So to be clear, your sole expectation of a liberal democracy is that it have a better judicial system than Russia or Iran.
And beyond that, you applaud any democratic country's efforts to reign in speech by arresting their own citizens in order to combat foreign influence operations?
And the fulcrum of this argument is that we believe that Russia and China have uniquely pernicious influence operations and there are no other state-level actors domestically or semi-domestically whose intelligence services also exert influence through the passage of laws restricting speech?
Having seen the last two years of politics in the UK and the US, your impression is that there is an overwhelming Chinese-Russian troll farm operation which self-evidently justifies rolling back the last two centuries worth of hard-fought and incremental precedents won for free speech and free press.
And again, the water-line we need to stay above is merely "this is still better than being arrested in Russia or Iran", keeping in mind that many countries we would not consider to be democracies at all also meet this bar.
> And beyond that, you applaud any democratic country's efforts to reign in speech by arresting their own citizens in order to combat foreign influence operations?
I probably made my point not very well. I am indeed worried about freedom of speech, and your example about Mccarthy ism is very very valud. I come from Germany; the Nazis, and later the Stasi, were masters in suppressing freedom of speech, and both committed the most brutal atrocities that must never be repeated (and also, as a side note, completely ran the country they ruled into the ground).
Freedom of speech is really, really important. And yes, we absolutely must defend it. But it bothers me that it is used as a complete killer argument when politicians try to talk about other problems.
Our societies are getting more and more polarized. We are being bullied by various actors, and whenever someone points it out someone else (often the perpetrator) is quick to hide behind the false argument of freedom of speech.
I personally really believe that we need to do something against that polarization. It’s an attack vector that’s very actively and very effectively being exploited by adversaries, foreign and domestic alime. It’s not a new thing, propaganda and misinformation is centuries old, but in the age of the internet the dynamics change, and we need to adapt.
This is a super complex problem. And there is a huge risk that people abuse it to implement surveillance they always wanted to have. But yes, my general position is that I think it’s good that proposals are being made, and because of that, I don’t want to see Starmer in the same bucket as Putin in this discussion. It’s also good that there are fights about which proposals are good and bad. But my overall feeling is that we ignored the problem for too long, and now we have to catch up. Otherwise, we’ll just get more and more polarized societies, and this really, really worries me.
It may at this point also be worth pointing out that the proposals really are very different.
- The UK went for a centralist proposal on age verification around porn, which can very easily turn into a surveillance tool. I think it’s a terrible solution.
- Australia opts for banning social media for minors. Doesn’t strike me as a big surveillance tool. Maybe extreme if you don’t share their view on the dangers of social media, but clearly a very different approach, and also a different problem they think they identified to the UK
- Germany goes for better parental controls, i.e. mandating manufacturers to make it really easy for parents to enable a walled garden for their kids. I like it because it’s still up to the parents whether to enable it or not, and no government surveillance is involved at all.
The cool thing of having different countries experiment with different approaches - not just solutions, but also assumptions on what problems would need fixing - is that you can run many experiments in parallel. The scientist in me is very happy about that.
If we’re lucky, one or two of these will over time come out as great solutions and get widely adopted.
And beyond that, you applaud any democratic country's efforts to reign in speech by arresting their own citizens in order to combat foreign influence operations?
And the fulcrum of this argument is that we believe that Russia and China have uniquely pernicious influence operations and there are no other state-level actors domestically or semi-domestically whose intelligence services also exert influence through the passage of laws restricting speech?
Having seen the last two years of politics in the UK and the US, your impression is that there is an overwhelming Chinese-Russian troll farm operation which self-evidently justifies rolling back the last two centuries worth of hard-fought and incremental precedents won for free speech and free press.
And again, the water-line we need to stay above is merely "this is still better than being arrested in Russia or Iran", keeping in mind that many countries we would not consider to be democracies at all also meet this bar.