Europe Comes Up With Perfectly Orwellian Responses to ‘Fake News’

In their zeal to stamp out “fake news,” European governments are turning toward Orwellian solutions that are worse than the disease.

The European Commission recently created a 39-member panel to explore avenues to eliminate fake news. On Twitter, it announced that it seeks to find a “balanced approach” to protecting free speech and making sure citizens get “reliable information.”

This follows in the footsteps of individual governments in Europe that have decided that the way to defeat fake news is to have the government decide what the truth is.

Germany recently enacted a law that allows the government to censor social media and fine related companies that won’t take down what government officials deem fake news or hate speech.

France isn’t far behind. French President Emmanuel Macron proposed a ban on fake news, especially around election time, “in order to protect democracy.”

And on Tuesday, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May announced the creation of a commission to respond to fake news called the National Security Communications Unit.

A spokesperson for the May government said: “Digital communications is constantly evolving and we are looking at ways to meet the challenging media landscape by harnessing the power of new technology for good.”

The key problem with these proposals is obvious, as the Washington Examiner highlighted in an editorial.

“One must ask who will decide which news is real and respectable, on the one hand, and which, on the other, is fake and must be censored?” the Examiner asked, before referring to George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984”:

Will it be bureaucrats in a censor’s office in a bigger agency? Or, will their work be so extensive and important that they will need a new agency of their own? Will they go the full Orwell and name it the Ministry of Truth?

Though Trump has proposed strengthening libel laws, a more traditional way of curbing intentional media falsehoods, his administration has made no widespread legal attack on the ability of Americans to disseminate news and views.

Saying mean things on Twitter isn’t an attack on free speech, but censorship by an unaccountable government board certainly is.

For all the hyperbole and hysteria following the coverage of the president, it has ultimately been our celebrated friends across the pond who’ve decided to take an ax to free speech, cloaked in the soothing rhetoric of protecting democracy.

SOURCE