Foreign Pressure to Censor Opponents
America’s government joins with that of China, which also pressured Meta to remove content critical of the regime, according to McConnell.
“There are governments — China is one of them — that put tremendous effort into getting criticism of the government eliminated from world discussion,” McConnell said. “And they bring pressure in various ways, and we try to be alert to that and be a guard against it.”
Meta, however, has been
colluding with Vietnam’s communist government to stifle opposition, according to The Washington Post.
Still, the European Union — like China — thinks Meta is not going far enough. It launched an
investigation on April 30 into Meta’s handling of so-called “disinformation” ahead of European Parliament elections.
The European Commission said it suspects Meta of not complying with the body’s “Digital Services Act,” which
made “misinformation” and “disinformation” illegal last year. Meta had
pledged in February to counter these in European elections.
Yoshino said Meta has been trying to “balance out these different values” in areas like elections. “If the baseline is international human rights norms,” Yoshino said, “oftentimes that calculus comes out differently than it would if the baseline were U.S. First Amendment norms.”
So much for free speech and the First Amendment.