patrick.net

Kraut still doesn't get it. But the commenters do.

U.S. Under Secretary of State Sarah Rogers called the list of sanctioned individuals “illustrative not exhaustive,” and she also detailed their symbolic importance. Enduring Euromoron Thierry Breton, for example, got the hammer for “mastermind[ing]” the DSA and for writing that wacky letter to Musk in advance of last year’s elections, while the State Department singled out cringe girlboss Josephine Ballon at HateAid partly for appearing in a notorious 60 Minutes segment on German political repression and telling her interviewers that “free speech needs boundaries.” ...

Party leader Franziska Brandner echoed this demand: “The entry bans are an authoritarian attempt at intimidation and a direct attack on the rule of law in Europe,” she said. ...

Sonja Eichwede, emphasised that the US was trying “under the guise of supposed freedom of expression” to take action against people and organisations “who are committed to having social platforms without hatred and incitement.” ...

Carmen Wegge, accused the US government of simply presenting a false argument. “Criminal behaviour such as incitement to hatred and insults are not protected by freedom of expression,” she warned. ...

(Note that was four women in a row. -Patrick)

1) Visa sanctions like these allow censorship goons like Breton, Ballon and the rest of them to claim a lot of clout for being persecuted by the Trump administration, while in truth facing nothing more than mild inconvenience. Thus our gaggle of discourse schoolmarms released strident statements within hours of Rubio’s announcement, professing their brave defiance of the Trump administration and their determination to continue censoring the internet in the name of human rights and free speech “now more than ever.” There is the danger that this whole thing devolves into a scenario of symbiotic opposition.2

2) What the U.S. would need to do, to really hurt these people and put a kink in their retarded game, is hit them with real sanctions – the kind that the EU has imposed on Baud and may impose on Köppel, the kind that make it impossible to buy and sell anything. That would have a serious chilling effect on the internet hall monitors. Alternatively, the Americans might work behind the scenes with the EU or specific European governments, like Merz’s coalition, enticing these governments to starve key nodes of the censorship industrial complex of funding in return for favours on things like tariffs (or whatever).

3) All of this naturally depends on what it is the Americans want to achieve. The official line, as stated by Under Secretary Rogers, is that British or EU laws restricting online speech that end up impacting the rights of Americans to free expression cross a “red line” and will invite retaliation from the United States. With only a little extrapolation, this argument also works to defend the European operations of American social media companies from DSA-related harassment more generally. And then there are the visa sanctions themselves, which suggest to me at least an interest in attacking the European censorship regime more generally, and independently of its specific effects on Americans in America.

4) Either way, one should have realistic expectations here: It would be great to get rid of organisations like HateAid, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and the Global Disinformation Index, but even total success on this front would not inaugurate a new era of liberalism and freedom of expression in Europe. These particular political tumours were all founded in 2018, after Brexit, Donald Trump’s first election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal convinced political elites of the totally insane conspiracy theory that adversarial states like Russia had weaponised “disinformation” and “social media algorithms” to hijack their political systems. ...