Earlier this month, French president Emmanuel Macron professed a worrying openness to shutting down social-media platforms as a way to address the chaos in France. Last week, Politico reported that Thierry Breton, European commissioner for internal market, supports Macron’s approach. “When there is hateful content, content that calls — for example — for revolt, that also calls for killing and burning of cars, they will be required to delete [the content] immediately” (emphasis added).
There it is! The Left’s favorite cudgel to impose illiberal policies: hateful.
Of course, those on the left don’t consider themselves authoritarian; they’re reasonable, freedom-loving liberals just like the rest of us. They protect free speech — just not hate speech, which obviously doesn’t qualify.
Give it a rest already and be honest with the public: France is suffering from violent riots. In order to address the chaos, the French president and the EU bureaucrat believe authoritarian measures are warranted.
Breton went so far as to threaten that, “if [the platforms] don’t act immediately, then yes, at that point we’ll be able not only to impose a fine but also to ban the operation [of the platforms] on our territory.” Really? Aren’t the central planners supposed to know more than the average bear? Somebody ought to let Breton know there’s this thing called a VPN (“Vee-Pee-Ehn”), i.e., a virtual private network, with which social-media users can evade censorship.
How Macron and Breton think social-media censorship will dampen rather than inflame revolutionary sentiment is perplexing (read: laughable and contemptible). The American social-media firms — Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat — threatened by our supposedly liberal allies in Western Europe should jointly refuse to engage in censorship of anything that is not an imminent and credible threat to life, limb, or property (public or private). Good luck to the EU’s coterie of bureaucrats and heads of state if they were to follow through with their ban — further enraging the public would be rather impolitic.
To prevent “killing and burning of cars,” it’s not censorship that’s needed. It’s the defensive use of police powers to uphold the universal right to life, liberty, and property in France.