Tech Legal Brief #13 – The Myth of European Censorship
Fascist tendencies and propaganda, how to fight back, the power of Russian misinformation , algorithmic manipulation & European censorship.
Introduction
The main story of this installment of Tech Legal Brief concerns a very serious topic: fascism.
In the paid segment of this post, we ask how to effectively fight fascism, look at a video which explains how the Russian military manages to infiltrate and attack the US from the inside out, a new study that shows the political effects of X’s recommendation algorithm, and a new proposal for a law in Wyoming which seeks to sanction foreign censorship (h/t Paul Gurney).
All these stories are closely tied to the themes of my recently published ebook “Death To Algorithms: On the entertainment and matchmaking engines that rule our lives” which can be purchased via this Gumroad page.
Beware of Fascist Tendencies
“European censorship” is one of those issues you often hear Trump admins and MAGA Americans complain about. It’s typically accompanied by a bundle of other beliefs which we could call the “MAGA starter pack”.
The US is undergoing an invasion of illegal immigrants, because the Democrats want them as voters. X is a safe haven for free speech warriors. If parents are not careful, democrats may force sex change operations on their children on any given school day. A cult of rich elites is secretly running an international pedophile ring (oops that one checks out). I compiled a video of beliefs from the MAGA starter pack with clips from a recent episode of the Joe Rogan podcast with Elon Musk.
But this is only scratching the surface.
What makes MAGA-American beliefs so dangerous is that they can’t be disputed with rational arguments, facts, or evidence to the contrary. The MAGA starter pack is rooted in a desire to take back control from an overly bureaucratic and unfair system. The beliefs are really only strawman arguments to justify this desire. When MAGA Americans such as Elon are making political arguments, they are doing so in bad faith, thus playing a different game than ordinary politicians in modern times. They use language with the purpose of reaching a specific aim. Therefore, logical holes in their argumentation or lack of factual evidence are not problems to them. The term we use to describe this kind of language use is: propaganda.
Propaganda is the language of fascism. It consists of slogans and simple solutions to complex problems that a majority of people or a powerful minority agree on. The first page of fascism playbook is: create unity among people by finding a common enemy to blame for the country’s hardships.
In Nazi Germany the enemy was jews. In MAGA America the enemy is – luckily – more diffuse. The various factions of the MAGA coalition have not managed to settle on a single, common target. To some it’s illegal democrats, to others it’s all non-white people, to others it’s trans or LGBTQ+ people, to others again it’s the working class, feminists, climate activists, the homeless, or foreign censors.
Trump is obviously a showman, a clown who invites laughter, while the coalition behind him is a fascinating mix of cruel and callous personalities with different agendas. We should all be very aware of the fascist tendencies that are taking root in the US, and partly in Europe. Even though some of us can denigrate Trump and MAGA’s chaos with laughter and schadenfreude for now, it may not last very long. History teaches us that we are perhaps only seeing the beginning, a temporary movement that could evolve with time into a darker, more potent, and less fragmented force of evil. This force could be boosted by socioeconomic inequality, social media as a propaganda tool, and AI as a privacy-eroding tool that discourages dissent. 1984 went from a dystopian novel to a gameplan.
