OPINION
As the old saying goes, knowledge is power, and today people have more power at the tip of their fingers than ever before.
From smartphones to laptops and tablets, people of every age and across continents, have the ability to inquire, question, and speak into virtually any topic and have an audience ready to listen.
Such speech is not always, in fact rarely is, a chorus of unanimity of opinion, but are instead often statements of dissent against those in power.
And when dissenting speech includes opinions about government actions, many politicians become squeamish about its availability — particularly those in authoritarian regimes where vibrant free speech and access to it is blocked or punished.
While much attention has recently been paid to efforts to block X in Brazil, bureaucrats in democratic European republics are increasingly looking to suppress online speech as well.
For instance, expanding legal liability to an information intermediary can provide a strong incentive for social media companies to restrict how their services can be used --- which would undermine their value to consumers and lead to a culture of self-censorship across the internet.
In Europe, the Digital Services Act allows bureaucrats to punish companies failing to comply with EU bureaucrats’ content moderation preferences.
If it were the law in America, government enforcers could legally punish X's Elon Musk or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for failing to take down content deemed to be a threat to safety.
In fact, before Elon Musk recently interviewed former President Donald Trump on X, the EU’s digital henchman Theirry Breton sent an intimidating letter to Musk, telling him to keep in mind X’s obligations under the DSA to control "hate speech" during the interview.
The U.K. has a similar law, the "Online Safety Act," which has been used to arrest and prosecute British citizens speaking out on X against the government’s actions during recent riots in the country.
These new rules, which were sold to the public, as a way to force companies to make "safer" products, are being abused by bureaucrats to silence legitimate speech online.
So as Americans watch free speech being routinely suppressed across Europe by government use of these new "safety" laws, many liberty-minded conservatives from various U.S. states and the Congress are considering, or have passed legislation, modeled after these same oppressive European digital speech acts.
In Congress, the U.S. Senate passed the so-called "Kids Online Safety Act" before leaving for August recess.
Despite the bill’s laudable goal, the rules it would implement are modeled on the EU and UK’s. KOSA’s overly broad policies would result in the mandated suppression of speech and expression online.
It would also empower bureaucrats across the country to pressure online companies to remove content the government believes is "harmful," a vague term ripe for abuse.
Thankfully, in America, our right to speak and access information is enshrined in our Constitution. However, this core protection has not slowed the momentum of some U.S. politicians pushing bills like KOSA which recently passed the senate.
There was brave bipartisan dissent lead by Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to stand up for us online and ensure government speech codes are not implemented in America.
U.S. House lawmakers must join them and reject this deeply flawed legislation.
As another saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility.
Our government, just as those in Europe, has great power over its people. But unlike the Europeans, the U.S. has a rich history of charting our own path, starting with the very founding of the nation over 248 years ago.
America must not only resist global attempts from Europe and elsewhere to obstruct online communications, but at the very least oppose imposing similar laws here in the U.S. which allow bureaucrats suppress dissenting ideas the deep state doesn’t like.
Rick Santorum was a member of the House of Representatives and a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania from 1991-2006, as well as a presidential candidate in 2012 and 2016.
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