VIEWPOINTS_ The Global Showdown Over Free Speech

THE EPOCH TIMES

The Global Showdown Over Free Speech

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

By Jeffrey A. Tucker
9/4/2024 Updated: 9/5/2024

Commentary


I’ve followed the work of economist Robert Reich for decades. Long before he was labor secretary under the Clinton administration, he was writing fascinating books on industrial organization and U.S. living standards. Agree or disagree, I always learned from him and enjoyed the challenge of grappling with ideas that challenged my assumptions about the world. I’ve always regarded him as an honest observer.

This weekend, Reich wrote an article for the UK newspaper The Guardian in which he calls for social media platform X to be banned and for owner Elon Musk to be arrested for allowing “disinformation” and “misinformation” on the platform.

“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” he wrote.

Reich is among many in the censorship camp who have proclaimed certain views to be dangerous to public order and therefore worthy of prosecution.

Reich’s call to jail Musk comes exactly at the time when the seemingly unthinkable happened in Brazil. A supreme court judge named Alexandre de Moraes, who apparently exercises autonomous autocratic power, outright banned the entire platform in the country. It is the most popular news application in the country. The judge further imposed criminal penalties on anyone who uses the app through a Virtual Private Network at nearly $10,000 per day.

It is unenforceable, of course, but it opens up possible investigations of every single political dissenter in the country. Already there have been grave questions surrounding the legitimacy of the 2022 election that took President Jair Messias Bolsonaro out and brought to power President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The voting results provoked the largest public protests in the country’s history, and hardened a resistance that has depended on alternative news sources, simply because the mainstream news in the country appears largely government-controlled.

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READ MORE: https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-global-showdown-over-free-speech-5716952?ea_src=frontpage&ea_cnt=a&ea_med=opinion-7

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