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Politicians around the world say governments must censor social media to prevent rioting, but that's a lie. It's not social media that causes people to riot. It's their often-justified anger at the real-world policy disasters the politicians created. 
Politicians Urge Censorship Of The Disasters They Create
Unpopular elected leaders from Ireland and France to California and Canada invent fresh justifications for speech crackdown while funding news media to promote their point of view
by @Shellenberger
French President Emanuel Macron, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, and California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Ireland must pass new legislation to crack down on the online hatred behind the rioting in Dublin on Thursday, said its Prime Minister Leo Varadkar yesterday. “It’s not just the platforms that have a responsibility here, and they do,” he said. “It’s also the individuals who post messages and images online that stir up hatred and violence. We need to be able to use laws to go after them individually as well.”
But what triggered the riots were accurate news media reports that the suspect in the stabbing of multiple individuals, including a five-year-old child, was an Algerian immigrant. Either Varadkar is spreading misinformation by attributing the riots to “messages and images,” or he wants to criminalize sharing accurate news stories.
There’s no excuse for the looting and rioting that occurred in Dublin, and the suspect in the stabbing attack had been in Ireland for 20 years, according to news reports, and another immigrant, a Brazilian, physically intervened to stop the attacker. The Dublin riots appeared to have been the work of the same kind of nihilistic young men that engaged in rioting during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and in France this summer.
At the same time, many in Ireland felt they have seen a pattern. “A few days before [the stabbing],” writes Angela Nagle at Compact, “a Slovak Romani immigrant was sentenced for the murder of a young woman, Ashling Murphy. She had been walking home from work by a canal when she was stabbed eleven times in the neck. It was reported that the assailant had been living on disability benefits in a publicly funded council home. Last year, an Iraqi immigrant murdered two Irish gay men, decapitating one of them. In a nation with close-knit, high-trust communities until recently, this new reality is shocking and alien to Irish people. Dublin used to be renowned for its warmth, fun, and friendliness. Now everyone talks about how the atmosphere has taken a dark turn.”
But rather than deal with crime, violence, and homelessness, the government instead wants to crack down on what people say on social media.
“People don’t realise how extreme Ireland’s hate speech bill is,” wrote an Irish commentator on X. “Up to 12 months in prison for refusing to give password to your devices if suspected of committing hate speech. 12 months for refusing to allow the State read messages between you and your spouse.”
Ireland’s government has presented no evidence that any of the riots were caused by “messages and images online that stir up hatred” other than accurate news reports. “In recent decades, Dublin has seen many incidences of rioting,” says Free Speech Ireland. “These incidents never caused calls for scrapping freedom of speech.”
Indeed, Ireland has experienced prolonged periods of low-level civil war in its turbulent past without resorting to such measures. “Organising a riot is a crime,” noted one of Ireland’s most impactful independent journalists, Ben Scallan of Gript. “Participating in a riot is a crime. Arson, attacking police, theft, calling for violence - these are all crimes already. If anyone tells you that we need new ‘hate speech’ laws to deal with these things, they are simply lying.”
Added Christopher O’Flynn, “Where are the new laws to seriously crack down on knife possession in public? Or a mandatory life for attack on a child or public sector worker? I would much rather an extreme law into place to protect people who might actually cause harm than a law prohibiting speech that may or may not hurt someone’s feelings.”
Unfortunately, Varadkar is not unique in turning to censorship.
On the Fourth of July, French President Emanuel Macron proposed sweeping censorship of social media platforms to prevent riots. "We need to have a think about social media, about the bans we need to put in place," he said. "And when things get out of hand, we may need to put ourselves in a position to regulate or cut them off."
One week later, the top censor of the European Union, Thierry Breton, said that the European Union would similarly censor to prevent rioting.
In California and New York progressive leaders are promoting and financing government-sanctioned news media companies in “media literacy” programs for school children, which promote reliance on mainstream corporate media, and skepticism of independent and social media.
In Canada, the government has voted to increase taxpayer funding for government-sanctioned news media corporations so they are more widely promoted by social media platforms and read by the public.
Much of the Left supports this censorship. Support for greater government censorship of social media by the government rose from 40% to 70% among Democrats between 2018 and 2023, according to Pew. And the numbers are likely to be similar among Left party partisans in Europe and Canada.
But it’s one thing to endorse a role for government in fighting misinformation in the abstract and quite another to advocate for concrete censorship.
Varadkar appears to view the riots as just what was needed to pass the new hate speech legislation. But support for his hate legislation declined from 40% in late Juneto just 19% today, and it’s not obvious the riots will change the minds of the Irish people.
And demands for censorship can sometimes backfire by generating more attention for the thing the politicians want to censor. This is known as the “Streisand effect” after singer Barbra Streisand tried to stop a photograph of her home in Malibu from being publicly released and only brought it national attention.
Censorship can also backfire by angering the public, turning them against the politicians demanding censorship.
Researchers find that censorship “pacifies rebellious societies but has the opposite effect on peaceful ones” and that “the choice of not restricting social communication turns out to be a judicious one for avoiding to trade democratic values and freedom of expression for an illusory sense of security.”
Indeed, there is a good case to be made that politicians from Joe Biden and Barack Obama to Varadkar and Macron are undermining their ability to govern, and their legacy, in urging censorship of their political opponents in the name of combating “misinformation” and “hate speech.”
The Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security had to withdraw its proposal for a “Disinformation Governance Board” after it was denounced by liberals and conservatives alike for being unAmerican, and it must now defend to the Supreme Court its sweeping censorship activities starting in 2020.
And yet the politicians continue to relentlessly demand new powers for censorship in response to every new crisis, from climate change, crime, and Covid to Ukraine, Israel, and immigration. Why is that? Why are politicians — who must remain popular in order to remain politicians, and are thus notoriously risk-averse — taking the highly risky path of trying to censor their citizens?
Unpopular elected leaders from Ireland and France to California and Canada invent fresh justifications for speech crackdown while funding news media to promote their point of view
by @Shellenberger
French President Emanuel Macron, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, and California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Ireland must pass new legislation to crack down on the online hatred behind the rioting in Dublin on Thursday, said its Prime Minister Leo Varadkar yesterday. “It’s not just the platforms that have a responsibility here, and they do,” he said. “It’s also the individuals who post messages and images online that stir up hatred and violence. We need to be able to use laws to go after them individually as well.”
But what triggered the riots were accurate news media reports that the suspect in the stabbing of multiple individuals, including a five-year-old child, was an Algerian immigrant. Either Varadkar is spreading misinformation by attributing the riots to “messages and images,” or he wants to criminalize sharing accurate news stories.
There’s no excuse for the looting and rioting that occurred in Dublin, and the suspect in the stabbing attack had been in Ireland for 20 years, according to news reports, and another immigrant, a Brazilian, physically intervened to stop the attacker. The Dublin riots appeared to have been the work of the same kind of nihilistic young men that engaged in rioting during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and in France this summer.
At the same time, many in Ireland felt they have seen a pattern. “A few days before [the stabbing],” writes Angela Nagle at Compact, “a Slovak Romani immigrant was sentenced for the murder of a young woman, Ashling Murphy. She had been walking home from work by a canal when she was stabbed eleven times in the neck. It was reported that the assailant had been living on disability benefits in a publicly funded council home. Last year, an Iraqi immigrant murdered two Irish gay men, decapitating one of them. In a nation with close-knit, high-trust communities until recently, this new reality is shocking and alien to Irish people. Dublin used to be renowned for its warmth, fun, and friendliness. Now everyone talks about how the atmosphere has taken a dark turn.”
But rather than deal with crime, violence, and homelessness, the government instead wants to crack down on what people say on social media.
“People don’t realise how extreme Ireland’s hate speech bill is,” wrote an Irish commentator on X. “Up to 12 months in prison for refusing to give password to your devices if suspected of committing hate speech. 12 months for refusing to allow the State read messages between you and your spouse.”
Ireland’s government has presented no evidence that any of the riots were caused by “messages and images online that stir up hatred” other than accurate news reports. “In recent decades, Dublin has seen many incidences of rioting,” says Free Speech Ireland. “These incidents never caused calls for scrapping freedom of speech.”
Indeed, Ireland has experienced prolonged periods of low-level civil war in its turbulent past without resorting to such measures. “Organising a riot is a crime,” noted one of Ireland’s most impactful independent journalists, Ben Scallan of Gript. “Participating in a riot is a crime. Arson, attacking police, theft, calling for violence - these are all crimes already. If anyone tells you that we need new ‘hate speech’ laws to deal with these things, they are simply lying.”
Added Christopher O’Flynn, “Where are the new laws to seriously crack down on knife possession in public? Or a mandatory life for attack on a child or public sector worker? I would much rather an extreme law into place to protect people who might actually cause harm than a law prohibiting speech that may or may not hurt someone’s feelings.”
Unfortunately, Varadkar is not unique in turning to censorship.
On the Fourth of July, French President Emanuel Macron proposed sweeping censorship of social media platforms to prevent riots. "We need to have a think about social media, about the bans we need to put in place," he said. "And when things get out of hand, we may need to put ourselves in a position to regulate or cut them off."
One week later, the top censor of the European Union, Thierry Breton, said that the European Union would similarly censor to prevent rioting.
In California and New York progressive leaders are promoting and financing government-sanctioned news media companies in “media literacy” programs for school children, which promote reliance on mainstream corporate media, and skepticism of independent and social media.
In Canada, the government has voted to increase taxpayer funding for government-sanctioned news media corporations so they are more widely promoted by social media platforms and read by the public.
Much of the Left supports this censorship. Support for greater government censorship of social media by the government rose from 40% to 70% among Democrats between 2018 and 2023, according to Pew. And the numbers are likely to be similar among Left party partisans in Europe and Canada.
But it’s one thing to endorse a role for government in fighting misinformation in the abstract and quite another to advocate for concrete censorship.
Varadkar appears to view the riots as just what was needed to pass the new hate speech legislation. But support for his hate legislation declined from 40% in late Juneto just 19% today, and it’s not obvious the riots will change the minds of the Irish people.
And demands for censorship can sometimes backfire by generating more attention for the thing the politicians want to censor. This is known as the “Streisand effect” after singer Barbra Streisand tried to stop a photograph of her home in Malibu from being publicly released and only brought it national attention.
Censorship can also backfire by angering the public, turning them against the politicians demanding censorship.
Researchers find that censorship “pacifies rebellious societies but has the opposite effect on peaceful ones” and that “the choice of not restricting social communication turns out to be a judicious one for avoiding to trade democratic values and freedom of expression for an illusory sense of security.”
Indeed, there is a good case to be made that politicians from Joe Biden and Barack Obama to Varadkar and Macron are undermining their ability to govern, and their legacy, in urging censorship of their political opponents in the name of combating “misinformation” and “hate speech.”
The Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security had to withdraw its proposal for a “Disinformation Governance Board” after it was denounced by liberals and conservatives alike for being unAmerican, and it must now defend to the Supreme Court its sweeping censorship activities starting in 2020.
And yet the politicians continue to relentlessly demand new powers for censorship in response to every new crisis, from climate change, crime, and Covid to Ukraine, Israel, and immigration. Why is that? Why are politicians — who must remain popular in order to remain politicians, and are thus notoriously risk-averse — taking the highly risky path of trying to censor their citizens?
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https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1728844747413045337?s=20
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