to have their personal information readily available to anyone and everyone? Nothing would lead to more crime and destroy social media faster. But of course the latter may just be the whole point.
Plus, while the crimes alleged by the French are real, others may be far less so. After all, in the U.K., much simple speech is now criminal, so, using the French prosecutors’ theories, wherever speech is illegal, CEOs run the risk of imprisonment for not policing it to the satisfaction of the state. Therefore, as Breton’s letter to Musk suggested, allowing Trump to criticize unlimited immigration to the U.S. could easily render the X CEO a criminal, subject to arrest, prosecution and imprisonment in the U.K. And what if Trump’s elected? Should the American president avoid travel to the U.K. for fear of arrest?
Predictably, forcing criminal culpability on CEOs like Durov and Musk could prove to be quite the large net. Consider the 15-year-old who steals a bicycle advertises and sells it on, say, Facebook. Does Zuckerberg go to prison? If not, why not?
Durov’s arrest is the clearest example to date of what I’ve been complaining about for years – the backlash by power elites against the freedom of expression the Internet once promised and that’s been used to confront elite power (see e.g., the 2011 fall of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak).
As traditional as state censorship is the practice by governing elites of refusing to consider the possibility that the fault may lie with their policies and not with those who point out their flaws. So Rome and Paris targeted the philosophes for voicing ideas they considered threatening to their power and prestige, but rarely, if ever, considered the possibility that their behavior richly deserved the criticism it received and vastly more. The centuries of pre-civilizational brutality by the Church, the open greed, the obvious lies, the monarchy’s disregard of the needs of- and disdain for- everyday people were, apparently, simple facts of life beyond questioning. Did it ever occur to them that better policies might have produced better societies and a governed populace less prone to revolution?
And so it is today. For years, British governments allowed all but unfettered immigration from the Muslim world, and not without consequences. In Rotherham, some 1,400 girls were raped and otherwise sexually abused by Pakistani men over a period of 16 years, much of it known to law enforcement authorities who refused to stop the violence for fear of being labeled racists. Is it a wonder that now everyday people object to open immigration and governmental fealty to woke doctrines and overreact when three girls are murdered?
No, but to do so is now called hate speech that, unlike serial rape of minor girls, is considered a serious offense requiring police action and punishable by jail time. The natural result being that a U.S. presidential candidate who criticizes unlimited immigration constitutes a public danger and a proper target for censorship before he’s uttered a single word.
Let’s be clear: outside the U.S., the criminalization of speech will continue because it serves state power. And state censorship will defeat whatever fond notions social media CEOs have of the People’s right to speak and hear the speech of others. I don’t see fabulously wealthy CEOs going to prison for their beliefs. And if it’s illegal in Europe, free speech in the U.S. will be sharply curtailed, despite our First Amendment, because those CEOs won’t consent to lose the European market. Durov’s arrest is just the first and no one believes that Musk isn’t a target. As long as states criminalize speech, those platforms will eventually fall into line.
Power seldom questions itself, only those who question it. It’s an age-old tradition, one that those in power never seem to forget and everyone of sense tries to destroy.
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
