| | | America will no longer tolerate Ireland’s war on free speech
by Michael Murphy
telegraph.co.uk
This week, Marco Rubio delivered a pointed warning to the world: the First Amendment is going global. The US secretary of state announced visa restrictions targeting “foreign officials and persons” complicit in censoring Americans. “Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere,” he said, “the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over.”
Diplomatically, it falls just shy of sanctions. No names were named: everyone implicated in speech policing, from ministers to overzealous constables, must now wonder whether their family holiday to Disney World has just been indefinitely postponed. Nowhere is the unease more acute than in Dublin.
Ireland has long enjoyed its status as the EU’s Anglophone entrepôt, a low-tax haven with excellent manners. But with most major social media platforms headquartered there, Dublin’s regulators have inherited the unenviable task of enforcing Brussels’ online speech codes.
Caught between Brussels and Washington, and economically tethered to both, Ireland finds itself in a tight spot. It can no longer please everyone. And the timing could hardly be worse.
In February, Brussels enacted the Digital Services Act (DSA), the most ambitious speech regulations in its history. It requires platforms to remove “illegal content,” including those now-ubiquitous modern offences: “disinformation” and “hate speech”. Both are defined, helpfully, by national authorities with varying sensibilities. Brussels has made clear it prefers those definitions to be broad, and enforcement to be swift.
The European Commission has now given Dublin two months to resuscitate a shelved hate speech bill or face the European Court of Justice. The law, paused after public backlash, rests on the elastic premise that hate is whatever the state says it is. That may comfort the authorities, but it leaves tech platforms navigating a legal hall of mirrors.
The result? American companies face a binary choice: enforce vague foreign speech codes, or risk fines of up to 6 per cent of global turnover per breach. Most will opt for the safer route: when in doubt, delete.
The knock-on effects have not gone unnoticed across the Atlantic, and Washington is not amused. As it steps back from its old role as global policeman, it finds its companies quietly conscripted as global censors. The regime, for good measure, threatens to tax not just American profits, but the principles underpinning them. And thanks to a quirk of geography and corporate clustering, Ireland has become the bailiff.
That role has already earned Dublin what diplomats might politely call a “frank exchange of views”. This week, Trump dispatched a team to the Irish capital, where they met with free speech advocates and, I’m told, delivered a few sharp words to the Irish government and media commissioner.
Rubio’s initiative reflects a growing mood in Washington that American free speech norms are under threat abroad, and that the full force of US diplomacy may be needed to defend them. Europe, for its part, is still pretending there’s no clash at all.
In Brussels, social media is seen less as a marketplace of ideas than as a digital latrine – the source of Trump, Brexit, and other electoral embarrassments. The sluices, in their view, must be shut.
Washington sees it rather differently. In one illustrative moment last year, Thierry Breton, then the EU’s Internal Market Commissioner, publicly warned Elon Musk about “amplifying harmful content” shortly before Musk interviewed Donald Trump. The optics were not ideal: a European official rebuking an American billionaire for speaking to a former American president, in the lead-up to an American election. No such warnings, needless to say, were issued to Democrats.
To Trump’s allies, the asymmetry is obvious, and the State Department appears to agree. Though “billed to protect children from harmful online content,” Europe’s laws are, in its words, “used to silence dissident voices through Orwellian content moderation.”
Orwellian is a word best used sparingly, but the DSA may be one of the rare exceptions.
There is still no settled definition of disinformation or hate speech. European governments, many of them nervous about rising populism, are now positioned to define and punish speech just as their electorates become more volatile. That conflict of interest alone ought to raise eyebrows.
Hints of what’s to come are already visible. One of the DSA’s guiding lights is the Global Disinformation Index. Its co-founder, Clare Melford, once explained that disinformation isn’t always about accuracy: “Something can be factually accurate but still extremely harmful.”
This represents a small but meaningful innovation in liberal jurisprudence: the idea that truth is no defence.
In a talk at the LSE, Ms Melford offered a “more useful” standard: “It’s not saying something is or is not disinformation, but it is saying that content on this site or this particular article is content that is anti-immigrant, content that is anti-women, content that is antisemitic.”
Put simply, disinformation is not what is false, but what the right people find distasteful.
Whether Rubio’s visa threats lead to tangible consequences remains to be seen. But the symbolism is already doing its work. If Europe’s speech enforcers must now consider the possibility of being flagged or blacklisted from the US, then the First Amendment’s long reach may be starting to make itself felt.
If not yet in Brussels, then certainly in Dublin.
Tom |
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