After President Trump was “gagged” on the Internet, conservatives had to flock to Parler and Gab, followed by Amazon’s discontinuation of Parler’s services, causing the company to face bankruptcy. In the “Land of Lights,” which has prided itself on freedom of speech for more than 200 years, this dystopia, as depicted in the book “1984,” occurred. Americans had to revisit George Orwell’s masterpiece, which was once a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon. (Bing Fang, “Novel [1984] Becomes Best-Seller in U.S. After Social Media Blocks Trump,” Voice of America, Jan. 12, 2021)
What is most bizarre is that many of the Chinese dissidents and human rights lawyers who have been subjected to speech suppression are applauding it. Amid the stern atmosphere of 1984, Australia’s current deputy prime minister has finally taken the lead in speaking out against the blocking of Trump’s speech by technology companies.
The primary reason for political opposition in many countries is related to freedom of speech
Among the government leaders of various countries, I would like to list the criticism related to this from the Australian government leadership in particular. This is because they are the first Western dignitaries to speak out. From the rhetoric of these criticisms, they are unanimous in their view that the perpetual ban of President Trump’s account by high-tech companies undermines freedom of expression.
For example, Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg noted that “freedom of speech is fundamental to our society”; Australian dignitaries have also bravely criticized the U.S. for applying a double standard to similar incidents, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack criticizing the U.S. for the same type of criticism. -Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack have refused to criticize Trump’s role in the riots at the U.S. Capitol, which McCormack has described as “unfortunate” and compared to last year’s BLM activities, calling it a “race riot. “race riots”.
After the Australian government leaders took a stand, countries followed suit, with French dignitaries voicing their opposition. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire denounced his “digital oligarchy” and called it “one of the threats” to democracy. Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Mexico and others have expressed their condemnation, using different words, but basically saying that freedom of expression is fundamental to a democratic society and that technology companies cannot censor speech.
Leaders are wary of digital hegemony
Before President Trump’s account was permanently deleted from Twitter and other platforms, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was alarmed by Silicon Valley’s censorship. In a November report, the Daily Mail quoted a senior government source as saying that the prime minister was considering new laws against tech censorship after Twitter censored President Trump during the U.S. presidential election.
“Boris didn’t like what he saw in the U.S. election and asked for more time to consider how to avoid the same thing happening to him in the future,” the government source said, adding that the prime minister had therefore asked for discussion of a planned bill on Internet regulation.
The Polish government is passing a law that would impose multi-million euro fines on tech companies for censoring content that is legal in Poland. The law would also create a new court for the protection of free speech in Poland, where the country’s citizens would be able to escalate complaints about tech censorship. The Hungarian government, a staunch enemy of the international cultural left, began an investigation into tech censorship in Europe in 2019. The country recently launched Hundub, a new anti-censorship social network.
The concerns of national leaders about digital hegemony are very valid. Following the rise of social media, leaders have entered social delivery media platforms, and measuring the social network influence of global political leaders has become an important research topic.
Some researchers have studied this using social network analysis and found the following characteristics.
▪ Global political leaders form an overall network of interconnectedness on the social network Twitter.
▪ leaders in the United States, France, and Canada have the greatest social network influence.
▪ There is a core-edge structure in the global leaders’ network, with the core network dominated by European and American leaders and leaders from Oceania, Africa, and Asia mostly located in the edge network.
▪ There is a significant relationship between the social network influence of global leaders and the level of national economic development.
The researcher considered the above four factors and came up with an indicator of “authority centrality”, according to which U.S. President Donald Trump ranks first, followed by French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Cruz, and other leaders from the United Kingdom, India, and Mexico are in the process of adjusting their ranking.
An authority centered on the first U.S. president, said by technology companies to eliminate the number, its influence on social media to zero, how can not make the dignitaries alarm? The British prime minister’s fears are justified.
Technology hegemony is threatening human life
Years ago, there was a deep fear of high-tech giants interfering in socio-political life. American science fiction movies and TV series, such as the TV series “Suspiria”, despite portraying the protagonist as a hero who saves his victims, in the end, the protagonist tends to have a mental breakdown in the fear of excessive involvement in real life, deeply suspecting that the consequences of high-tech involvement in human life are uncontrollable.
Not only do high-tech companies in the United States use their digital control to control speech, they are also suspected of powerfully interfering in public elections with their monetary power. on December 16, 2020, the Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project released a report exposing a dark money network of 10 nonprofit organizations funded by five foundations that funneled private money into the 2020 public elections, bypassing state protocols and violating state law to disrupt the electoral process. *The report shows that this dark money network was created to collect, aggregate and analyze information gathered from third parties that have direct access to state voter files with the goal of influencing U.S. elections and election policies and fundamentally undermining the electoral system. Among the hundreds of millions of dollars injected into this election is $500 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. (Source: PRESS CONFERENCE: MAJOR NEW REPORT EXPOSES HOW MARK ZUCKERBERG’S $500 MIL CAUSED CHAOS, INFLUENCED THE 2020 ELECTION, Dec. 16,2020 The foundation of a democracy lies in one man.
The foundation of a democratic state lies in the electoral system of one person, one vote. Democracy is a system of proxy, in which the citizens of each country cede power to government leaders through elections, during which they can only protest by making suggestions, criticizing, and marching, even if they have grievances, and only once every few years do elections give the people the right to legally overthrow the government (and choose a new proxy). And these high-tech companies have become enemies of democracy by using both their own deep pockets to interfere and disrupt U.S. elections and their digital hegemony to deny freedom of expression to those who disagree.
The lessons from the 2020 U.S. election are profound. The historical facts that have brought shame to the U.S. cannot be plucked from history, even though they have been removed by the joint actions of several major U.S. high-tech companies. Politicians will not directly criticize this because of the rule of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, and even more so because it happened in the United States, but to criticize the move of Twitter, Facebook and other high-tech companies to delete President Trump’s remarks is a euphemism.
There is enough reason to believe that governments in all countries that do not want to see a situation like the 2020 U.S. elections in their countries should think about how to prevent data dictatorship by high-tech companies, improve their election systems, and exclude machine cheating, restrict mail-in ballots, verify voters’ identities, and legislate to restrict the oligarchy of capital from using money and digital hegemony to intervene in public election affairs in future elections.
The credibility and effectiveness of democracy hinges on a one-person-one-vote electoral system, and it is our sincere hope that protecting the rights of voters will be a key consideration for countries to protect their democratic systems.
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