Thread by @Doc_0

I wrote about Internet freedom a few hours before it suddenly became a massive crisis in the United States, so the post (and the Freedom House report I discussed) became an instant time capsule. The questions I asked are more urgent than ever:

breitbart.com/national-secur…

"Disinformation" is treated by analysts as a menace to Internet freedom, but so are the measures employed to combat it. The worst totalitarian regimes on Earth justify Internet repression as efforts to control disinformation. We're getting a taste of that in America right now.

"Cyber sovereignty" means states like China establishing their own little Internet backwaters, ruled according to their definitions of acceptable speech, hate speech, disinformation, and sedition.

We have that too. In America, cyber sovereignty is imposed by Big Tech moguls.

You're free to speak... as long as you don't discuss topics the Big Tech companies have decided to forbid, as long as you don't say anything they have decided is "disinformation" or "hate speech." The definitions of these forbidden words change as they see fit.

Yesterday anonymous sources, leaked information, illicitly obtained data, and unconfirmed rumors were the very essence of journalism, amplified to thunderous volume by thousands of accounts and millions of retweets. Today they are suddenly forbidden and silenced by force.

I warned for years that tyranny has become more "viral" than liberty. Engagement, the sacred ritual of globalism, doesn't liberalize tyrannies - it makes the free world more tyrannical. The world is sinking to the lowest common denominator of free speech.

We sent the globalist emissaries of the West to spread classical liberalism using billions of capitalist dollars. They returned to tell us our intellectual property had been mercilessly stolen - tough break! - and say, those Chinese censors have some sharp ideas, don't they?

The curse of cyber sovereignty is here in America, but it wasn't our government that imposed it. We never got to vote on it. We the People have no say in how "disinformation" or "hatred" are defined, any more than subjects of the Chinese Communist Party do.

Our Internet backwater was created by a few tech billionaires and their activist employees. They agree with the ChiComs on principle that speech must be suppressed in the name of social harmony. They agree dissent should be silenced to preserve faith in the ruling class.

They agree with the ChiComs that "truth" is established by a consensus of "experts" who hold the correct political credentials. This agreement became total after China unleashed the coronavirus and totalitarianism became LITERALLY viral.

There IS a great and enduring conflict between freedom and the search for truth. That conflict is eternal - it existed long before the Internet, or radio, or even the written word. False choices are not free choices. Fraud is a form of compulsion.

But no one ever got closer to establishing truth by silencing disagreement. The notion of some council of incorruptible experts wisely deciding Truth for the rest of us is, itself, a massive fraud that always degenerates into a direct attack on freedom.

Speech controls will ALWAYS become corrupt and politicized. Cyber sovereignty will always become tyrannical. It cannot end otherwise, for power is ravenous and devours every morsel of freedom to feed its growth. Every belief clamors to be sanctified as "science" or "consensus."

China's coronavirus illustrated the folly of totalitarian crusades against "disinformation." If you repeat today what credentialed "experts" were saying with absolute certainty three months ago, you could be banned for spreading disinformation.

But instead of teaching us humility and the importance of having more voices, not less, the virus clearly reduced Internet freedom around the world and spread China's authoritarian ideology as surely as it spread sickness and death. We need a vaccine against that ideology.

We should declare war against silence, against oppression, and reject the notion of cyber sovereignty utterly, whether it comes from Beijing or San Francisco. There should be minimum standards of freedom for participating in the global Internet, without compromise. /end