Whose Safety?
When the Government passes an "Online Safety Act", it's not for YOUR safety, it's for the Government's.
We live in an age where the Brits are arresting 30 people a day for “Hateful” comments on social media. Where Leftists make a regular practice of digging up decades-old postings and doxing to get opponents in trouble or fired (Only after Charlie Kirk’s assassination have they finally gotten a serious taste of their own medicine). When otherwise free states like Texas pass “Children’s Online Protection Acts” that contain central registries for age verification for adult sites, they’re just BEGGING for hackers to exploit it for blackmail and identity theft. Reportedly this has already happened to the Spanish site that France employs for the EU’s Digital Services Act.
Some studies have shown that “87.5-99.7% of removed content on platforms like Facebook and YouTube in France, Germany, and Sweden was legally permissible speech.” There is no defense, no advocate for Free Speech, no checks or balances in any of these “Protection” systems. If you thought Facebook’s “Trust and Safety” committee was bad, you can just imagine what it’s like when it has the power of Government behind it.
The desire to “Hold people accountable for their speech” is never intended to advance free speech but to stifle it. The requirement to identify all speakers online is specifically for suppressing them. Any Government that wants to punish people for unapproved ideas is totalitarian, and is trying to cement its control over the population by suppressing intellectual liberty. As in Orwell’s 1984 the idea is to constrain the language to the extent that dissent isn’t articulable, or even conceivable.
Anonymity was crucial in fomenting the American Revolution. John Dickinson’s “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania”, Ben Franklin’s multiple pseudonyms, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, Benjamin Rush, and possibly hundreds of other patriots who still remain anonymous to this day, all were critical towards leading the public discourse towards freedom for the Colonies.
Anonymity expresses ideas in their most pure form, without reflecting the status or fame of the author. They can only stand or fall based on their own merits. And criticism of those ideas must also be freely given in the interest of honest and truthful debate.
The idea that names must be attached to all speech for the purposes of monitoring and punishing ideas that are “not allowed” is anathema to human rights.
The concept that speech must be suppressed if it hurts the feelings, or even slightly challenges the beliefs, of some protected class is infantilizing. The very idea of protected classes in and of itself is in defiance of human equality (The only legitimate classes for protection are those who literally are incapable of protecting themselves, like children, whose protection is vital to the future of humanity). Somehow, and I believe this is deliberate, we’ve changed from a culture that believes “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” to “Words are weapons! Hate Speech is not Free Speech!” and yet “Silence is Violence” if you don’t mouth the words they want to compel you to say.
Europe is lost, and the Left is trying to implement the same thing here. The Right is opposed only so much as they don’t want the Left to have this power exclusively. The Libertarians are an unserious joke. So I am very concerned about how much worse this is going to get before it gets better, if it ever does, and what it may take to get there.
Texas has seven years to get its ideas about Freedom straight before I retire.