Getting Kicked Off Social Media For Breaking Its Rules Is Nothing Like Being Sent To A Prison Camp For Retweeting Criticism Of A Dictator

Free Speech

from the push-back,-don't-emulate dept

It’s become frustrating how often people insist that losing this or that social media account is “censorship” and an “attack on free speech.” Not only is it not that, it makes a mockery of those who face real censorship and real attacks on free speech. The Washington Post recently put out an amazing feature about people who have been jailed or sent away to re-education camps for simply reposting something on social media. It’s titled “They clicked once. Then came the dark prisons.“

The authoritarian rulers were not idle. They planned to take back the public square, and now they are doing it. According to Freedom on the Net 2022, published by Freedom House, between June 2021 and May 2022, authorities in 40 countries blocked social, political or religious content online, an all-time high. Social media has made people feel as though they can speak openly, but technological tools also allow autocrats to target individuals. Social media users leave traces: words, locations, contacts, network links. Protesters are betrayed by the phones in their pockets. Regimes criminalized free speech and expression on social media, prohibiting “insulting the president” (Belarus), “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (China), “discrediting the military” (Russia) or “public disorder” (Cuba).

Ms. Perednya’s case is chilling. She was an honors student at Belarus’s Mogilev State University. Three days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she reposted, in a chat on Telegram, another person’s harsh criticism of Mr. Putin and Mr. Lukashenko, calling for street protests and saying Belarus’s army should not enter the conflict.

She was arrested the next day while getting off a bus to attend classes. Judges have twice upheld her 6½-year sentence on charges of “causing damage to the national interests of Belarus” and “insulting the president.”

That is chilling free speech. That is censorship. You losing your account for harassing someone is not.

There are a bunch of stories in the piece, each more harrowing then the next.

After a wave of protest against covid-19 restrictions in late November, Doa, a 28-year-old tech worker in Beijing, told The Post that she and a friend were at a night demonstration briefly, keeping away from police and people filming with their phones. “I worked before in the social media industry. … I know how those things can be used by police,” she said. “They still found me. I’m still wondering how that is possible.” She added: “All I can think of is that they knew my phone’s location.” Two days later, police called her mother, claiming Doa had participated in “illegal riots” and would soon be detained. “I don’t know why they did it that way. I think it creates fear,” Doa said. A few hours later, the police called her directly, and she was summoned to a police station in northern Beijing, where her phone was confiscated and she underwent a series of interrogations over roughly nine hours. The group Chinese Human Rights Defenders estimates that more than 100 people have been detained for the November protests.

The piece calls on democratic nations to do something about all of this.

But as authoritarian regimes evolve and adapt to such measures, protesters will require new methods and tools to help them keep their causes alive — before the prison door clangs shut. It is a job not only for democratic governments, but for citizens, universities, nongovernmental organizations, civic groups and, especially, technology companies to figure out how to help in places such as Belarus and Hong Kong, where a powerful state has thrown hundreds of demonstrators into prison without a second thought, or to find new ways to keep protest alive in surveillance-heavy dystopias such as China.

Free nations should also use whatever diplomatic leverage they have. When the United States and other democracies have contact with these regimes, they should raise political prisoners’ cases, making the autocrats squirm by giving them lists and names — and imposing penalties. The Global Magnitsky Act offers a mechanism for singling out the perpetrators, going beyond broad sanctions on countries and aiming visa bans and asset freezes at individuals who control the systems that seize so many innocent prisoners. The dictators should hear, loud and clear, that brutish behavior will not be excused or ignored.

Except, what the piece leaves out is that, rather than do any of that, it seems that the political class in many of these “free nations” are looking on in envy. We’ve pointed out how various nations, such as the UK with its Online Safety Bill, and the US with a wide variety of bills, are actually taking pages directly from these authoritarian regimes, claiming that there can be new laws that require censorship in the name of “public health” or “to protect the children.” From pretty much all political parties, we’re seeing an embrace of using the power of regulations to make citizens less free to use the internet.

The many, many stories in the WaPo feature are worth thinking about, but the suggestion that the US government or other governments in so-called “free” nations aren’t moving in the same direction is naïve. We keep hearing talk about the need to “verify” everyone online, or to end anonymity. But that’s exactly what these authoritarian countries are doing to track and identify those saying what they don’t like.

And then we see the UK trying to require sites take down “legal, but harmful” content, or US Senators proposing bills that would make social media companies liable for anything the government declares to be “medical misinfo” and you realize how we’re putting in place the identical infrastructure, enabling a future leader to treat the citizens of these supposedly “free” nations identically to what’s happening in the places called out in the WaPo piece.

If anything, reading that piece should make it clear that these supposedly free nations should be pushing back against those types of laws, highlighting how similar laws are being abused to silence dissent. Fight for those locked up in other countries, but don’t hand those dictators and authoritarians the ammunition to point right back at our own laws, allowing them to claim they’re just doing the same things we are.

Filed Under: authoritarian, censorship, dictators, free expression, free speech, internet