On Friday, 50 innocent worshippers were brutally slaughtered in Christchurch, New Zealand. Today, the reaction to the gunman’s video livestreaming of that attack reminds us why the First Amendment is so important.
After all, the gunman’s Facebook livestreaming of his massacre has sparked renewed calls for censorship constraints on social media companies such as Facebook and YouTube. The problem is that this censorship agenda offers a very slippery path to global authoritarianism.
Consider how China has responded to the massacre. In an editorial on Monday, the Global Times newspaper argued that the incident proves that “chances should be reduced for the internet to stir up troubles for society or severely mislead social ideologies.” This is necessary, President Xi Jinping’s mouthpiece says, because “social order” requires “preventing social media from becoming a platform for disseminating harmful information.”
But here’s the thing. While most Americans, Europeans, and Chinese citizens might agree that the Christchurch livestream represents “harmful information,” China’s definition of “harmful information” does not end there. China sees “harmful information” as anything that endangers the Communist Party’s absolute control over the levers of national power. That means China sees Muslim free expression as “harmful information,” criticism of Xi as “harmful information,” and the identification of Chinese intelligence malfeasance as “harmful information.”
It is for these reasons China wants to use Christchurch as a doorway to regulate the Internet, and why the U.S. is lucky to have a First Amendment that obstructs China from effectively implementing that regulation on American companies.
Yet it’s not just China’s conception of harm here that should concern us.
Consider that were Iran able to enforce its version of “harmful information” in regulating social media content, we would see a ban on blasphemous material. Or were Russia to enforce its “harmful information” agenda, we would see a ban on reporting that scrutinizes Vladimir Putin’s corruption. Indeed, Putin has already to some degree succeeded here.
Nor is the concern here solely defined by authoritarian governments. Alongside European governments, New Zealand is now demanding that social media companies greatly increase their self-regulation in lieu of legal action. Again, however, unlike in the U.S., these governments do not regard hate speech as protected speech.
Fortunately, because most social media companies are located in the U.S., the First Amendment will continue to guard our common freedom.
