This article by Denyse O’Leary is reprinted from Salvo 71, Fall, 2024.

The internet empowers everyone, including the censor. Last summer three events happened in quick succession that provide a bird’s-eye view of government efforts across the globe to control the flow of information on the internet.  

Thirty-nine-year-old Pavel Durov, the chairman of Telegram, a Facebook competitor, was arrested at an airport outside of Paris and charged with twelve crimes. The charges relate to his failure to remove illicit content, but the French government also appears to want a back door into Telegram, which has 900 million active users.

On August 26, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee that the U.S. administration (under both Trump and Biden) had pressured his company to censor Covid-19 content during the pandemic, as well as the Hunter Biden laptop story, which came out prior to the 2020 election—and that he regretted doing so. He even vowed change: “we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”  

Speculation as to why Zuckerberg suddenly admitted all this has ranged widely: He wants to help the Republicans; he wants to avoid costly litigation; and there are more.

How about this: Seeing what happened to Durov, he has realized that governments are making his business a dangerous game, and he wants more public discussion about that. Granted, he is much more a part of the establishment than Durov is, but that hardly makes him invulnerable. 

From Wikimedia Commons by Daniel Oberhaus

On September 2, things got even testier when a Supreme Court decision in Brazil shut down Elon Musk’s X, stranding 40 million users. Huge fines threaten anyone who attempts to use X via a VPN. Musk’s Starlink, which provides affordable broadband internet—vital in many poorer countries—may be shut down, too. Citing Durov’s arrest, Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, responded by arguing that Musk should be “rein[ed] in” and threatened with arrest, for failing to cooperate with authorities. 

The immediate cause of the shutdown was X’s unwillingness to appoint an in-country representative. “This is a sad day for X users around the world, especially those in Brazil, who are being denied access to our platform,” said X CEO Linda Yaccarino. “When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the company wrote. An underlying cause is thought to be X’s refusal to deplatform political opponents of the regime.

These shutdowns are not new to X. It is already banned in a number of countries, including Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela, and Turkmenistan. 

A Global Trend 

Image Credit: adzicnatasa - Adobe Stock

Pavel Durov’s and Elon Musk’s pushback personalities are certainly a flashpoint for bureaucrats. But these headline incidents are only one part of an international trend toward attempted government control of the news stream. Germany has censored a podcast that misgenders a trans activist, under threat of a huge fine or prison. Britain has started jailing people for, essentially, mean tweets. Canada is preparing pre-crime legislation for that purpose. Turkey blocked Instagram for nine days recently for unclear reasons. Meanwhile, Australia proposes a fine for social networks of up to five percent of global revenue for failing to curb “misinformation.” 

The European Union has passed the Digital Services Act, which further restricts opinion with the stated goal of “fighting disinformation.” Even Substack, an independent platform for journalists, has created a surprising amount of angst among establishment media figures, who seem “horrified by the mere existence of venues over which they are unable to exert control.” That includes, predictably, demands for censorship. The American government has been silent in the face of all this, except for citing a general stance against “disinformation,” which becomes ambiguous under the circumstances.  

But What about Hate & Exploitation? 

Surely, many will object, the reason for all that government action is the presence of hate and exploitation on the targeted platforms. There the record is much murkier than is sometimes supposed. Elon Musk, for example, has taken a strong stand against child porn at X. In fact, when Durov was arrested, Musk commented that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta “Instagram has a massive child exploitation problem, but no arrest for Zuck, as he censors free speech and gives governments backdoor access to user data. … He already caved into censorship pressure.”¹⁰  

Image Credit: Igor Nikushin - Adobe Stock

At Spiked, Fraser Myers notes likewise that the framing of Telegram merely as a routine host for controversial content is inaccurate: “… its terms of service do prohibit terrorist content, scams, illegal pornography and incitement to violence. Notably it has removed ISIS-linked channels and white-supremacist groups involved with the ‘January 6’ storming of the US Capitol.” It hosts Putin’s critics as well as pro-war Russian bloggers, and yet it is popular in Ukraine. Pro-democracy organizers in Hong Kong have found Telegram essential, he notes, precisely because of its fierce protection of privacy.  

It is reasonable to take Musk’s hint regarding Durov’s arrest seriously. Problems like child exploitation are unlikely to be confined to those platforms that governments have chosen to target. But governments may be less likely to attack the platforms that give them a backdoor for monitoring, censoring, or otherwise controlling political opponents. Precisely because, with sufficient investigation, illegal activities like child porn could probably be found on any massive platform, they may prove a handy pretext for actions taken against a platform or its CEO for unrelated reasons. 

Establishment vs. Internet Content Creators  

The traditional media seems quietly pleased by these digital crackdowns, but that says much more about their own “free fall”—as Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz puts it—than it does about the crackdowns themselves. Free fall? Yes. In 2023, Sports Illustrated laid off most staff and the Washington Post axed 240 despite a walkout. The Los Angeles Times suffered its first strike in 142 years as 100 employees protested looming staff cuts. 

Image Credit: InputUX - Adobe Stock

Lorenz has thought a lot about these issues. They erupted at the Democratic National Committee Convention in August in a heated conflict between mainstream media journalists and internet “content creators.” Essentially, the mainstream media journalists were angered by the better treatment the party accorded to the 200 internet content creators. It clearly signifies who the party thinks is more important in these times. Lorenz writes,

The way creators are being mocked and belittled by so-called “established” journalists and observers online is nothing short of disgraceful. The entitlement, the arrogance, and the gatekeeping is appalling. While the viciousness of these attacks is upsetting, the backlash is not surprising. This is the same kind of protectionist behavior that has been happening in the media world for decades, as many invested in institutional power structures lash out amidst their dwindling influence. 

Asawin Suebsaeng, senior political reporter at Rolling Stone, offered substantially the same critique.

The Larger Picture 

Hovering in the background for shrinking traditional media is the prospect of government funding, as in Canada. Indeed, that very thing was proposed last year in Scientific American by journalist Patrick Walters. When government, not readers, fund media, media outlets become mouthpieces for the governments that fund them. Their commitment to freedom of the press necessarily wanes; they will tend to cheer on government crackdowns on independent content creators.    

In the larger picture, the establishment media are increasingly irrelevant to the main conflict. The conflict is created by the fact that the internet crashed the cost of two things: independent content creation and censorship. Regardless of who emerges as the victor in that looming battle, the traditional media landscape is now history. But, we must ask, what else is becoming mere history?  

Writing for The Epoch Times, Jeffrey Tucker senses a larger picture, of which this conflict is certainly a part. Riffing off the message of the dystopian Hunger Games series, he wrote recently,

There is general agreement today that the United States does stand at the precipice of something huge because the existing disequilibrium is simply not sustainable on multiple levels. The key question is always: what kind of society do we want to live in?

We can’t extricate from that question the related questions of who decides what is news and who is entitled to convey it.