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The Campaign to Censor Social Media Across the West
In 1965, the guru of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, penned an essay that neatly brought together both strands of the unitary threat faced today by conservatives defending Western civilization: the threat of online censorship and the threat of street violence. Six decades later, it has come back with renewed force.
Titled “Repressive Tolerance,” the essay’s dictates on the need to repress conservative views are followed almost word for word by 21st-century technocrats. Even what it says on the use of violence is heeded by the most leftist of Western governments.
These technocratic politicians, found across the West, run the gamut from the center right to the extreme left. They lead nation-states and multinational institutions, and consider a freewheeling internet a threat to an “expert-managed” international order.
At the United Nations, we have Secretary-General António Guterres, a Portuguese socialist, and his minions. At the European Union level—that means the EU Commission—there is Ursula von der Leyen, a center-right German civil servant. Neither Guterres nor Von der Leyen has been elected to their positions.
In Britain, it is Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour Party. In Canada, it is Prime Minister Mark Carney of the Liberal Party. In Spain, there is the Marxist party Podemos, now cheering antifa’s violence.
Here in the United States, we have former President Barack Obama, who is reinvolved in politics and policy, leaving no doubt that if his ilk ever gets power, censorship will follow.
What they all share is horror that a new and insurgent Right wants to demolish the arrangement the experts have created. They are openly calling for shutting down its ability to use the internet or street action to bypass the Left’s lock on legacy media and communicate its ideas to voters.
All of this was blessed by Marcuse 60 years ago. His essay laid out how the Right was beyond the pale of civil society, and governments must use censorship to suppress its right to communicate.
“In endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood,” he tut-tuts.
In his typically dense prose, Marcuse explains at length that “this pure toleration of sense and nonsense” was superficially justified by the principle that “neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to ‘the people’ for its deliberation and choice.”
That didn’t work, however, he said, because “monopolistic media” had premolded what the people in democracy thought, so they were no longer capable of “autonomous thought.” Presenting all views equally was, therefore, wrong.
“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left,” Marcuse wrote. “Different opinions and ‘philosophies’ can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds.”
“Repressive Tolerance,” he wrote, meant “strengthening the oppressed against the oppressor. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled.”
The survival of the downtrodden was worth more than constitutional guarantees. “Powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities.”
This idea that a “stupid opinion” cannot be treated equally with an “intelligent one,” as defined by the Left, is heard today, again and again, in support of censoring online content.
“Facts are important,” Obama told the historian Heather Cox Richardson at an event in Connecticut in July. “We have a situation now where we’re not just arguing about policy, values, or opinions, but basic facts are being contested.”
“That is a problem because then the marketplace of ideas or the democracy don’t work,” added Obama, echoing Marcuse, who also denounced “the marketplace of ideas.”
“We’re now in a situation in which we are having these just basic, factual arguments, and that further undermines trust,” Obama continued. “Part of what we’re going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism, and how do we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts, separate facts from opinion. We want diversity of opinion—we don’t want diversity of facts.”
All that was ominous enough, but then came the kicker: “By the way, it will require, I believe, some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models in a way that’s consistent with the First Amendment but that also says, ‘Look, there is a difference between these platforms letting all voices be heard versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices, or the most polarizing voices, or the most dangerous in the sense of inciting violence voices.’”
This is not just thinking out loud by our 44th president. Government-supported journalism that acts as a mouthpiece of the technocratic consensus, combined with regulation that brings online platforms such as Elon Musk’s X to heel, is exactly what the governments of allied nations are enacting.
Consider the EU’s Digital Services Act.
“Don’t let the name fool you,” wrote Brian Chai of Alliance Defending Freedom Legal two months ago. “It may sound like an innocuous, boring European law, but the DSA is a digital gag order with global consequences. If left unchecked, it can censor you no matter where you live, including in the United States.”
The DSA, enacted in 2024, particularly targets what it calls “illegal hate speech online.” The problem with that, obviously, is that “hate speech usually means whatever Von der Leyen and her surrounding coterie of unelected civil servants hate.”
As Chai explains, while officially the DSA’s goal is “to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation,” in reality, “the EU Digital Services Act allows those in power to silence or censor voices they find disagreeable. It is, for all intents and purposes, one of the biggest power grabs in internet regulation history.”
You know there is a problem when the definition of hate speech the EU uses—the “public incitement to violence or hatred based on race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin”—is itself, as Chai explains, a circular description that must recycle the word “hate” in the explanation. Ditto for “illegal content.”
The DSA is worrisome not only because of what it can do to our allies in Europe—it can also affect Americans. Google, for example, “may be inclined to conform their international content moderation policies to suit EU censorship,” Chai says.
This is why the House Judiciary Committee wrote Von der Leyen to warn her that, “because many social media platforms generally maintain one set of content moderation policies that they apply globally, restrictive censorship laws like the DSA may set de facto global censorship standards.”
Two months ago, Von der Leyen also announced the launch of a “media resilience program” that would include “a significant increase in media funding” in the EU budget and cajole “private equity capital” to support the project.
The U.N. is itself also on a jihad against this circularly defined online “hate.” There is a “darker side of the digital ecosystem. It has enabled the rapid spread of lies and hate, causing real harm on a global scale,” says a U.N. policy brief that offers another Marcusian “framework for global action through a Code of Conduct for information integrity on digital platforms.”
“This clear and present global threat demands clear and coordinated global action,” Guterres said, sounding as apocalyptic as Marcuse when he wrote that his “extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation.”
Just last week, French President Emmanuel Macron railed against X for its “far-right content,” and called for a new “European agenda of protection and regulation.”
Across the Channel, one finds the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, which went into effect this year. Under the guise of sparing minors from harm, the act “leaves many users bereft of important news and critical discourse,” the Cato Institute warns. Canada’s Online Harms Act is even worse. It has been stopped by Parliament in Ottawa, but it keeps threatening to reappear.
Real people have already suffered, and more will because of these acts by having their speech rights suppressed or going to prison. But in Spain, communists in government are taking a step further and cheering on mob attacks on people exercising their free speech rights.
“The antifa movement—filled with young people—is assuming the main duty of the citizen in our day: to make universities and streets safe spaces from fascism,” Irene Montero, a senior politician in the Marxist party Podemos, posted on X last week after antifa assaulted a crowd of conservatives in Pamplona.
In 1965, Marcuse, too, defended the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror: “There is a difference between revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence practiced by the oppressed and by the oppressors.”
Originally published by the Washington Examiner
The post The Campaign to Censor Social Media Across the West appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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