The War on Dissent: Western Governments are Creating Legal Frameworks to Attack Alternative Media

Canada's C-11, the UK's Online Safety Bill, and the EU's Digital Services Act are all specifically designed to render alternative media ineffective.

It is not an uncommon occurrence in America for our intelligence community to collude with big-tech platforms to stifle dissent around major issues, but this type of behavior is not unique to the US. In Europe, Canada, Brazil and particularly in the U.K., we are seeing an aggressive censorship campaign rollout, one that seeks to take things further than they’ve ever gone before, and it’s all in the name of "safety." Sound familiar?

We’ve all heard the terms “disinformation”, "misinformation,” and even the lesser-known “malinformation” used ad nauseam over the better part of the last decade. Their use began in the wake of Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton but became increasingly frequent during COVID and the 2020 election. (#)

Obviously, no one loves disinformation in principle. The real problem is the observably problematic process of determining what is and isn’t disinformation. As previously mentioned, COVID and the 2020 election saw people’s personal social media accounts as well as their business accounts take visibility hits and account bans for exploring ideas deemed taboo by the censors.

For example, mentioning the lab leak theory in 2020 would earn you time in Facebook jail, something that is now a much more widely accepted possibility and is no longer flagged as disinformation by the algorithms. (#)

With the 2020 election, we saw the Hunter Biden laptop scandal immediately written off by “51 intelligence experts” as Russian propaganda, which we now know was not only false, but these “experts” knew it was false and knowingly interfered with the election by scapegoating the Russians. (#) (#)

Interestingly enough, many of these intelligence experts are currently working for major media publications.

Regardless of your stance on either of these issues, it shouldn’t be hard to see that the banning of select information is extremely despotic and can be used for ill ends.

It’s important to note that the self-appointed fact-checking “experts” who decide what is and isn't disinformation belong to institutions that happen to be completely funded by a litany of corporations that have had severe antitrust lawsuits filed against them.

It should come as no surprise by now that among the top priorities of Western centers of power is the implementation of a rigorous, legally endorsed censorship machine to exercise power over our primary means of communication and information dissemination.

Previously, if you recall what was learned from the Twitter Files, Western governments were conducting their censorship informally; the CIA and the FBI would simply phone up Google, Facebook or Twitter and request that they crack down on specific talking points. They were able to conduct themselves this way without much pushback—that is, until it all came to light.

Now, having been exposed, these same governments (and many others) are creating legal frameworks to continue their ceaseless policing of information. These frameworks provide for serious punishments in the event that a major media platform or outlet does not comply with censorship demands.

In Canada, we are seeing the C-11, or “Online Streaming Act,” create a legal framework for policing content creators, particularly alternative media and especially those who are critical of the Trudeau government.

In the European Union, there is what’s called the Digital Services Act (DSA), which will be the primary focus of this piece. Suffice it to say, under the unspoken doctrine of the Digital Services Act, the only free speech you’ll require is the freedom to agree with the government and its donor class.

Before we dissect the EU’s regulatory atrocity, let’s consider what happened in the UK first.

Last month, I wrote a piece for Badlands Media called 5GW Counter-Offensive: The Censorship Regime and the Road to 2024, in which I outlined the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill (OSB) and other instances of excessive censorship that have popped up recently.

The bill, which the British Government has been drooling over for a while now, claims to set “tougher standards” for social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. What it really does is give the British government the power to put extreme pressure on platforms to weed out any political dissent.

The U.K. Parliament claims that the bill will make the U.K. “the safest place” in the world to be online. Reading between the lines, what they mean to say is that the OSB will lead to a much more censored, locked-down internet for British users, and it will also establish a precedent for other nations.

One member of Parliament in particular, a baroness no less, has already begun a despotic campaign to test the waters and get a feel for whether tech companies and news outlets will comply under pressure. Her name is Dame Caroline Dinenage, and she is the Baroness Lancaster of Kimbleton. The Baroness, in the wake of the Online Safety Bill being approved in the House of Lords, wrote several letters to media outlets and tech platforms alike, demanding they take action against Russell Brand.

Glenn Greenwald devoted a highly entertaining and informative portion of a recent episode of System Update to the Baroness and her correspondences with the BBC, Channel 4, TikTok, GBNews, and Rumble.

There is a lot of dull jargon in this bill, as is the case with all extremely consequential bills, but peppered throughout are rather vague yet alarming clauses.

For example, Section 10 details the crimes of transmitting “harmful, false and threatening communications” and then refuses to clearly define what will be considered “harmful” and what the criteria will be to determine whether or not something is “false”.

Additionally, the bill makes it a crime to “send a message” containing false information in clause 156.

Then, in the next breath, grants immunity to every newspaper, television channel and streaming service in clause 157.

It’s right there in print for anyone willing to put in a modicum of effort to understand what their government is foisting upon them.

Of course, the bill is being marketed in a much different light than I am portraying here. The mainstream coverage of this bill puts the ‘combating child pornography’ window-dressing front and center while ignoring the fact that 99% of child pornography exists in the deep web, far outside of this piece of legislation’s purview.

But we all know that in order to steal people’s rights away, you need to have a good pretext.

Much like the Patriot Act, this OSB plays upon the psychology of the undiscerning by using evocative framing and claiming to combat something that is far removed from how the bill will be used. In the coming months, we will likely see the U.K. Parliament issuing threats to various platforms demanding that they remove anyone who is an effective critic of the state on the grounds that they are ‘peddling harmful conspiracy theories.’

The Digital Services Act and the Targeting of “X”

The OBS is going to be the UK’s weapon of choice for combating dissent in the coming years. Now, the decidedly globalist European Union already has a similar weapon of its own called the Digital Services Act.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a regulation in EU law to update the Electronic Commerce Directive 2000 regarding illegal content, transparent advertising, and disinformation. Despite its benign-sounding title, the law is actually incredibly repressive and has the potential to be a major weapon in the arsenal of the ruling class.

For months now—years really—but increasingly in the last few months, the deep political establishment in the West has been laying the foundation for a full-on assault against the freedom of speech. They’ve created a perception that the failure of social media companies to censor in accordance with the government’s demands is somehow dangerous, that the flow of “disinformation” and “hate speech” is somehow to blame for all of society’s ills rather than a deeply entrenched political establishment subservient to its donors.

Now these censors have immediately seized upon the conflict in Israel as an opportunity to collect a few more scalps in the greater information war. Particularly, they are searching for anyone harboring less than glowing sentiments towards Israel, our “greatest ally”.

In the days following the attacks, the EU, the US, the UK and Canada have all pledged their support for Israel; these also happen to be the primary offenders of free speech in the West. As the likes of Lindsay Graham and Nikki Haley have made abundantly clear, the war machine is hungry, and it will not tolerate dissent.

Among the vanguard leading the fight against public scrutiny and freedom of speech is a man named Thierry Breton, an EU official from France who works directly under Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission.

Thierry Breton

Breton has been working overtime to help build the narrative that platforms refusing to censor are a serious threat to the public, particularly since Elon Musk divulged the company formerly known as Twitter’s deepest, darkest secrets.

Last week, a letter was sent from Breton to Elon Musk, warning him that a huge price awaits him should he not comply and censor more, specifically in regard to Israel, citing an allegation that the platform is allowing misinformation and hate speech.

The letter is provided in image form below; you can also view the letter HERE. As you read, if you choose to do so, consider how heavy-handed and authoritarian the language included here is.

The tone and sentiment in this letter are nothing short of dictatorial, and the threat of consequence should Musk choose to uphold his values and continue to allow free speech in all its forms (short of criminality and calls for violence) is heavily implied.

The first thing to point out here is that when Breton says:

“we have indications that your platform is being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU”

He refuses to elaborate on exactly what that illegal content was. You see, it’s strategic to keep it vague because if Musk was specifically shown what content was illegal, he could then act on it. The goal here isn’t to simply get a couple of posts removed; it is to further delegitimize X in the public mind and to create the pretext to use the DSA against X, essentially forcing the company to comply with censorship demands as Twitter previously did.

Remember, X is the literal frontlines of this information war right now, and they know that controlling the battlefield ensures victory. If it’s really fake images they are worried about, you can see those on just about every major social media platform, yet they’ve specifically chosen to target Musk and Twitter.

Fight the Despotic Government, Not Your Neighbor

In a world as polarized as the one we currently inhabit, it is not uncommon for people to see their political opponents as subhuman and deserving of having their constitutional rights stripped away. That is where we are in 2023.

What is taking place in the EU is an unabashed totalitarian campaign to root out dissent and keep you from forming your own opinion on anything unless that opinion is guided and nurtured by the state. The state operates on the assumption that the general population is stupid, and even if a percentage of the population starts to see the game for what it is, they count on the fact that the greater, undiscerning mass will put the fringe in check before information is allowed to spread.

The international political ruling class has done a bang-up job normalizing behavior that once seemed appalling and unthinkable, all because they successfully convinced us that it’s our neighbors who are the cause of all our societal woes instead of the government. People often wonder how significant swaths of the German population could have gone along with the Nazis in the lead-up to WWII, but that is the power of the subtle, prolonged use of propaganda, and it looks exactly like what we are witnessing culturally today.