Regulation, Censorship: Same Thing
Both Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes Like To Control The News
The News Café has been focusing this week on Margarita Simonovna Simonyan, the woman who, in 1996, spent a year as an exchange student at Newfound Regional High School in Bristol as part of the U.S. State Department-funded Future Leaders Exchange program. She went on to a successful career in journalism that has culminated in her role as the head of RT, formerly Russia Today, “an autonomous, non-profit organization that is publicly financed from the budget of the Russian Federation.” In a recent interview, Simonyan proposed cancelling the article of the Russian Constitution that prohibits censorship. In that she has an ally in the West: former President Barack Obama.
“Each of us, whether we work at a tech company or consume social media, whether we are a parent, a legislator, an advertiser on one of these platforms, now’s the time to pick a side,” Obama said in a speech at Stanford University last week. “We have a choice right now. Do we allow our democracy to wither or do we make it better?” According to Obama — and he is not alone — media companies should be regulated by the government to be more responsible for the content published on their services. According to that view, online “disinformation” is threatening the future of freedom around the world.
The European Union is considering the Digital Services Act that would subject media platforms to tighter regulations around “potentially harmful or misleading content” and impose more disclosure requirements around algorithms.
Interestingly, Obama repeatedly cited Russia's domestic crackdowns on speech and independent journalism amid the invasion of Ukraine as an example of “what happens when societies lose track of what is true.”
The previous day, during a Rossiya-1 broadcast, Simonyan said, “We had two periods in our history of limited or no censorship, from 1905 to 1917, we remember how that ended, and during Perestroika and the following ’90s, we remember how that ended, it ended with the country’s collapse.”
“No big nation can exist without control over information,” she continued, sounding a lot like Obama’s pronouncement, “Do we allow our democracy to wither or do we make it better?”
“Those who made us add to our constitution that censorship is prohibited, they understood that very well,” Simonyan argued. “They who taught us for decades, no no no, society must be free, a developed economy can’t exist without a developed political system or a free political system, all of that is total BS.”
“It is clear from the context that ‘they’ are Western liberals who, according to Margarita Simonovna, spoiled us in the 1990s as best they could, imposing values that did not correspond to our traditions. Even before the appearance of printed monuments, ‘heretical interpretations of sacred books were censored,’ said the head of RT, uttering the word ‘censored’ with apparent pleasure,” writes Anna Ochkina in Russian Dissent. “Note that it was not the mistakes and failures of decision makers, not the neglect of economic laws, not incompetent diplomacy, not theft and lies, but it was freedom of speech that ruined empires.”
Contrast that with Elon Musk, the billionaire who just acquired control of Twitter with a $44 billion stock purchase. In a press release, Elon argued, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”
“The media’s reaction to these ambitions was instant and apoplectic,” writes Mike Solana in Common Sense. “They were akin, we were told, to literal Nazism.”
“Elon has repeatedly stated his goal of guaranteeing freedom of political dissent, which he considers essential to the functioning of our democracy. This is what his detractors are reacting to,” Solana says. “Obama’s tactics here are of a kind we’ve seen from media and government for the last five years. No laws were plainly proposed, because no law concerning the regulation of speech can be easily enacted — it’s that pesky Constitution, you see. Obama’s goal was to bully tech workers into doing censorship on our government’s behalf, which is why his chosen audience was the next generation of Google engineers rather than Congress. Until recently, the legal loophole for would-be censors in government was simply asking, or threatening, a bunch of billionaires in tech to do it on your behalf. Today, at least one billionaire stands apart.”
The United States’ Constitution, like Russia’s, is based on the belief that free speech that allows all sides to be aired leads to better decisions. The way to deal with untruths is not censorship, but reasoned rebuttal — a lost art, it seems, in this generation where censorship is the preferred solution to all the world’s problems. Perhaps rereading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would remind everyone where that leads.
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