This is an article published in The Atlantic:
Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal
In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.
Here are the authors:
Jack Goldsmith
Harvard Law School professor
Andrew Keane Woods
Professor of law at the University of Arizona College of Law
Harvard Law School is currently the No. 2 ranked law school in the country. The University of Arizona College of Law is ranked as No. 47.
Today, [social media] platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures.
This is beyond dangerous. By “collaborating” with the government, social media has turned over personal information to the government that under normal circumstances would require a warrant for the government to obtain.
It should worry Americans that they voluntarily hand over information to social media that they think is private, just for social media to hand it to the government.
We need “to make sure that, when we’ve made it past this crisis, our country isn’t transformed into a place we don’t want to live,” warns the American Civil Liberties Union’s Jay Stanley. “Any extraordinary measures used to manage a specific crisis must not become permanent fixtures in the landscape of government intrusions into daily life,” declares the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group. These are real worries, since, as the foundation notes, “life-saving programs such as these, and their intrusions on digital liberties, [tend] to outlive their urgency.”
I disagree with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. These intrusions are not urgent or even useful, they are usually counterproductive.
But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.
And that is very, very bad. China should not be the model for our internet, either by government diktat or by social media acting as its own digital political entity with its own laws.
The Coronavirus turning American social media into China’s social credit system is a horrifying, dystopian future.
One of the greatest lies Americans have been told is that oppression comes only from the government. It doesn’t. In America, oppression most often comes from the collusion of big private industry and corrupt government.
If you don’t believe me, just look up the Battle of Blair Mountain or the Ludlow Massacre. In both cases, powerful local mining companies oppressed the people and committed murder because they had corrupted local government officials into letting the companies run their company towns essentially as feudal lordships.
Rather than respect free speech, social media has been given a pass because “they are the private sector.” The private sector should not be allowed to impose Chinese like censorship on the people, especially when they are allowed to operate as de facto monopolies.
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.
Two law school professors arguing that Chinese like censorship of the internet is right and the sign of a mature and flourishing internet.
Because when I think of “flourishing” I think of the oppressive boot of government and social media internet censor crushing the life out of every unapproved opinion posted online.
I guarantee you this blog would not survive the censors.
China was not right. China’s internet censorship and disinformation campaign on the Coronavirus outbreak has cost the lives of possibly millions. At least more than a hundred thousand in the Western world, we still don’t and may never know how many Chinese died. Chinese censorship exacerbated the Coronavirus, not helped stop it. Had the Chinese been able to post what was happening to them online, the world would have had a much better understanding of the situation far earlier.
Law professors arguing against the First Amendment on the greatest library of information the human species has ever created is obscene.
It is incredible that American lawyers and law school professors would ever defend turning our internet into China’s internet, but this is where we are when it comes to liberty in the United States in 2020. Especially how the model that they want to impose here is responsible for so much death and destruction over there.
What this is, is the arrogance that comes from believing that you are smarter than everyone else and always right, and wanting to shut up every other opinion. People like this never assume that the powers that they demand for themselves will ever fall into the hands of their opponents.
Really they should be reminded of that.
If they like the Chinese system so much, perhaps the president should seize all of Harvard’s $40 billion endowment to fund the PPP and use Harvard’s campus as a convalescent home for COVID patients.
That would provide much more benefit to this nation than the indoctrinating of any more law school students by a professor who things that the Chinese system should trump the First Amendment in the United States.
Then, maybe, we weld the professor into his house until he starves.
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