Green Censorship, Again

By Andrew Stuttaford

November 27, 2024

We often hear about the threat to freedom posed by the “far right,” but it’s time to pay more attention to the increasingly open authoritarianism of the deep (or, sometimes, not so deep) Greens, which has extended well beyond attacks on consumer choice and the functioning of a free-market economy.

Free speech is undoubtedly in Green sights, as John Kerry reminded us recently:

But, look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.

As I noted:

The essence of social media, of course, is that they are channels for many competing sources of information. Besides that, to condemn the First Amendment as a “major block” to “hammering out” a competing source of information is disturbingly authoritarian. Yes, Kerry may think that a source is “sick,” has an “agenda” (and he doesn’t?), and is putting out what he considers to be disinformation. But a legal system that would allow him and those who agree with him to “hammer it out of existence” is far sicker.

And, as I wrote in an article for NR a month or so ago, the EU’s new(ish) Digital Services Act clearly could be used to address the wrong sort of talk about the climate on online media:

The Digital Services Act is not meant to criminalize any new categories of speech. What is illegal under the law of an individual EU member-state or under EU law will remain illegal. Any amendments to legislation in that area will be left to national parliaments or to the EU’s legislative process. However, the DSA’s broad language could easily be used to impose de facto censorship on all sorts of theoretically legal speech, in the interest of preventing “harms” that exist only in the progressive imagination and that are hinted at in, among other places, the law’s preamble, but also elsewhere. Thus on its website the EU Commission warns of the dangers of “climate disinformation.” Tackling that is, it states, incorporated within its general approach to disinformation, including making it “more difficult for disinformation actors to misuse online platforms.”

As a platform with more than 45 million monthly visitors from the EU, X has been classified as a “very large online platform” (VLOP) and is thus subject to Brussels’ censorship regime, something that (I’d argue) means that X will either have to block the EU altogether — or at least ensure that users there only see content in line with the EU’s censorship regime. The alternative is that posts on X here in the U.S. will be subject to Brussels’s control.

And the way things are going, “disinformation” may not just be confined to classic climate “denial,” at least if the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a U.K.-based censorship shop gets its way:

As I noted here:

The CCDH has been actively trying to persuade online service providers to “demonetize” providers of information that it considers to be climate “denialism.” However difficult it is to reconcile with the idea of scientific enquiry, the idea of shutting down debate over climate change is by now nothing new. But according to the CCDH, climate denialism is evolving.

The CCDH believes that:

“Old denial” (global warming is not happening, human-generated greenhouse gases are not causing global warming) had been overtaken by “new denial.” This included claims that “the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless” or that “climate solutions don’t work” or that “climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.”

If this is intended to add ideas to the list of the anathematized, it only highlights the authoritarian streak running through climatism, an ideology increasingly at odds with democracy. Attempting to shut down debate over a scientific question (even one that is “settled”) is unhealthy, but going on from that to trying to muzzle debate over the correct approach to a changing climate takes this authoritarianism far, far further.

Even if “the science” were settled, that would not mean that the same is true of climate policy, which, if done properly, would involve serious consideration of trade-offs, detailed cost-benefit analyses, and the like. The “right” response would be constantly evolving. Climate policy is not “settled” and never could be. To claim otherwise makes a mockery of science and democratic politics.

Now there is this, reported a week or so ago by the Brussels Signal:

Marine Tondelier, national secretary and leader of The Greens party in France, has said she wanted to shut down Elon Musk’s X if it fails to bow to censorship demands.

She described the platform as a “catalyst for hatred” during a TV debate on the show Lundi, c’est politique (Monday It’s Politics) on LCP on November 18.

According to Tondelier, the social network website, which she has regularly used herself, should be “regulated or shut down”.

 

By “regulated,” she means censored.