What was just published in The Atlantic by Harvard law professor, Jack Goldsmith, and Andrew Keane Woods, a law professor at Arizona College of Law is the most un-American piece I’ve ever read.
This was an actual sentence, “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”
The piece argues that the “extraordinary” measures tech companies are taking during the coronavirus are not “extraordinary, it’s similar to what China does and it should happen more often.
The Atlantic explains:
But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.
As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.
The article argues that the internet has given people more free speech than they deserve and that more speech is bad speech.
They cite that China realized the “dangers” of “unregulated digital speech” as a threat to social order and the Communist Party’s control, so they cracked down.
They blame free speech on Edward Snowden who revealed to the world that the government was actually spying on its own civilians and of course they couldn’t leave out the 2016 election.
The writers lamented that when the coronavirus is over the “extraordinary” measure will cease and that the “harms of digital speech will also grow.”
You can read the entire report here.
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