Western governments are increasingly using their power to decide what is ‘real’ or ‘fake’ news, and what is right or wrong. They are depriving citizens of the possibilities to decide for themselves, and to look into other opinions and alternative sources.
If you, like me, were born in the late 20th century, you must have read Orwell’s 1984 at school. In 1984, we read about a world that has fallen victim to omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda. ‘Dystopian fiction,’ our teachers told us. A couple of decades later, the horrors of the book aren’t that dystopian anymore.
A short summary of the past month: In the US, one of the biggest teachers’ unions signed a contract with NewsGuard, a controversial service that tells children which internet sources are true and which are not. This is without question an incredibly dangerous service that provides a lot of power to the people who control it, and it certainly does not belong in a democracy, a label that the US still likes to use for itself. In the same week, US crowdfunding platform GoFundMe froze the funds that were raised by a campaign to support Canadian truckers protesting Covid vaccine mandates.
Once again, one single platform decides what is right and what is wrong. In France, the National Assembly has now banned gay conversion therapy, deciding that this sort of therapy is not only ‘wrong’ but also illegal, assaulting the freedom of people who choose to go to such therapy. The state has thus decided that it is forbidden for homosexuals to pursue a heterosexual lifestyle. So much for liberté in France. Meanwhile in the UK a women’s rights campaigner was arrested for ‘hate crime’: she spread posters critical of the transgender movement. Another opinion that is forbidden. And this is just a tiny selection of all governmental restrictions on free press and freedom of speech in the West in the past month.
What is happening here? Western states are increasingly using their power to decide what is ‘real’ or ‘fake’ news, and what is right or wrong. They are depriving citizens of the possibilities to decide for themselves, and to look into other opinions and alternative sources. Moreover, certain opinions are not only wrong, but also punishable, as we saw in the case of the British women’s rights campaigner. Others with the same views will now think twice before they express them. Ultimately, this will lead to a society in which people only hear the state-approved opinions, and have become too passive to research anything themselves. The government will then completely control its citizens. Sounds familiar?
As the examples in this article illustrate, increased government surveillance and censorship are not only a serious problem in China and Saudi Arabia, but also in Western countries. The consequences of entire nations filled with complacent yes-men can be severe – we have seen that before in history. Behind this are a few people in power. Together they decide about truth. People who point out what is happening are branded as conspiracy theorists, which in itself is another case in point. We all know how this will end, because we’ve read it before. The problem is the young generation is not reading it, because universities are now slapping ‘trigger warnings’ on 1984. How very telling.