By Andrew Stuttaford
Friday, January 05, 2018
There is little over the Atlantic that bears much of a
resemblance to the First Amendment, an absence (envied, sadly, by quite a few
over here) that has often been exploited by a European political establishment
that shows every sign of willingness to exploit the often deliberately
exaggerated fear of ‘fake news’, a
phenomenon—such as it is—far more
healthily tackled by argument than by a gag, as a new excuse for shutting down
speech of which it disapproves.
Here’s France’s President Macron, a defender, we are
often told, of Europe’s liberal order.
The Guardian:
In his new year’s speech to
journalists at the Élysée palace, Macron said he would shortly present the new
law in order to fight the spread of fake news, which he said threatened liberal
democracies…. For fake news published during election seasons, an emergency
legal action could allow authorities to remove that content or even block the
website, Macron said. “If we want to protect liberal democracies, we must be
strong and have clear rules,” he added.
Quite who decides what is—or is not—fake news is an interesting question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes and all
that.
What makes it even more ‘interesting’ is the notion that
news defined as fake should be suppressed with particular speed during an
election campaign that may be over before the decision of the relevant
authorities—whoever they may be—can be subjected to proper review. That could
be…convenient.
Reuters:
“Only authoritarian regimes try to
control what the truth is,” said senior conservative senator Bruno Retailleau.
Freedom of expression carries risks, but that’s better “than the temptation to
control minds,” he said.
The same Reuters report also notes that the EU Commission is looking at how to deal with
fake news. Writing in Euractiv, Aline
Robert and Catherine Stupp argue that Macron’s speech might encourage the
Brussels bureaucracy to propose tougher measures than might otherwise have been
the case.
Censors stick together.
Meanwhile, Reuters (my emphasis added):
A German satirical magazine’s
Twitter account was blocked after it parodied anti-Muslim comments, the
publication said on Wednesday, in what the national journalists association
said showed the downside of a new law against online hate speech. Titanic
magazine was mocking Beatrix von Storch, a member of the right-wing Alternative
for Germany (AfD) party, who accused police of trying “to appease the barbaric,
Muslim, rapist hordes of men” by putting out a tweet in Arabic. Twitter briefly
suspended her account and prosecutors are examining if her comments amount to
incitement to hatred.
Titanic magazine published its
send-up late on Tuesday, in a tweet purporting to be from von Storch to the
police, saying: “The last thing that I want is mollified barbarian, Muslim,
gang-raping hordes of men.”
Titanic said on Wednesday its
Twitter account had been blocked over the message, which it assumed was a result of a law that came into full force on
Jan. 1 that can impose fines of up to 50 million euros ($60 million) on social
media sites that fail to remove hate speech [and fake news] promptly.
“We are shocked,” Titanic editor
Tim Wolff said on the magazine’s website, adding that Chancellor Angela Merkel and Justice Minister Heiko Maas had promised
that the new law would not have this kind of effect.
If Wolff was truly shocked, he is truly naïve. Merkel,
another (supposed) champion of ‘liberal’ values, has been Germany’s Chancellor
since 2005. That’s long enough for anyone paying any attention to realize that
she is reflexively authoritarian and, when it suits her, less than honest.
As for von Storch’s comments about the tweet, DW gives some context here:
The Cologne police tweeted New
Year’s greetings and linked to information on celebrating safely in a series of
messages in German and other languages, including Arabic. Cologne was the scene
two years ago of mass sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in which most of the
suspects were described as young men of North African and Arab origin.
“What the hell is happening in this
country? Why is an official police site tweeting in Arabic? Do you think it is
to appease the barbaric, gang-raping hordes of Muslim men?” wrote Beatrix von
Storch, the deputy leader of the AfD’s parliamentary group.
The tweet was later deleted after
Twitter froze von Storch’s account and informed her she had violated hate
speech rules. Her account was shut down for 12 hours. The Cologne police said
on Monday that they had filed a criminal complaint against von Storch for hate
speech.
Whatever one might think about von Storch’s comments,
which read to me (and I’m not exactly a fan of Merkel’s immigration policies)
as a harsh and intemperate response to a well-intentioned gesture by the
police, she is the deputy leader of the AfD’s parliamentary group. And the AfD
is no longer just a party of the fringe. Given an enormous boost both by
Merkel’s Willkommenspolitik and the
attempts by the media and political establishments to stifle criticism of the
approach that the Chancellor had taken, the AfD secured nearly 13 percent
of the vote in Germany’s recent elections.
There is thus something particularly unsettling about von Storch’s (brief)
silencing on Twitter, and something infinitely more sinister (and, probably
counter-productive – more on that later) about the filing of a police
complaint.
So far as Twitter is concerned, it’s understandable
enough why the company did what it did. To be sure, Twitter is less even-handed
in its approach to free speech than it pretends, but it’s hard to imagine that
its decision will not have been influenced by the prospect of a massive fine
should it have contravened Germany’s new censorship laws, laws so broadly drawn
that even the UN was concerned.
Newsweek:
“Many of the violations covered by
the bill are highly dependent on context, context which platforms are in no position
to assess,” the U.N. Special Rapporteur
to the High Commissioner for Human Rights David Kaye wrote of the law in the
run up to its passage.
Reuters:
The Association of German
Journalists (DJV) said the Twitter move [against Titanic] amounted to
censorship, adding it had warned of this danger when the law was drawn up last
year. “A private company based in the United States decides the boundaries of
freedom of the press and opinion in Germany,” DJV Chairman Frank Ueberall said
in a statement, calling on parliament to reverse the hate speech law.
Twitter, Facebook and other social
media platforms are scrambling to adapt to the law, and its implementation is
being closely watched after warnings that the threat of fines could prompt
websites to block more content than necessary.
Germany has some of the world’s
toughest laws on defamation, incitement to commit crimes and threats of
violence, with prison sentences for Holocaust denial or inciting hatred against
minorities.
Merkel’s conservatives accused the
AfD of undermining the post-war democratic consensus in Germany.
“The racism that AfD lawmakers have
been tweeting for days is intentionally violating, with criminal intent, the
basic consensus which democrats have built up since 1949 despite all
disagreements,” Armin Laschet, party deputy of Merkel’s Christian Democrats,
tweeted.
“By doing this, they want to pave
the way to a totally different republic.”
No-one should need reminding of Germany’s terrible history
(to which, it may be unfair to note, von Storch has an unsettling family
connection) and the circumstances that gave birth to the postwar republic’s
attitude to free speech.
In an earlier post, I quoted Foreign Affairs:
Created in 1949, the West German
federal constitution, also known as the Basic Law or Grundgesetz, contained a central paradox. Many West German
politicians—conservatives and social democrats alike—believed in a “militant
democracy,” one where free speech could be constrained to protect democratic
norms. Essentially, democrats had to use undemocratic means to protect
democracy. Article 18 of the constitution states that anyone abusing rights
like freedom of speech to undermine a free democratic order might forfeit those
basic rights.
In that same post, I agreed that, in the specific
circumstances of Germany just after the fall of the Third Reich, that might
(just) be understandable, but now?
Then there’s this from Flemming Rose of Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper
that published the Mohammed cartoons, in an interview with The New Yorker in 2015 (my emphasis
added):
I found that, contrary to what most
people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied
quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role
in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim
that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and
Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such
as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted
for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than
deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery,
affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a
climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der
Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to
court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced,
the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an
important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews.
The precedent is far from strictly comparable, but there
could still be a lesson there.
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