Western censorship ratchets up amid the Israel-Hamas conflict

Western censorship ratchets up amid the Israel-Hamas conflict

By: Rachel Marsden

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Within the span of a single week this month, the European Union’s censorship commissars have sent letters to three different major online platforms demanding to know what they’re doing about “disinformation” as the conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas heats up. How about buzzing off, already, comrades?

The “problem” seems to be that there’s a very high risk that people who don’t parrot the conventional Western narrative will take advantage of democracy’s theoretically non-negotiable cornerstone of free speech to log on and post something raw that risks undermining the establishment narrative. Or that one or both parties to the conflict are leveraging these platforms to wage grotesque influence campaigns. Kind of like the Kardashians do whenever they have something to sell.

The EU Commission has requested that, by this week, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) “provide more information on the measures it has taken to comply with obligations related to risk assessments and mitigation measures … following the terrorist attacks across Israel by Hamas, in particular with regard to the dissemination and amplification of illegal content and disinformation.”

A similar message was also sent to the video- sharing platform, TikTok.

Indeed, they should provide the bureaucrats information about how they’re going to ensure that the online playing field stays level and that comments like the EU’s evocation of “terrorist attacks across Israel by Hamas”, as the EU says, are balanced out by mentions of Israel bombing Palestinian civilians. Something that the EU evidently often fails to do itself.

The platform, “X”, formerly known as Twitter, has also received a letter from the EU noting that it was under investigation by the bureaucrats in Brussels related to the platform’s handling of things like “illegal content, disinformation, and gender-based violence.”

EU internal affairs commissioner, Thierry Breton, said in a recent address to the EU parliament that “illicit content and disinformation” creates a risk of stigmatization of certain communities and destabilization of democratic structures. Indeed, there’s no more stable government entity than one with no dissent or turbulence. Division and vigorous debate or resistance to the establishment quo is one of the very hallmarks of a healthy and stable democracy. Yet Breton has said that “we will not let terror and disinformation divide us or undermine our democracy.” OK, then let’s all just wait for the official government propaganda on every contentious issue and fall in line. Sounds super democratic.

Breton underscored the need to suppress violent content to protect children. Sorry but that’s the parents’ job. Or at least it was when I was growing up. Why does the state figure that it’s now expected to step in and take their place on everything from childcare funding to ensuring that the entire internet is one giant safe space that accommodates the definition of what a bunch of desk jockeys figure that kids should be exposed to? Why is it X owner Elon Musk’s job to parent other people’s kids? He has his hands full already with at least 11 of his own.

Critics of platforms like X routinely evoke its lack of reactivity related to what they call propaganda. Most of the time, those complaints tend to favor one side of a given conflict, even when both sides have committed violent acts against civilians of the other side.

Then there’s the oft-leveled criticism that allowing publication of terrorism-related material constitutes its promotion, attributing outsized blame to Big Tech and effectively obscuring debate over the fact that these same states have failed to curtail some of the top facilitators of terrorist recruitment within their own control. Those include their failure to eradicate terrorist recruitment within their own state-run prisons, or to champion the protection of innocent civilians on all sides equally rather than just those who happen to be on the side of allied Western interests.

And again, if you’re old enough for mom and dad to let you use the internet, then you’re also old enough to have them explain to you what a "terrorist video" is. If not, then they can just go back to blowing stuff up in video games until they’re of the right age to understand.

If this level of censorship had existed back in the day of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, then we never would have been able to get a good laugh at the Taliban’s monkey bars training camp videos.

The bottom line is that the EU is using the Israel-Hamas conflict as an opportunity to strong-arm these platforms into an arranged marriage with the Western establishment-funded think-tanks that the EU works with to control information under the guise of dodging any mere specter of harm to democracy. Musk called one such entity a “ scam” and suggested that it be disbanded immediately when an online user pointed out some of its own peddling of fake-news under the guise of fact-checking.

Musk and others who paid billions for their online businesses should be able to run them as they see fit. If they’re indeed seen as too big to fail — or to be granted freedom — then let these same governments fork over tens of billions to buy and run them … and then watch everyone flee elsewhere in search of raw information that helps the average person make up their own mind outside of their Orwellian echo chamber.