Many realized that moving towards censorship online was dangerous and it becomes quite evident in the next step as outlined by The Atlantic author Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard professor. The title of the piece is “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal” and the subtitle is ‘In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.’
The good professor, a law professor, writes that Chinese communists have “better standards on the regulation of freedom of speech than America does.”
Ironically, his article is under the ‘ideas’ section. What better place to put an argument to squash ideas than under the ideas section of the Atlantic?
His point is the private sector has “taken over digital surveillance and speech control in the United States” and it already shows “similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China.” He’s not opposed to this, quite the contrary.
If it wasn’t for the constitution and our culture, the federal and state governments would have taken over, he continues. The trend towards government control is “undeniable and likely inexorable,” the author contends.
GOVERNMENTS MUST TAKE OVER THE INTERNET
The U.S. is wrong and China is right, he claims, and this is the crux of his argument, in that “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.” [His leftist values he means]
He isn’t concerned about the Wuhan Chinese Communist Party Virus from China at all. He’s worried about the elections as one sees further on in the essay.
He notes that the first wake up call was Edward Snowden who was able to reveal government [nasty] secrets. But then the author gets to what he really cares about.
It really isn’t about coronavirus or Edward Snowden at all, it’s about the “interference” in the 2016 election.
IT’S ABOUT NEVER ELECTING ANOTHER TRUMP
The second wake-up call, he says, was Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Then he quotes Marxist Obama, saying the most consequential misinformation campaign in modern history was “not particularly sophisticated—this was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.”
Russia, Professor Goldsmith writes, uses a simple phishing attack and a relatively limited social-media strategy to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2016 election and wreak still-ongoing havoc on the American political system.
What he doesn’t say is the entire Russia-Trump fiasco was a Democrat Party scam and he uses it to say the U.S. can be exploited in elections. The only ones who collaborated with Russian spies were the Democrats.
THE FIRST AND FOURTH AMENDMENTS HAVE GOT TO GO
The LAW professor adds, “It also highlighted how legal limitations grounded in the First Amendment (freedom of speech and press) and the Fourth Amendment (privacy) make it hard for the U.S. government to identify, prevent, and respond to malicious cyber operations from abroad.”
Those pesky Amendments again.
The hard-left, which has control of the Democratic Party, wants to use the coronavirus epidemic in order to seize freedom of speech rights.
The Amendments are barriers, he proclaims.
“The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.”
Those barriers are the point, aren’t they?
THIS IS A TEST
This professor sees this as a reasonable trade-off — government censorship over free speech — and wants to see how we can keep it going.
“We are about to find out how this trade-off will be managed in the United States. The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.”
OPINION
Indeed, the social media giants are harshly censoring all information about the virus, even if it means spreading China’s propaganda, and even if it means shutting down legitimate information, as long as it hurts the President. YouTube is vigorously shutting down all studies that involve ultraviolet lights.
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