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- [00:00]
A
Suddenly, free speech is being seen not as a competitive advantage for democracies against their authoritarian counterparts, but as a Trojan horse that allows the enemies of democracies, both from within and without, to chip away at the foundations of democracy.
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And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. Perhaps this says something about my social media algorithm, but nearly every time that I try to learn about what's going on in the world, I see another outrageous story about limits and restrictions of free speech. Sometimes here in the United States, sometimes in England or Germany or Brazil. It seems as though we are not just in a democratic recession, but also in a free speech recession, with even many very reasonable middle of the road people coming to a conclusion that the only way to deal with the social media age is, is to prosecute people for speech they don't like, to make sure that nobody can be anonymous on the Internet to take very draconian measures to restrict quote, unquote, misinformation. So I invited back on the podcast my friend Jacob Changuma, who is the CEO of a great free speech organization in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of the similarly named the Future of Free Speech, a new book that he co authored with Jeff Kosseff. We talk about what attacks on free speech look like today, particularly in the democratic world, why it is that those are so popular, and why it's a mistake to think that they can actually achieve the goals that their supporters have in mind for them. In the last part of this conversation, I asked Jacob how we can fight back, how we can persuade sensible people that many of these forms of censorship will in fact backfire, that they are giving up much too much of our freedom for far too small an actual recompense. And I also ask him about the situation in the United States. Jacob and I agree that the Trump administration is attacking free speech, despite claiming to defend this. The question is whether or not they're succeeding is the reason to be less worried about their ability to actually impose their views on the American public today than there might have been 12, 13, 14 months ago when Donald Trump had just taken office to listen to that part of the conversation to support what we do here. To get full access to all of our podcasts, go to writing.yashamunk.com listen and follow the instructions to set up your premium feed. If you're a subscriber, your premium feed on your favorite podcasting app. If you have trouble setting up the feed, you can email supportubstack.com for help. That's writing. Jacob, welcome back to the podcast.
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A
Thank you so Much.
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B
Yasha, you know, you keep writing books about free speech and I keep having to have you back on the podcast. It's terrible.
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A
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I'm not running out of material anytime soon.
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B
I was going to say, I don't understand why anybody would write a book about free speech right now. Everything's going swimmingly, isn't it? We are in the best age for free speech in the history of the world.
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A
It is a golden age. I mean, we're getting tired of winning. Governments everywhere have just given up on censorship and suppression and realized that free speech is the bedrock principle of free societies. And yeah, soon I'll retire.
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B
All right. So to speak a little bit more seriously. In one sense, we are in a golden age of free speech, right? The ability for people to make their voices heard is much greater than in the past. It is much easier for a lot of ordinary people to participate in the political discourse in a meaningful way. The access to information that we have as citizens is in many respects probably better than it ever was. In earlier periods, it would have been much harder to get specialized information about things, even to do things like read a court judgment that interests you. All of that is now available at the click of a button that is partially a result of social media, partially a result of Google, partially a result of artificial intelligence that can now go and do a lot of very interesting research for you and distill a lot of material that you're trying to understand. If there's a technical document that previously perhaps you weren't expert enough to understand, you now have an assistant that can help you do that. So in many ways it seems like we are actually in quite a good time for free speech. Why do you argue that? Nevertheless, we should think of this period as a free speech recession.
- [05:02]
A
I think you're absolutely right. I mean, first the World Wide web, social media, and now AI. In many ways it is true that if you compare our ability to share and access information to that of enlightenment heroes, or even sort of after the immediate adoption of the First Amendment or the French Declaration on the Rights of Man that did away with, with entrenched censorship, we have a lot more options, at least in democracies around the world. If you're in China, it's probably a different story. Even though you could have certain tools that help you. I think the huge difference is that for a very long time there was this sense in democracies that free speech was part of a winning formula that entrenched freedom and democracy. That so called third wave of Democratization that washed ashore in all parts of the world, and a sense that technology was extremely helpful with that. That calculus has changed dramatically both in democracies and authoritarian states. Authoritarian states were at one point, I think, extremely concerned about the World Wide Web and its ability to circumvent official propaganda and censorship. You see that very clearly in the so called document number nine, which is like this internal communique from the Chinese Communist Party circulated shortly after Xi Jinping comes into power, in which talks about how there's a need to really crack down on Western concepts of constitutionalism, press freedom, and so on. You also see it in 2012 in Russia, after Putin essentially fakes the presidential election, comes back into office. There's a coordinated effort to say we don't want the kind of street protests that were coordinated on social media, on Facebook and vcontact and in Moscow. That really was a bad look for Putin when he was sort of triumphantly coming back into the presidency. And now this is something that we need to do something about. At that time, I think democracies were still sort of looking back at the Arab Spring and so on and saying Internet is mostly a good thing. Then you have Brexit, you have the 2016 election, you also prior to that have terrorist content from ISIS spreading on social media. And then the mood sours and suddenly free speech is being not as a competitive advantage for democracies against their authoritarian counterparts, but as a Trojan horse that allows the enemies of democracies, both from within and without, to chip away at the foundations of democracy. And so there's sort of this attempt to say we need a new conception of free speech, one where that is more militant and where we need to reimpose some kind of top down control of the public sphere. Because with the Internet, it's basically the lunatics who are running the asylum in terms of the public sphere.
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B
Yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't quite thought about the relationship between these two things in as clear a way. Right. So there's a period in which there is naive enthusiasm about how the Internet and social media is going to lead to an expansion of democracy around the world. And so that makes it a little bit naive about China is sure to liberalize and perhaps even become a democracy within our lifetimes. And that story turns out to be wrong in part because dictators learn how to control the Internet and how to control social media for their own purposes. And they've become very good at that. And it's worth going a little bit into why that is but you're right that along with that you've also had a real inversion into, in how a lot of reasonable sort of middle of the road people think about free speech within democratic societies, where at the period where we fought social media leads to Occupy Wall street and the Green revolution in Iran, people fought and therefore free speech is a left wing value. I mean, I remember even courses that always seemed to me to be somewhat minor from a free speech perspective, like net neutrality, defined as no Internet service provider could possibly prioritize a video file over a text file or the whole principle of the Internet would be broken. Being the core celebre of people like John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, when that show started on hbo, it was a time in which the left was, at least in this respect, quite instinctively for Internet freedom. Perhaps not for free speech in every respect, but for Internet freedom. At least now, after 2016 and Cambridge Analytica and the election of Donald Trump, as well as the erection of a great firewall in China and other kinds of things, there's this kind of feeling that domestically what social media brings you is Donald Trump, and internationally what it brings you is these dictatorships being able to show disinformation and so on and so forth. And so suddenly we're in a world in which certainly the right thinking people in quotation marks on the left, but also a lot of the kind of middle of the road people in the center are saying, no, no, no, social media is what's polarizing our society, what's destroying our societies, and we need all of these new regulations in order to deal with it. It's kind of remarkable how quickly that paradigm shift happened. It now feels as though this is the world in which we've been in for a long time, but 10 years ago the discussion was still quite different.
- [10:58]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you're absolutely right in saying that, you know, and I would say it's not even confined to, to, to the left. You know, I think people who I admire a lot and respect, who, you know, whose liberal Democratic credentials are impeccable, like Anne Applebaum, Francis Fukuyama are also, I think have, have changed their sort of tone on, on, on, on this. Certainly Anne Applebaum sort of in terms of wanting more stringent social media regulation, Jonathan Haidt is, is another one. So, so it, and, and suddenly, and another thing of course, is that especially in the US culture war issues has infused this topic and which, which makes it very easy to sort of pick positions depending on those fault lines. And then the free speech position, especially when it comes to online speech becomes, you know, is equal with, you know, right wing populism, for instance, or being in favor of disinformation, or being not caring about the spread of hate speech and so on, which I think it's a, is a pretty lazy argumentation. On the other hand, I also think it is incumbent on free speech advocates who think that, that it's extremely important to hold on to a principled, robust conception of free speech in the online age to acknowledge that free speech is not an unalloyed good. You know, it comes with, with harms and costs. That's not unique to the digital age. If you go back and look, it would be an interesting experiment to look at the writings of the first 300 years of the printing press. How much of that would reflect values that we appreciate today. How much of it would be deeply hateful and full of misconceptions and lies and propaganda and so on? Probably a lot. But, but it, but of course, you know, the idea that everyone has the right and the ability to speak at any time on any given subject is likely to cause disruption and it is also likely to disrupt institutional authority.
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B
Let us go a little bit concretely to understand what concrete measures some of this background sort of shift in the debate you've been talking about have actually led to, and I'm here, less interested, I think, in the straight up dictatorships, we can get to those. And obviously again, the ability of authoritarian governments around the world to very quickly censor what the citizens are posting, to have much greater insight into what's going on in social media platforms at all times, to block content from outside the country that they find to be disfavorable even to shape the development, in the case of China, of chatbots developed by the leading AI labs within the country in such a way that they will be politically reliable has advanced very far and it has narrowed the space for free speech, which was always very restricted in an even more extreme way. But I think what I'm interested in is the countries that are democracies that claim to care for democratic values, but aren't even captured by the most liberal populists. I'm not talking here about Turkey, which has a horrible record on free speech, or Venezuela, which has a horrible record on free speech. But where over the last years we've seen the real introduction of rules, regulations, sometimes criminal laws that make it much more dangerous to express your political opinion. I imagine that a bunch of European countries fall into that category. United Kingdom, outside the eu, but I guess still within the geographic entity of Europe was within that realm. But countries like Brazil might be counted among those places as well. What are some of the concrete changes that have happened there in the last decade or more that have restricted the scope of free speech?
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A
So a very prominent example would be hate speech. So hate speech is generally criminalized or prohibited in most countries outside the United States. There are even human rights conventions that oblige you to do so. But it has been unevenly prohibited and enforced in many countries. But there's definitely been a huge move in the digital age to crack down further on free speech. And there's been even further efforts I think after October 7th to crack down on a hate speech in, in, in the shape of anti Semitism. So Canada, Canada has hates, has had hate speech law since 1970. But they've their, their, their, their courts have been quite reluctant to give an expansive interpretation of hate speech law. So they put quite a bit of emphasis on free speech. But in 2022 the hate speech bill was, the hate speech law was expanded with a specific crime targeting anti Semitism through essentially denying and trivializing the Holocaust. Right now there's a new bill in Canada that would, that, that is aimed at going after hate crimes and hate speech and further restrictions free speech in Canada. In Australia actually shortly before the horrific anti Semitic terrorist attack in Sydney in Bondi beach, the government had criminalized certain forms of hateful expressions. But immediately after the the attack, the reaction of of both state governments and the federal government in Australia was to crack down further on on hate spe Germany, which you know better than anyone else, has these and proudly both of these coordinated days against hate speech where police will show up in different locations, confiscate devices, sometimes arrest people and people are convicted for really vague categories of hate speech. And you know, one of the things that you know, I use this example in my book, in our book we use this example of this far left Israeli Jewish activist called Iris Heifetz who lives in Germany. She lives in Berlin. She moved to Germany as a protest against Israeli policies. She's an anti Zionist but an Israeli Jew. She's been arrested on four occasions for essentially walking around Berlin with Plackets that says as an Israeli Jew, stop the genocide in Gaza or variations thereof. Now you can agree or disagree with whether there's a genocide in Gaza. That's a political position. But I think this shows the absurdity and danger of these kinds of laws that in the capital of Germany, where these laws are above anything else meant to protect Jews against anti Semitism. A Jew is arrested for hate speech, for criticizing not only the policies of Israel, but also what she sees as complicity on part of, of the German government. And this is, I think is an unavoidable consequence. You have a lot of other, you know, crazy cases coming out of.
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B
There's also, I mean, just to stay with Germany for a moment, there's also a whole number of cases where the prohibition on the use of Nazi era symbols, which I think, on balance I oppose, but I certainly understand why, given Germany's particular history, they were adopted, are then used and applied in such stupid ways that they obviously go against their original purpose. There's a German journalist called Jan Fleischauer who is a well known journalist. He wrote for the Spiegel for a very long time, which is one of the country's leading magazines. Now he works for the Focus. He's a little bit more right leaning. He was criticizing the youth organization of the AfD, the leading right wing populist party there, which is called Generation Hoffnung, Generation Hope. And he was criticizing them for playing with Nazi ideas and so on in various ways and saying perhaps they should rename themselves Generation Deutschland, Generation Awaken Germany, which is a Nazi slogan. So he obviously was mentioning that slogan in a way that implied criticism of his organization by insinuating that it was in some way too friendly to Nazi ideology. The state prosecutor started to look into this and to have a formal investigation of him because of the use of Nazi symbols. There was an outcry and eventually they dropped it. But it just shows you that there's absolutely no common sense in how these laws are used and they end up stifling political speech. But that is, but it's clearly right or wrong, agree or disagree, clearly legitimate.
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A
To me, there's simply no evidence that Germany's HP laws work. It's one of the things that I try to go in depth in the book. If you look at the German domestic intelligence service, they have these very, very detailed reports about political extremism and violence in Germany that go back several years and they break it down by right wing extremism, left wing extremism, religious extremism and on. And over the past decade there's been a constant increase in, in right wing extremism, including right wing extremism, violence, anti Semitism and so on. All the while, during this period, successive governments have done more and more to crack down on, on hate speech. Whether it was the net passed in 2017 to try and, and ensure that social media platforms remove illegal content, whether it's expanding existing hate speech laws, whether it's ensuring that authorities do more to enforce existing hate speech laws by doing these coordinated rates and so on. And you could, you know, we talk about afd, you know, Bjorn Hooker, who won a local election, I think in Thuringia, a local leader was twice, I think, convicted for essentially using Nazi speeches or referring to them Nazi slogans in his speeches. It did nothing to minimize his appeal with voters. So I think the elections were maybe in July, and he had been convicted in May. And I think this is one of the problems that I have with Europe, where the European Commission, by the way, is proposing that hate speech law should be strengthened and harmonized across all 27 member states. So essentially, you would have the European Commission being sort of the body that could go after member states if they don't do enough to enforce these laws. But there's no empirical attempt at sort of saying, do these laws actually work? And again, if you look at the European Union, their own data, they say, well, over the past decades, there's been a huge, huge increase in hate speech and hate crimes. Well, during that same time, you've actually done a lot to criminalize and crack down on hate speech. So why are we wedded to this concept of militant democracy? And also, if you adopt the logic that every time there's an outbreak of intolerance or hate crimes or antisemitism, the only political solution is to adopt further speech restrictive laws. Where does it end? Like, I would already say that there's been a lot of laws and restrictions adopted that if you ask people 15 or 20 years ago, they would say no, that would be way too much. But it's sort of been normalized that this is just the way you do it.
- [24:39]
B
Tell us a little bit about the situation in countries other than Europe. There's a big debate, for example, in Brazil, where there was a genuine threat to democracy with an attempt at storming the Congress after Haya Bolsonaro was ousted from office in elections that echoed in a strange way, the assault on the capital on January 6, 2021. There is a kind of attempt to try and strengthen democratic institutions for which I have a lot of sympathy. But it seems as though in the process of that attempt, a lot of power has been given to one prosecutor to make decisions about what speech is legal and what speech is illegal that really restrict the space for free speech in the country in some striking ways. Tell us a little bit about the developments there. Hey, sweetie, your mother showed me this carvana thing for selling the car. I'm going to give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check. Anyway, Carvana, give it a whirl.
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A
Love ya. So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up.
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B
Fees may apply.
- [26:05]
A
Yeah, and so the interesting thing in Brazil is that. So the Supreme Federal Court in Brazil in 2019 essentially gave itself powers to a fake news investigation. And it was a particular judge called Alexander de Moraes who would spearhead this effort. And he then expanded. So it was initially looking at attacks on members of the Supreme Court. So a Supreme Court judge would sort of look at fake news attacks on Supreme Court judges. And it's a very complicated.
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B
No vested interest there.
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A
No vested interest. It's a very complicated backstory because as you well know, there was the so called car wash corruption scandal which implicated huge parts of Brazilian politics and businesses. And there were parts of that investigations that sort of pointed perhaps in the direction of Supreme Court members. And when that happened, they established this investigation. And so Demurrage says that he is fighting for democracy, but the methods that he has employed has, has, has been to essentially be the, the, the, the, the, the prosecutor, judge and jury in these cases determining on very vague standards, fake news and even hate speech and so on, going after individuals. So one of the first, I mean it is overwhelmingly been aimed at sort of the populist right, Bolsonaro supporters. And certainly some of those, certainly Bolsonaro and some of his supporters have done things that are, you know, illegal and expressed sentiments that are anti democratic. But these powers have also implicated, for instance, a Communist party that attacked the Supreme Court and where he ordered their, their, their social media accounts to be shut down, criminal investigations of statements enclosed, WhatsApp groups and so on. And then they have a federal election court where Moraish is also part of it, which essentially gives itself powers to police political speech. So it will say, well, this statement by a politician is misleading in a certain way and therefore it should be removed. And that I think has had huge consequences for political speech in Brazil. But again, what is interesting here is that the elites, if you like, and especially on the center left, who would not that long ago have been suspicious of these kind of things, have said, well, this is a necessary prize for Combating right wing populism. And of course you can understand the angst in Brazil because Bolsonaro has a military background, strong ties with the military, and it's not that long ago Brazil had a military dictatorship. But of course, what was one of the main means of the Brazilian dictatorship? Well, it was hard handed, heavy handed censorship. So this is one of the paradoxes. Other than that you also see, well,
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B
the other interesting thing about Brazil is that it is being for the last five or so years cited as this shining example of militant democracy. And perhaps we need to get into the concept of militant democracy a little bit further in the next part of the conversation. But people are saying, look, in Brazil, they actually are dealing with this toxic speech. They have this prosecutor who is able to go after politicians who make false statements. They put Haya Bolsonaro in jail. And so this is the way that you can fortify your democratic institutions and get safe. But as you were saying in the European context, there's not a lot of evidence that all of that hate speech legislation in Germany actually means that people are less likely to take extremist point of views or to engage in racist beliefs at least, and in some ways to vote on them. So too the same is true in Brazil. There was a very promising right leaning governor of Sao Paulo who was not closely allied with Bolsonaro. He was part of Bolsonaro's movement. But there was some political room between them who was widely expected to be the right wing candidate. Haya Bolsonaro from jail, basically anointed his own son, who is a full loyalist, as his successor. That son is now running against Lula, the sitting president, in the presidential elections. And looking at opinion polls at the moment, Lula is ahead by a couple of points in the first round of the election, according to opinion polls. But in polling for the crucial second round, for which both of them would be very likely to qualify, the sign of Hayo Bolsonaro is either even or ahead in a lot of the polls. The latest ones seem to have him ahead by between 1 and 3 percentage points. So Brazilian democracy is as much on a knife's edge as it was at any previous point. And the idea that all of these measures would somehow help you to miraculously shut this political movement out of contestation has simply not worked out.
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A
An even stronger, maybe sort of empirical check on this is to say the fake news investigation started in 2019 and was, was then expanded and then you had the attack on Congress came years later. So if, if, if, if this fake news investigation was necessary to check conspiracy theories, cramp, ramp, you know, crack down on polarization fueled by lies and disinformation. It quite clearly did not work given what, what actually transpired in, in, in Brazil, in Brasilia on, on that day. So, so, so. Yeah, but I think also I guess one of the things that, and this is a problem for free speech advocates that, that I grapple with myself quite a. Politicians will say, well, we have to do something about it. This is a, this is a huge problem. You know, maybe, maybe they view it as an existential problem. And you know, let's, you know, for most politicians, you know, their, their motivations and incentives are probably mixed, but I think it's, it's certainly the case that a lot of, there are a lot of reasonable liberal Democrats who restrict free speech out of good intentions, who don't have sort of Machiavellian plans to, to, to do away with democracy and lock up their opponents. And, and the problem you have as a free speech advocate is that when, when these things hit the headlines and you see and you feel this threat that comes from the other side, that sort of resonates with the wiring of us human beings as quite tribal and very acute to senses of threat, that makes it very, very difficult for what then seems as an abstract principle of free speech to override our sense of threat. Now we have to do something. And so the question being shot back at free speech advocates is, well, what's your solution? And very often we don't have a good solution other than saying, oh, well, John Stuart Mill warned against this. And Judge John Mill was great and eloquent, but he and Madison, they should still be read and inspire us. But they're not likely to convince people who feel that democracy is on the edge or that, you know, standing at, in, in, in, in, in 1932, figuratively speaking. And therefore, I think there are certain dynamics in the world that we live in right now that favor militant democracy, that favor this idea that you have to be intolerant towards the forces of intolerance, of intolerance in order to safeguard democracy. This is not the time for talking. This is the time for doing. Because otherwise the enemies of democracy will win and things will get much worse.
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B
Let's talk about some of the things that people are proposing that we do. Many of those laws are being discussed at the moment in the European Union, in Britain and Canada, some of them even in the United States, where the scope for some of these policies is much more narrower because of the First Amendment. One idea is to make sure that children don't have access to social media or more broadly don't have access to all kinds of forms of damaging content that might be extreme pornography, it might be extremely violent content online, and to accomplish that with a age verification law. Now, in principle, that seems like something that even free speech advocates should be open to in the sense that certainly as a good philosophical liberal, I believe that adults should be able to consume as much pornography as they want, even if that's perhaps not always good for them or not always a good idea. But that's part of having individual freedom and not having the state be the moral guardian of what it is we can and can't do. But of course, I do think that it's perfectly appropriate to have restrictions on 10 year olds having access to that kind of content. The problem with these laws, of course, is that they also then impose a requirement on adults to prove that they're adults, and that can chill their speech and their access to information in other ways. What do you make about these laws that require age verification in order to access main parts of the Internet as they have been rolled out in Britain, other places over the last years?
- [37:11]
A
Yeah, I mean, concerns about the corruption of children obviously goes back a very long way. It's part of the charges against Socrates in 399 BC that he was corrupting the youth. And today, you know, we don't fear dangerous, quote, unquote dangerous philosophy, but harms to children.
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B
We'd be happy if more children read some more Socrates.
- [37:36]
A
Yes, I think so. I mean, the ironic thing of course, is in ancient Greece, like things that you would do with youth, physical acts that we would frown upon today were seen as perfectly normal, whereas certain ideas being taught were seen as beyond the pale. But I digress. And so, you know, I have two teenage children myself, a daughter of 13, a son 16. I have fought with them about screens and devices. I wish that I had been introduced them to devices later. And I now have sort of pretty stringent controls on their devices in terms of, of time limitations, certain types of content that they can't use at all. But I also think that there are benefits for, for children to having online access. You know, children have human rights as well, and one of those is access to information. For instance, three years ago my family moved to the United States. My children would not be as proficient not only in the English language, but also the cultural idioms and so on of their peers if they had not been watching stuff on YouTube, for instance. That's a huge benefit for them and also younger people, whether you like it or not, consume news and ideas through, through new media. So if you cut them off from that, you cut them off from a lot of relevant information and then you have the problem, as you, you mentioned with, with, with adults giving up their private information in ways that governments can potentially use and abuse to identify them and, you know, compromise anonymity. You know, it is now at least a policy goal of certain democracies, including Germany. I think the German Chancellor Metz has said that he does not think that you should have the right to be anonymous on social media online. Now think about the historical implications of that.
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B
Let's toilman that for a moment when I want to hear your argument against it. So you might say that we believe in free speech for people, that you shouldn't be under any threat to be prosecuted or put in jail for what you say. Even if it's very unpopular. There would already be a big improvement in places like Germany and United Kingdom relative to laws as we stand at the moment. But why should we give free speech rights to bots? Why should we give free speech rights foreign intelligence services that make up fake accounts in order to influence debates in Germany or Britain or the United States? Why should we allow people to go online and just insult anybody who has a different opinion in the most vile possible ways, perhaps even threatening them in various ways, hiding behind the COVID of some kind of avatar? Why shouldn't we say, yes, you have as a citizen full rights of expression, or as a visitor for that matter, but you need to actually prove who you are so we know that we're actually having a conversation among real human beings. Again, I can see the arguments on the other side. I'm not agreeing what I just said, but just to steel man the position, why, if somebody like Friedrich Maels believes that, is he wrong?
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A
So yeah, I can understand the argument. Superficially, I think that it is, it is probably true that, you know, it's, it is easier for conversations online to derail when you can hide behind anonymity and you don't have your, your full name because, you know, you feel more comfortable with, with just trolling and shitposting and so on. There's less inhibition, there's less incentive to think about what you, you, you say before you blurt it out. But I mean, what think about. Okay, let, let me be a bit facetious here. And with a really like an argument in a German context, like was it, was it wrong by the members of the White Rose that they spread their anti Nazi pamphlets anonymously during Germany, they obviously ended up being arrested and executed. But that shows you why people have resorted to writing anonymously or pseudonymously throughout history is because there were repercussions. When you write in your own name, if you're a dissident, it is much easier to identify you and then you can face legal consequences. Now, if you're a Chancellor Merz in, in Germany, who, according to some reports, have used NGOs and law firms to launch lawsuits against people for insulting him for pretty. You know, at least according to my stat, like, someone called him a racist. Like, to me, that's. If you're a politician and, and he's someone who's like, positioned himself as wanting to have a more firm immigration policy in Germany, doing away with the mistakes of the Merkel era. If you on the one hand say, hey, I want to be tougher on Islamists and the mistakes of immigration, but you can't call me a racist asshole, then obviously Germans who disagree with him want to be able to criticize him without also giving their details that he can then instruct his lawyer to go after them so that they have criminally prosecuted. But you also look at European history. I saw Ursula van der Leyen in an interview, sort of a bit smartly saying, as a criticism against the American attack on European free speech, we know quite a bit about free speech in Europe. We're actually the place of the Enlightenment. Well, did Spinoza publish his theological political treatise under his own name? No, he did not. Did Montesquieu publish his Persian letters under his own name? No, he did not. Did Voltaire publish Candide? Were Cato's letters published? Of course not. And so I think that shows you quite clearly why Tom Paine, Common Sense was not written under his. His name. You know, the Federalist Papers were written using pseudonyms and so on. So I think that's a remarkable list.
- [44:59]
B
Once you, I mean, I kind of was aware of each of those, but once you put them all next to each other, that is a huge share of the most important writings of the Enlightenment that were published under pseudonym in that kind of way. So that argument, I think, is Two
- [45:17]
A
Treatises of Government by John Locke. I mean, the list is, is almost endless. So when you have a company, you know, so you have that, that history of actually a lot of the, the
- [45:29]
B
literary work, treatises of government, John Locke. I'm trying to remember this arcane piece of knowledge for my undergraduate degree, which was unfortunately a few years ago now, but I believe that it survived the civil War under the false book cover stowed away in some library of on the French disease, which was a contemporary appellation for something like syphilis. So it looked like it was sort of medical treatise. But the French disease was meant to be authoritarianism.
- [45:59]
A
Yeah. So many of the literary works that have shaped enlightenment values, democracy and so on, depended on anonymity to be able to spread and to save their authors, at least temporarily. And then when you add to sort of to the digital age the fact that the very same politicians who say we can't have anonymity are also busy adopting laws that criminalize and prohibit ever larger swaths of speech, I think that in and of itself shows why this is an extremely dangerous development. And of course, when it comes to the whole child protection thing, we should also look at authoritarian and illiberal states. I mentioned Russia's crackdown on online speech in 2012. That's when they built out their so called red web. And the, the pretext for this was, you guessed it, protecting children. I saw Jonathan Haidt in February praising Indonesia for adopting its own version of Australia's pioneering law banning under 16s from social media. Indonesia is a country that has used child protection to ban gay dating apps, which is in. Has. Has recently proposed a bill that would give its. It brought its broadcasting commission broader powers to crack down on LGBT content in order to protect children. This is not something that's going to stay within Europe. And I mean Indonesia is often praised as a sort of a model country, Muslim majority country that has democratic institutions and which is relatively moderate. So it's not an outright authoritarian state. So I think all of these examples shows why this sounds superficially great on paper, but includes grave implications for free speech and privacy, especially in our day and age, where if every time you logged on to the Internet or certain parts of the Internet, your data was collected, that data today can be used in ways that are much more intrusive than the days where you needed to show a library card to, to take out a book, for instance. It will give whichever, whether it's a private company or it's the government troves of data about you that could give you a very, very forensic picture of who you are, what your interests are, you know, your social connections and so on. So it would essentially shield the government from criticism and dissent and make the citizens much more transparent to the government. That essentially is an inversion of what I understand to be at the core of liberal democratic societies.
- [49:17]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a good fight. In the rest of this conversation, I asked Jacob how we can fight back. How can we make a more persuasive case that free speech is essential, but essentially, in times when our democratic institutions are threatened and we talk about the United States, Jacob and I agree that the Trump administration is attacking free speech in some outrageous ways. The question is whether or not it's succeeding. Is there, I asked Jacob, reason to thank that the Trump administration is actually failing in its goals and that therefore we might be a little bit more sanguine about the future of free speech in the United States today than we would have been about a year ago. To listen to that part of the conversation to support the work we do here. To get full access to every episode of this podcast, go to writingdashamonk.com listen become a paying subscriber Set up the premium feed on your favorite podcasting app. If you have trouble following those instructions, you can get support anytime by emailing supportubstack.com. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone Paying Big Wireless Way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month, of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms at Mint Mob.