"Don't let the name fool you," wrote Brian Chai of Alliance Defending Freedom Legal two months ago. "It may sound like an innocuous, boring European law, but the DSA is a digital gag order with global consequences. If left unchecked, it can censor you no matter where you live, including in the United States."
The DSA, enacted in 2024, particularly targets what it calls "illegal hate speech online." The problem with that, obviously, is that "hate speech usually means whatever Von der Leyen and her surrounding coterie of unelected civil servants hate."
As Chai explains, while officially the DSA's goal is "to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation," in reality, "the EU Digital Services Act allows those in power to silence or censor voices they find disagreeable. It is, for all intents and purposes, one of the biggest power grabs in internet regulation history."
You know there is a problem when the definition of hate speech the EU uses--the "public incitement to violence or hatred based on race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin"--is itself, as Chai explains, a circular description that must recycle the word "hate" in the explanation. Ditto for "illegal content."
The DSA is worrisome not only because of what it can do to our allies in Europe--it can also affect Americans. Google, for example, "may be inclined to conform their international content moderation policies to suit EU censorship," Chai says.
This is why the House Judiciary Committee wrote Von der Leyen to warn her that, "because many social media platforms generally maintain one set of content moderation policies that they apply globally, restrictive censorship laws like the DSA may set de facto global censorship standards."
Two months ago, Von der Leyen also announced the launch of a "media resilience program" that would include "a significant increase in media funding" in the EU budget and cajole "private equity capital" to support the project.
The U.N. is itself also on a jihad against this circularly defined online "hate." There is a "darker side of the digital ecosystem. It has enabled the rapid spread of lies and hate, causing real harm on a global scale," says a U.N. policy brief that offers another Marcusian "framework for global action through a Code of Conduct for information integrity on digital platforms."
"This clear and present global threat demands clear and coordinated global action," Guterres said, sounding as apocalyptic as Marcuse when he wrote that his "extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation."
Just last week, French President Emmanuel Macron railed against X for its "far-right content," and called for a new "European agenda of protection and regulation."
Across the Channel, one finds the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act, which went into effect this year. Under the guise of sparing minors from harm, the act "leaves many users bereft of important news and critical discourse," the Cato Institute warns. Canada's Online Harms Act is even worse. It has been stopped by Parliament in Ottawa, but it keeps threatening to reappear.
Real people have already suffered, and more will because of these acts by having their speech rights suppressed or going to prison. But in Spain, communists in government are taking a step further and cheering on mob attacks on people exercising their free speech rights.
"The antifa movement--filled with young people--is assuming the main duty of the citizen in our day: to make universities and streets safe spaces from fascism," Irene Montero, a senior politician in the Marxist party Podemos, posted on X last week after antifa assaulted a crowd of conservatives in Pamplona.
In 1965, Marcuse, too, defended the French Revolution's Reign of Terror: "There is a difference between revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence practiced by the oppressed and by the oppressors."
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