Speak up for Free Speech
In many Western countries, governments are enacting draconian speech laws. Politicians argue that these measures are necessary to combat misinformation and hate speech spread through social media. Nowadays, even mild insults are often labeled as “hate speech.” Illiberal politicians, government officials, and special interest groups frequently use this term to silence anyone who criticizes them. Those who dare to question their politics risk destroying their reputation and being “canceled.”
In theory, hate speech laws are there to protect people who face discrimination. In practice, anyone can be arrested for anything said about a protected group. In Ireland, arrests can be made for memes and other digital images that are considered offensive. In Germany, social media companies with more than two million users have 24 hours after receiving a complaint to block or delete what is illegal content or face fines.
According to the New York Times, more than 1,000 Germans faced charges for online hate since 2018, and people have experienced early morning police raids where the police enter a home and confiscate computers and personal devices. More troubling is that German hate speech laws are used against citizens who have criticized the government.
In France, Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, a social media platform with a billion users, was arrested for violations that include “complicity in selling child pornography, drug trafficking, fraud, abetting organized transactions, and refusing to share information with investigators when required by law.” In 2018, Russia pressured Telegram to remove online communities of Russian opposition activists. Pavel Durov refused and left the country. Governments are attempting to use social media platforms as a database of information to access at any time without legal justification.
Britain was once a global power and the envy of the world. Through the Communications Act, some of the harshest censorship in the world has been handed out against its citizens. The Times conducted an investigation and discovered that nine people a day were being arrested for posting offensive messages online; in 2016, three thousand three hundred people were jailed.
British speech is so controlled that celebrities like Rowan Atkinson have lambasted the government: “Free speech is my passionate belief that the second most precious thing in life is the right to express yourself freely and the most precious thing in life is food in your mouth,” he stated.
Atkinson is speaking out not only for himself but for ordinary people who don’t have the resources to defend themselves. He spoke of an Oxford man arrested for calling a “police horse gay, a teenager arrested for calling the Church of Scientology a cult, and a cafe owner arrested for displaying passages from the Bible on a TV screen.” He thinks the government may be well-intentioned in its ambition to control troublemakers. Still, the result is an “authoritarian, intolerant society.”
After nine years in power, the Trudeau Liberals have created a kangaroo speech court in Canada. The passage of the Online Harms Act muzzles Canadians with punishments and forces collective self-censorship on its citizens. The Act empowers the Human Rights Commission to haul citizens in for a pre-trial hearing before any crime has been committed based on a complaint where a person feels a hate crime may be directed against them. The judge can put the person under house arrest or electronic surveillance without due process. As well, anyone who advocates for or promotes genocide is “liable to life imprisonment.” The Trudeau government is more restrictive on free speech than on handling serial killers. The latter are often moved from maximum to medium security, and repeat offenders are released within 24 hours to continue their criminal activities.
The country’s activist Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from author Dr. Jordan Peterson against an order for him to undergo social media training by the College of Psychologists of Ontario as punishment for some controversial media posts. The College threatened to revoke Peterson’s license unless he went in for social media training. The result is that 25% of Canadians who are members of professional and trade-regulated vocations have been effectively silenced and warned not to express their opinions publicly. “It is an invitation to extortion and to levying personal vendettas by threatening people with loss of their professional licenses if a complaint is made against them that something they said or wrote might offend the sensibilities of their regulatory bodies” stated Peterson’s lawyer Howard Levitt.
Americans are proud of their First Amendment rights, but two-thirds of Americans are afraid to state their true beliefs about politics for fear of losing their jobs. This fear is four times what it was during the height of McCarthyism during the 1950s. The Biden administration tried to create its own version of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth from 1984. In a landmark decision, a Louisiana federal court upheld First Amendment rights to speak without being censored by the government. Judge Terry Doughty said (Missouri v. Biden) “arguably involved the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” The Biden-Harris administration is appealing.
The message conveyed by Pastor Martin Niemöller was that the German people were complicit and never exercised their chance to speak up about the Nazi imprisonment and murder of millions of people. In contemporary times, citizens of the Western world are similarly complicit in passively accepting their governments’ actions, which curtails their freedom to express dissenting views on contentious issues that challenge the established narrative. As a result, the government has stepped in to become the arbiter of truth, using the state’s coercive power to silence its citizens and tell people what they should think. “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party,” wrote George Orwell in 1984.
The right to free speech, once cherished in the West, is now considered a major offense. Citizens are being jailed for protesting against war and expressing their opinions on illegal immigration. Moreover, private conversations are now targeted by those seeking to control thoughts and opinions. If people do not take a stand for their freedoms, democracy could become totalitarian, and its citizens will be oppressed—just as Orwell predicted in 1984.
