US Democrats “openly talk” about using the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) legislation to censor Americans, journalist and free speech activist Michael Shellenberger has told Brussels Signal.
Asked about outgoing US President Joe Biden administration’s involvement in the DSA, Shellenberger expressed disappointment that the Democrats had “got themselves on the wrong side of the free speech issue”.
“It’s a complete reversal from where the Democrats had historically been,” the American journalist told Brussels Signal on the sidelines of a December 4 event organised by the European Parliament’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in Brussels.
“I mean, the Democrats openly talk about the DSA as a way to get the censorship that they would like to see in through the back door, since it would be illegal under our First Amendment the United States.”
“I think it’s a stain on the Democrat Party. As a former Democrat, I should say that it’s a shame and it should be an embarrassment to them and absolutely it’s what’s happening.”
“I mean, the Democrats openly talk about the DSA as a way to get the censorship that they would like to see in through the back door, since it would be illegal under our First Amendment the United States,” Shellenberger said.
“They know that they’re doing the wrong thing, that this is a fundamental violation of our most important right, which is free speech, and that’s why they have to sneak around and do this surreptitiously through the back door,” he added.
Asked about what effect the DSA could now have on US-EU relations with Donald Trump in the White House, Shellenberger warned that any attacks on US First Amendment rights would be viewed harshly by the forthcoming Republican administration, advising European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to “back off” trying to apply the DSA internationally.
“I think it’s just fair to say that the American people, we don’t, we don’t like censorship, and we don’t like foreign interference. So when you get foreign censorship, you’ve combined the two things that Americans hate the most,” he said.
“I think the message that I wanted to deliver today was really just they need to back off. They need to get a grip, because I think they’re in the grip of a kind of derangement, so to speak.”
Jim Jordan, chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, says Breton has sent an “inaccurate” letter to his committee in an attempt to deny he was threatening to force Musk into censoring content.https://t.co/IqTGcSrSQm
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) September 10, 2024
Speaking during the ECR event in the European Parliament, Shellenberger lambasted the “extra-territorial ambitions” of the DSA, highlighting how, in a letter sent by former Commissioner Thierry Breton threatening US tech billionaire Elon Musk over his personal activities on X, greatly angered many in the US.
“It’s hard to describe how annoying we Americans found that letter,” he told an audience consisting of MEPs and officials from the ECR, Patriots, and Europe of Sovereign Nations groups.
“We don’t care for foreigners telling us who we can and cannot speak with. And it’s not an issue of Republican or Democrat. We did not take kindly to that attempted assault on our First Amendment.”
Shellenberger acknowledged that, while the European Union’s fears surrounding misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories were well founded, he clarified that the best way to tackle such issues was by making sure good information was available to the public.
He warned that censoring information deemed to be incorrect was likely to backfire, with there being numerous examples of anti-misinformation activists and government experts flagging stories as disinformation that later turned out to be true.
“What about the Hunter Biden laptop? We were told that this was a Russian information operation by 51 former intelligence heads, including former heads of the CIA, that just that was proposed as the justification to censor a New York Post article a little less than a month before the 2020 elections,” he said.
“We also discovered through the ‘Twitter files’ that there was an active effort by the Aspen Institute on behalf of the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to brainwash the mainstream media journalists through two separate workshops in the summer and fall of 2020 as well as to directly go to Facebook and Twitter and say that they had intelligence that there was a secret Russian plan to spread disinformation about Hunter Biden.”
“That was the conspiracy theory that they persuaded the entire news media and social media [about]. The CIA approved that letter from the 51 intelligence agents. It was all disinformation,” Shellenberger claimed.
Shellenberger’s comments were well received by EU representatives, with event host Fernand Kartheiser saying that the journalist’s comments should serve as a “wake-up call” for the bloc.
“Mr Shellenberger’s talk made a deep impression both in the European Parliament and amongst a wider audience that followed his speech online,” he told Brussels Signal after the event.
“Hence there is now hope that the EU might want to amend this dangerous policy of censorship.”
The European Union will ban Elon Musk’s X if it fails to censor the platform, one of the bloc’s top Liberal MEPs has claimed. https://t.co/fqUiqInuIP
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) August 19, 2024
