Biden and Harris, along with liberals in Brazil and Europe, are suppressing free speech in the name of disinformation

In 2019, Vice President Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly communicating with millions of people without any oversight or regulation, and that needs to stop.”

Is that so?

Every authoritarian leader in history has justified censorship of their citizens as a way to protect them from the scourge of disinformation.

But social media, contrary to the reliably illiberal Ms. Harris, does not “speak directly” to anyone. Millions of people interact and talk to millions of other people. Really, that’s what pisses off the modern left: unsupervised conversations.

Take, for example, the Brazilian Supreme Court panel that unanimously upheld the decision of one of its judges to shut down Elon Musk’s X over alleged concerns about “disinformation.”

We must assume that the Democratic presidential candidate who once promised to ban guns via executive order agrees with Judge de Moraes’ decision to shut down the social media platform for refusing to comply with state-imposed censorship demands.

The Associated Press reports that the Brazilian Supreme Court’s decision “undermines efforts by Musk and his supporters to portray Judge Alexandre de Moraes as a renegade authoritarian bent on censoring political speech in Brazil.”

Really? Because it seems to me that a state shutting down a popular social media site qualifies as a ban on political speech, whether one person or an entire government is responsible.

And make no mistake, it’s politically motivated. “Just because a guy has a lot of money doesn’t mean he can disrespect it (the country),” argued Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Well, the constitution of this South American country, like ours, apparently protects freedom of speech — making no distinction between poor and rich: “All censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is prohibited.”

It is clear that Brazil takes this matter extremely seriously, because in my translated copy this sub-clause appears in Chapter V, Article 220, i.e. on page 148.

But suppose Judge de Moraes is no renegade but merely a typical Brazilian autocrat. Similarly, Mr. Musk is not just another billionaire but a tech CEO who generally considers free speech to be a neutral principle.

I think the best evidence to support this claim is the fact that while Brazil has blocked Mr Musk’s website, Musk allows the far-left president to have an account on X with 9 million followers.

In Europe, freedom of speech is also supposedly protected by the constitution. Well, the law depends on “national security,” “territorial disorder,” “crime,” “health,” and other highly influenceable issues that ultimately allow police officers in the UK and Germany to show up at your door and throw you in jail for offensive posts.

As Justice Antonin Scalia once observed, “Every banana republic has a Bill of Rights.” The question is: How close are we to becoming one?

The answer is disturbingly close.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor” Covid-related content, including “humor and satire,” during the pandemic. Mr. Zuckerberg has vowed to never allow his company to be manipulated again. Sorry if we don’t take his word for it.

Tech companies enjoy unfettered rights of free association and are free to detain or remove anyone from their platform as they please. Before Mr. Musk bought Twitter, now known as X, modern leftists celebrated the independence of social media platforms. “If you don’t like it, start your own Twitter,” they said.

Fine. It’s when corporations, which often spend tens of millions of dollars a year in Washington rent-seeking and lobbying for favorable regulations, take marching orders from state officials and giant federal bureaucracies about acceptable speech that we have a big problem.

If presidential candidates truly cared about “democracy,” they would advocate for anti-cronyism laws and prohibit government officials from interfering with or pressuring free speech over private speech.

But many Americans these days no longer see free speech as a neutral, liberal virtue worth defending. The most important of these, it seems, is the Democratic presidential candidate.

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