by Eugyppius, Daily Sceptic:
The Brussels Eurocrats around Emmanuel Macron are having a big sad about Twitter right now. They fear the platform fuels “the amplification of hateful content” and “disinformation”, which are multisyllabic ways of saying that there is too much unapproved and uncurated discourse on the site. You cannot just have people taking to their keyboards to type, like and retweet whatever they want. You especially cannot have that in Europe, where we suffer under the immensely liberal and democratic Digital Services Act, which mandates all manner of social media censorship to protect traditional European freedoms, like freedom of expression.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Twitter is a useful website; I use it to try out ideas and also for news-gathering purposes. As much as I’ve benefitted from the platform, however, I find the establishment derangement surrounding it to be extremely bizarre. There is little chance that Elon Musk’s relaxed moderation regime will lead to fascism, and still less chance that heavy censorship there will do anything about tHe ExtREmE RiGhT. The real reason that Twitter bothers establishment pundits and politicians, is its inherently confrontational nature. Our smug and self-satisfied oligarchs don’t like getting dragged and dunked on by the rabble. They want to tweet their lunacies without anonymous anime-themed accounts showing them up for the fools that they are, and they are very, extremely, fulminously enraged that Musk won’t do anything to improve their user experience.
One of these dissatisfied users is Thierry Breton, the Macron-appointed Commissioner for the Internal Market of the European Union. As everybody knows, on August 12th, Breton posted a letter to Musk ahead of Musk’s Twitter discussion with Donald Trump, to remind the American entrepreneur of his obligations to censor content. Breton has long been a thorn in the side of his EU colleagues, who regard him as a shallow self-promoter, and his game rapidly backfired. The next day, the EU Commission clarified that “The timing and the wording of the letter were neither co-ordinated nor agreed with the President nor with the [commissioners].” The American House Judiciary Committee then added to Breton’s humiliation by condemning his “threats” and his “attempt to intimidate individuals or entities engaged in political speech in the United States”. Musk also had some choice words for the EU Commissioner:
The Macronistes don’t care that they are wildly unpopular and that everybody hates them. They just don’t want to hear about it. They could simply delete their Twitter accounts, but people would still be saying mean things about them on the internet somewhere. They’d have to lie awake in bed at night, staring at the ceiling and stewing about it. Better by far would be to delete Twitter itself, or at least to block access to the platform across all 27 EU member states. This Monday, Sandro Gozi, who represents Macron’s Ensemble coalition in the European Parliament, gave an interview to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, in which he renewed Breton’s threats and hinted that it might even come to that:
… Gozi said on August 19th that X “must respect the [Digital Services Act] directive on disinformation and incitement to hatred” or face prohibition.
“If Elon Musk does not comply with European rules on digital services, the EU Commission will ask continental operators to block X or, in the most extreme case, will impose the total dismantling of the platform in the territory of the Union,” the senior Renew Europe MEP stated.
He went on to justify speech controls as being necessary to curtail political violence as well as the rise of the so-called “extreme Right.”
“Online violence often leads to offline violence,” he wrote. “The extreme Right hides its violence behind freedom of expression. Platforms must moderate hateful content.”
Perhaps the EU will soon have its own version of the Great Chinese Firewall, all to protect the delicate feelings of our political minders Europeans from the scourge of being able to say and read things on the internet.
The most notable thing about these attacks, is that they’re emanating precisely from the self-described centrist, liberal quarters of the Eurocracy. For my American readers, that’s “liberal” in the traditional sense of the term, denoting those who claim to value such things as equality before the law and individual rights. Something very strange has happened to European liberals over the past several decades. Liberal parties across Europe embraced the Covid lockdowns, many of them were totally on board with mass vaccination insanity, and in Germany the liberal FDP have hardly lifted a finger to oppose the strange and unhinged campaign of the Federal Interior Ministry to persecute “the Right”.
