X, formerly Twitter, found itself on the wrong side of Brazil’s totalitarian government recently and is now banned in that country. Charlie, on today’s edition of The Editors, says this is “a disgrace.”
“The great advantage of the internet,” Charlie says, “at least in theory, is that it is ubiquitous and decentralized, and except for its core functions . . . should to the extent possible remain under the control of free nations run by nobody.”
Charlie points out that, “The legal question here is to me an irrelevance other than as an answer to the question: What gives Brazil the right to do this? Brazil is a sovereign nation and can do what it wants. . . . But the important question is not that. The important question is whether or not this is a good law and whether it’s pretextual. And it’s not a good law and it is pretextual. Clearly, the root cause of this is that Brazil wants to ban certain accounts and certain speech.”
He says this is “classic government censorship,” and that while “we should condemn it . . . we shouldn’t spend too much time condemning what goes on in Brazil, important though it might be.”
What Charlie is more interested in is America, and he says, “We should be more concerned about what’s happening” here. “Thankfully, this is not happening in America, but there are some loose ends that I think we ought to tie off in America.”
“I want to see Congress step in and set some rules for what the government can and can’t do in this area,” he says. “I would also like the Congress to make it clear that the federal agencies that so many of our sensors have started to point to as potential regulators of the internet don’t have that authority. . . . So I think this is a disgrace, but I’m more worried about the prospect of its being repeated or emulated even in small part here in the United States, and there are many things we can and should do to stop that.”
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