American Spectator by DANIEL J. FLYNN
In China, authoritarians flood Twitter with ads for prostitutes and pornography in an effort to prevent users from obtaining information about protests. Authoritarians in the United States threaten to remove Twitter from more than 1.5 billion devices worldwide.
“Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store,” Elon Musk tweeted, “but won’t tell us why.”
The powerful few want to impede the free flow of information to the vulnerable many. Suppression strikes intelligent observers as not a Chinese thing but a fetish of the powerful in whatever nation they reside.
It appears cruder and more thuggish in China, and more passive-aggressive and sophisticated in the United States. But whether the state or a monopoly suppresses expression, does the crushing effect of it on a free society really differ?
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke of “monitoring” and “keeping a close eye” on Twitter (big sister is watching!), which, she claims, bears a responsibility to “take action” against “misinformation” and “hate.”
Does not the federal government bear a responsibility to ensure that the United States remains a free society?
Instead of breaking out of the stranglehold Apple and Google have placed upon the information that we consume, the White House publicly nudges tech companies to censor.
Traditionally, the federal government assumed a massive role in ensuring, particularly when it came to communications, that no company controlled too much of the market share.
During the 1940s, the feds forced NBC’s Blue Network to separate from the parent company. It eventually became NBC’s competitor ABC.
Later, after decades of litigation, the government broke up the Bell System into the seven “Baby Bells” (four of which once again folded into “Ma Bell,” otherwise known as AT&T). This similarly resulted in a competitor to the monopoly in Verizon.
Now people in positions of power cheer on the consolidation of information. Instead of breaking out of the stranglehold Apple and Google have placed upon the information that we consume, the White House publicly nudges tech companies to censor.
Privately, we may learn that political actors do much more than nudge.
“The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself,” Musk tweeted Monday.
“The public deserves to know what really happened.” And, of course, Mark Zuckerberg noted that Facebook’s decision to suppress the true Hunter Biden laptop story came about after the FBI issued a stern warning to them about disseminating “disinformation,” a euphemism that now means information that disturbs progressives.
Americans allow infringements on their freedom of speech because we imagine intolerance to that degree as remaining the domain of people who neither look like us nor sound like us. This speaks further to our small-mindedness.
This can happen here because it does happen here.
Later in the article, the author, Daniel Flynn states:
Elon Musk deserves gratitude for transforming Twitter from that woke wasteland into a vibrant Mecca for speech. Instead, Apple allegedly seeks to ruin his enterprise through restraint-of-trade practices. Similarly, Apple’s Chinese benefactors who make their iPhones now scour the devices of pedestrians to see if they contain Twitter and other apps.
The interests of Apple and China, then, coincide on much more than the manufacture of cheap iPhones.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple and Chinese President Xi Jinping imagine that they hold the right to dictate what apps you may keep on your phone.
“This is a battle for the future of civilization,” Musk accurately tweets. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”
Regulators should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.
What can history tell us?
Censorship was rampant throughout Nazi Germany. Censorship ensured that Germans could only see what the Nazi hierarchy wanted people to see, hear what they wanted them to hear and read only what the Nazis deemed acceptable.
The Nazi police dealt with anyone who went outside of these boundaries. Censorship dominated the lives of the ordinary citizen in Nazi Germany.
The prime mover in censorship was the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
It was his responsibility to see that the German people were fed with material acceptable to the Nazi state. Newspapers, radio, and all forms of media were put under the control of the Nazis.
Even the film and music industries were controlled by the Nazis.
Music by Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn was banned since they were both Jews. Jazz was also banned.
Even telling jokes about Hitler became a serious offence – one that could send you to the concentration camps and potentially death (think Saturday Night Live).
Censorship was enforced by a number of methods. First, the secret police or the local police ensured that the rules were kept to.
Secondly, anyone who wanted to go outside of the desired party norm faced the most serious of consequences.
Third, people in general were expected to report anything unacceptable to their local party chief. Those who knew something but did not report it were deemed as guilty as those who went against the system. This was key to enforcement.
Censorship ensured that the Nazis had the German public in their grip as they bombarded them on a daily basis on how their lives had been improved from the day Hitler became Germany’s leader.
| The chief function of propaganda is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on their mind………the slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula. The one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results that such a personal policy secures.” Adolf Hitler from “Mein Kampf” |
“Our way of taking power and using it would have been inconceivable without the radio and the airplane,” Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels claimed in August 1933.
Such statements are often cited—the head of Disney, Bob Iger, recently said that Adolf Hitler would have loved social media.
Goebbels was not saying that the Nazis had used both new technologies, the airplane and the radio, to come to power. Rather, the airplane helped the Nazis take power. Radio helped them keep it.
The history of radio, and in particular how it was regulated in interwar Germany, is more relevant than ever: Five years ago, the question was whether we would regulate social media. Now the questions are how and when we will regulate them.
As politicians and regulators in places as different as Berlin, Singapore, and Washington and even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg consider how best to do so, we should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.
Radio only became central to Nazi aims after Hitler was elected chancellor in January 1933, but Goebbels quickly exercised power over the medium, because the state already controlled its infrastructure and content.
State control over radio had been intended to defend democracy. It unintentionally laid the groundwork for the Nazi propaganda machine.
Radio emerged as a new technology in the early 1920s, and the bureaucrat tasked with developing regulations for it in the Weimar Republic, Hans Bredow, initially had high hopes.
He thought that radio could broadcast education and entertainment to bring the German population together after the divisive loss of World War I, and believed that radio should not broadcast political content, fearing it might exacerbate an already hostile environment.
Many thought the same of Twitter, Facebook, and Tik Tok.
Initially, Bredow allowed private companies to broadcast, and only from the mid-1920s on did stations start to air some news.
This seemed dangerous to Bredow and other officials, who worried that news could stoke uprisings or antidemocratic sentiment.
Weimar bureaucrats began exerting ever greater state supervision over radio content to try to depoliticize it. As the Weimar Republic became more and more politically unstable, Bredow and others pushed through reforms in 1926 and 1932 that mandated direct state supervision of radio content.
Bredow believed that increased state direction would prevent Weimar democracy from failing.
Can you see where I am going with this? Folks, we are repeating history if we allow the government to regulate free speech.
Back to our story.
Ironically, government regulation of radio played right into the Nazis’ hands, and meant that the Nazis could seize immediate control over radio content when they came to power.
Bredow was imprisoned for trying to stand up for democratic values. (After World War II, he helped to reestablish radio in democratic West Germany. There is now even a media institute in Hamburg named after him.)
The Nazi example, though extreme, reminds us that well-intentioned laws can have tragic unintended consequences.
We need to be wary of the long-term consequences of state control over content.
Now let’s turn to another great example of government controlled media. The Soviet Union.
The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 while championing freedom, yet one of their first decisions was to limit free speech through harsh censorship.
In early November 1917, the Soviet government signed the Decree on Press which prohibited publishing any “bourgeois” (affluent, middle class) articles criticizing the Bolsheviks’ authority.
As the years passed political censorship grew stronger, reaching its peak under Joseph Stalin’s reign. After his death the state relaxed its stance, but censorship remained until Mikhail Gorbachev declared glasnost in the late 1980s.
Lenin and Stalin claimedSoviet censorship had “a different character than the one existing in bourgeois states and aimed only at protecting the interests of the working class.”
This is a bold statement, especially given the fact the Soviet elite employed censorship for its own bloody gain, most notably during Stalin’s Great Purge.
“The physical eradication of Stalin’s political opponents was followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence,” British historian David King wrote in his book The Commissar Vanishes.
Retouchers worked hard erasing traces of fallen leaders from all photographs and images.
In 1921, the Soviet government created the Glavlit (General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press) which for decades remained the main instrument of controlling literature. Glavlit’s censors decided if a book was published in the USSR, or if it was banned.
As a result, Soviet citizens could not read many books, some of which are now regarded as classics – including Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, not to mention most works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that criticized the Soviet regime.
The circulation of books written by immigrant writers who had fled Soviet Russia were, of course, prohibited.
Nevertheless, the Soviet government wasn’t able to completely eradicate literature it deemed “dangerous.”
Through the ages, people opposing censorship have circulated handmade copies of banned literature. In the Soviet Union, this was called samizdat (self-published) and scores of illegal books were enjoyed by readers as a result.
Now I know what a lot of you are thinking. “It will never happen here.” You are dead wrong.
During the Civil War, the battle for public opinion was almost as important as the battles fought with bullets and bayonets. President Abraham Lincoln was a master tactician when it came to using public opinion as both a political weapon as well as a military aid.
He used the press not only to get his message out in an era before electronic mass communication, but also to prevent his opponents from having similar access to the hearts and minds of the people.
He did this through the use of military censorship, control of the post office and telegraphs, and through the use of patronage (giving certain papers exclusive rights).
At that time, New York City was the media capital of the western world. The big three papers in New York City were the Tribune, the Herald, and the Times.
There were also many other influential newspapers in other parts of the country. Lincoln used censorship of those journalists and newspapers whose views did not fit with the administration or its prosecution of the war, justifying the practice as being one which saved lives by shortening the war.
Many newspapers that were critical of the Union cause were censored or shut down.
Some editors were jailed for their anti-administration views. Freedom of the press was a casualty of the Civil War, and the real debate is whether or not this was justified under the circumstances of the time.
In mid-August 1861, four newspapers in New York City: the New York Daily News, the Journal of Commerce, Day Book, and Freeman’s Journal were all given indictments by a Grand Jury of the United States Circuit Court for “frequently encouraging the rebels by expressions of sympathy and agreement”.
A series of federal prosecutions of newspapers throughout the northern United States followed. The target was any newspaper that printed expressions of sympathy for Southern causes or criticisms of the Lincoln Administration.
Lincoln was able to effect control of press censorship because in those days, stories were filed by telegraph and Lincoln controlled telegraph usage.
Do you see any similarities in what I have shared today? Wake up America!