The Group of Seven (G7) is an annual meeting at which leaders of seven major countries hobnob about international matters and how they might coordinate policies.
This year, the pandemic was high on the agenda. Also on the agenda, if lower and less conspicuous, was muzzling dissidents.
Dissidents being defined, in current style, as people who spread “disinformation.”
At the meeting, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson endorsed a revised version of the 1941 Atlantic Charter that includes a seemingly minor provision: “We oppose interference through disinformation or other malign influences, including in elections . . . .”
That’s it — just an ominous hint.
But the Biden administration has been more open in other contexts. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki says that according to Biden, more should be done by “major platforms” to prevent “misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life-threatening information” from going out to the public.
Throughout history, people have disagreed about facts and their interpretation. It’s nothing new. And pretending it is new provides no justification for preventing the exercise of freedoms that are the only means of reaching and communicating truths — and of correcting the honest or dishonest errors that government officials are as capable of committing as the rest of us.
The UK is considering an Online Safety Bill to block social media sites that fail to remove “legal but harmful content” — which opens up wide vistas of . . . illegal legal content?
Even if our government doesn’t follow Her Majesty’s (yet), our current administration is pressuring social media firms to impose censorship on its behalf.
That’s violation-by-proxy of the First Amendment.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “The Biden-Boris Censorship Alliance”
Who gets to decide what is ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’? You don’t know what you don’t know.
Freedom is withering on the vine in what was once known as the ‘free world’. It’s late afternoon in America.
You know who gets to decide; and it *ain’t* you. Or any ordinary person.
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I think it’s already past late afternoon. Better have the fire fixins.