In an effort to “balance” freedom of expression with other needs, the European Union on Monday launched its “High-Level Expert Group” to tackle fake news.
This followed a proposal last week by French President Emmanuel Macron to give government more censorship power, including prior restraint to stop the spread of stories that are not true. This move came the same week President Trump resurrected his vague and misguided promise to revisit libel laws.
EU politicians, and not a few citizens, claim to believe that more censorship is needed to save democracy. They argue that “a citizen’s right to diverse and reliable information” must be protected. Indeed, it must, but not in the way proposed.
Macron and the European Commission are using a Red Scare to drum up support for new police powers over publishing. They point to Russian efforts to influence elections in America, Europe, and elsewhere, and they argue that deliberate information peddled by anonymous actors, some of whom have Russian ties, undermine democracy.
The broad public support for Catalonian independence was seen by European elites as a bitter fruit of foreign meddling through social media and fake news. Trump’s election was another. “The gullible people have been led astray,” the thinking goes, “and would better appreciate the wisdom and virtue of their benign elites if they were not being fooled by purveyors of fake news.”
EU officials swear they’re talking about a pernicious threat posed by evil-doers who dishonestly pose as news outlets.
Macron wants a law creating emergency government powers to crack down on fake news. This would entail not merely punishing those who publish it, but shutting down sites and blocking what they wish to publish. They want government to have the right to judge in advance whether the public gets to see certain stories. If a bureaucrat decides the story is misinformation, it won’t see the light of day.
American jurisprudence calls this “prior restraint,” and the government almost never has that power. But even though Europe does not have as robust a tradition as we do of protecting free speech, the EU should think long and hard about the evils to which prior restraint leads.
Most obviously, one must ask who will decide which news is real and respectable, on the one hand, and which, on the other, is fake and must be censored? Will it be bureaucrats in a censor’s office in a bigger agency? Or, will their work be so extensive and important that they will need a new agency of their own? Will they go the full Orwell and name it the Ministry of Truth?
There are many reasons not to trust the powerful with such a task. Most obvious is the clear conflict of interest in a government deciding whether criticism aimed at itself is over the line. China and North Korea do this. Iran and Turkey have also taken similar steps. Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel probably do not have designs to be despots, but they do have an arrogant tendency to think government would be a lot easier if it weren’t for all those people who think they’re incompetent or flatly wrong. Leaders bristle at criticism and tend to abuse power when given too much of it. That’s why we have rule of law rather than of men. Democracy and freedom involve structures and procedures. They cannot be left to the mercies of well-intentioned people.
Here in America, august institutions have abused the trust placed in them to discern real news from fake news. They have applied nakedly ideological standards without regard for truth. Harvard University’s library published a guide for avoiding fake news, which included what it said was a “list of fake news sites.” It included nearly every conservative news and opinion site, including this one. But salacious left-leaning sites such as Think Progress and Salon passed muster.
Google created a fact-checker to warn readers about untruths, and, like Harvard, produced a list that was egregiously biased against conservative websites while giving liberal sites a pass.
Former President Barack Obama’s White House objected to “fishy” stories about Obamacare while falsely insisting, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”
Those critical of President Trump ought to worry about this trend, as well. The White House has lambasted as “deliberate falsehoods” stories that were, in all likelihood, honest mistakes. Would anyone want this government to have the power to shut down “fake news” publishers?
The greatest danger to free speech in America today comes not from government but from speech codes on college campuses. Europe often leads the way in making imprudent power grabs. If the EU or Macron make progress on censorship, America’s guardians of free speech will need to worry about a dangerous import.
