If Europe doesn’t ease up, it will have to learn the hard way that repression has its limits.
If Europe doesn’t ease up, it will have to learn the hard way that repression has its limits.
A mericans do not sufficiently appreciate the meaning of Elon Musk’s buying Twitter and turning it into X, or the reelection of Donald Trump, which inspired Mark Zuckerberg to publicly recant the Covid-era woke censorship he had pursued hand-in-hand with the U.S. government’s three-letter agencies. Much of Europe is still living in early 2017, when the shock of Brexit and Donald Trump inspired a determination among establishment parties in government to giddily launch info-warfare upon their own publics.
France has opened a criminal investigation into Elon Musk, amid concern over “deepfakes” and “manipulation.” The head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, announced a new effort to combat so-called foreign disinformation that could impact the next election. The ministry said “the battle of narratives is in full swing.” Notably, this was all accompanied with a presentation in which the Eiffel Tower was pictured on a glorious summer day, juxtaposed against a “filtered image” of a man wearing a MAGA cap and glasses, who sees the tower alongside squalor and disorder. That same morning, lots of Paris had a disordered look after rioting by locals, including torched buses. But the message from the government was clear: the only acceptable information is that France is doing great under Emmanuel Macron.
France is not alone. Germany has employed its NetzDG law to set strict removal deadlines for “illegal content,” which hugely incentivizes social networks to censor broadly and quickly.
The guidelines are so broad as to be laughable. Disinformation is defined as anything that may threaten “European values,” “democratic systems,” or “public security.” Basically, anything spicy said about immigration, sovereignty, climate change, or war can be classified as disinformation. A network of NGOs is deployed and funded by the EU to act as snitches and enforcers on this through the European Union’s “democracy shield” — which was deployed in Hungary ahead of parliamentary elections and is sure to feature again anywhere that dissident or populist candidates are exercising influence.
The combination of tight political ad rules, censors, and the network of “fact-checkers” and trusted flaggers gives a huge advantage to actors who already enjoy legacy media access. Those dependent on social media are exposed to demonetization, label-slapping, and outright restriction.
The EU is pressuring all member states to develop their own laws restricting disinformation and hate speech. We’ve seen the draft legislation in some countries, like Ireland, that would make it a criminal offense to have memes on your phone — perhaps sent to you by another friend — that other people may find offensive. You wouldn’t have had to spread the material yourself; mere possession of it would constitute the entire criminal offense.
This wave of anti-populist censorship has been carried out in the name of democracy. Europe sees these measures much like they do some nations’ bans on the formation of fascist parties, or the display of fascist slogans and symbols. That is, they see these efforts as part of the far edge of defending democracy from demagoguery.
They are wrong to do so. Outright fascist parties, besides Golden Dawn in Greece, have almost always failed spectacularly. Populists as well as mainstream voters only come around to support national-populist parties when they have been radically reformed. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally had to repudiate the antisemitism of her father’s National Front before it could break 15 percent in the polls. Giorgia Meloni’s party, likewise, made dramatic breaks with its WWII-era commitments and only then received massive support. Voter behavior clearly indicates there is no wish to return to the 1930s, only a massive desire to revisit and reform the political settlements of the 1990s. That was the era that committed Europe to ever-tighter political integration, ever-larger waves of mass immigration, and a more searching and intolerant form of secularism. If Europe doesn’t ease up, it will have to learn the hard way that repression has its limits.