The Speech Is Free And It's Poisoning Everything

The continued existence of democracy depends on what might be called – depending on your politics – content moderation or speech suppression.

Free speech in the 21st century is a fucking snake eating its own fucking tail, devouring itself until nothing is left. Freedom of speech, as I’ve detailed ad nauseam in Bad Faith Times pieces over the past eighteen months, has been effectively and brutally weaponized by the right wing, becoming the centerpiece of the international fascist movement that is slowly but surely unraveling representative democracy across the world. Speech is both essential to democracy and quite possibly the end of democracy. It's a vexing thing.

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I’m very much open to the idea of stopping misinformation with strict policies banning people and accounts from popular social media sites and the internet in general. But even in places where this is being tried, it’s failing spectacularly. 

Nations in the European Union bloc have taken admirable steps in interrupting the flow of disinformation designed to destroy democracy from within. European countries can do this because, unlike us Americans, they are not chained to the rotting corpses of their forefathers. EU nations are allowed to conduct themselves as if it is the 21st century, not the 18th century. Imagine that. In the US, since Thomas Jefferson did not outline ways to police social media algorithms, no one can police social media. Alexander Hamilton said nothing about Russian troll farms? Well, there's nothing we can do. Sorry.

We are doomed by the constitution, a dead document that threatens us all. 

Not so in the EU, where the bloc of nations have worked tirelessly to stop disinformation campaigns in their tracks over the past decade, including those from Russia, the epicenter of the international fascist movement. European countries have set up so-called digital defense agencies, launched sprawling investigations, and passed meaningful laws punishing those who participate in disinformation campaigns. And yet, with European Parliament elections ongoing, anti-democracy forces have flooded Europeans with mass amounts of patently untrue content, most of it designed to encourage nationalism over EU solidarity.

(This reminds me of a show I watched last year with my son, The 100 on Netflix. If you can get by the painfully contrived teenage drama and love triangles, you’ll see a trend line running through the series: The protagonists keep committing genocide because they are helplessly tribal. Oops, there’s another horrific genocide. And another. And another. They keep wiping out entire populations because they embrace a brand of nationalism that means only one group can survive. It’s not until the very end of the show that the group realizes the error of their ways. Oh well, they think. Maybe we shouldn't have destroyed entire worlds to stay alive over these many years. Nevertheless. It’s a hamfisted lesson in the pitfalls of nationalism.)

Back to the EU, which has seen an unprecedented torrent of disinformation this election season. 

I’m not totally dismissing the free flow of information as a crucial piece of a functional democratic society. The internet has made a hands-off approach untenable and, in many ways, suicidal, since unfettered free speech is favored (in bad faith) by the worst among us – those who advocate for white supremacy and the repression of LGBTQ populations. Right wingers don’t want “free speech” because it's good and essential for a thriving, open society; they want it because it can and has been used as a highly effective weapon in sowing mass confusion and distrust of democratic institutions. We have to be honest about this if we’re ever going to address the pressing issue of right-wing misinformation in this age of social media. 

Doing nothing about the right's poisoning of the discourse is not an option, as Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU DisinfoLab, an independent research organization in Brussels, told the New York Times.

“Should we all get relaxed because we don’t actually have fascists or Nazis in the streets right now — they’re just at the corner?” Alaphilippe said. “That’s my main concern right now.”

I don’t want a China-style monitoring of every single online post. This is not a call for authoritarian-style crackdowns on speech that does not fit the party line, even if that's how any effort to curb misinformation would be interpreted by the right (in bad faith). The long-term consequences of EU-style online monitoring are frightening though. Imagine these tools in the hands of bad-faith operators wanting nothing more than to crush the speech of their opponents – to label anything they don’t like as disinformation. Again, in bad faith. 

What’s to be done with a political movement that refuses to say what they mean in an age of unfettered access to a never-ending flow of information? I’ll let you know when I have the answers. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads and X at @CDCarter13.