The ability to express ideas openly has been a staple in democracies for centuries. Free Speech is, of course, a First Amendment Right in our own Constitutional Republic. However, over the last several years, that right has been quickly eroded as social media and other Big Tech firms have obfuscated people from this right.
The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft is one of the plaintiffs in Missouri v Biden, a case currently Supreme Court-bound making that argument. In that case, a shocking discovery was made that the government deems your thoughts “cognitive infrastructure” and suggests their right to control it. Since the censorship machine has been spun up, The Gateway Pundit has suffered losses resulting from bans and censorship on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. We are still banned from the former.
As discovered in the #TwitterFiles, governments, including our very own, have found a way to subvert that right. By opening up backdoor channels and comms with social media conglomerates and non-profits, they censor Americans for what they deem to be “mis- or disinformation” regarding elections, COVID-19 and the ensuing vaccines, and other contentious topics.
Whether it be the relationship between the Department of Homeland Security and a non-profit known as the Center for Internet Security to both shore up security for elections and flag posts for censorship in the lead up to and aftermath of the election, or removing people for being skeptical about a vaccine utilizing new technology with no long-term testing conducted, censorship has been a hotly contested topic since the 2020 lockdowns.
Now, a group of 136 of journalists, intellectuals, scientists, and others have signed The Westminster Declaration which calls on government to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and to refrain from censoring politically motivated speech, dissenting voices, and political opinion.
Signers include journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, Wikileak’s Julian Assange, actor Tim Robbins, whistleblower Edward Snowden, Jordan Peterson, and professor Jay Bhattacharya.
Julian #Assange and I are signatories of the #WestminsterDeclaration, which launched today. Thread.#FreeSpeech = #FreeAssange https://t.co/LEyFggZFrM pic.twitter.com/cbQRldxhPL
— Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) October 18, 2023
The Westminster Declaration, in part, reads:
Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’
This complex often operates through direct government policies. Authorities in India[1] and Turkey[2] have seized the power to remove political content from social media. The legislature in Germany[3] and the Supreme Court in Brazil[4] are criminalising political speech. In other countries, measures such as Ireland’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill[5], Scotland’s Hate Crime Act[6], the UK’s Online Safety Bill[7], and Australia’s ‘Misinformation’ Bill[8] threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.
But the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through de-platforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance. They have done so with the full support of ‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers’ in the mainstream media, who have abandoned the journalistic values of debate and intellectual inquiry.
As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society. Soon, the European Union’s Digital Services Act will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.
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There also exists a clear and robust international protection for free speech. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)[11] was drafted in 1948 in response to atrocities committed during World War II. Article 19 of the UDHR states, ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’ While there may be a need for governments to regulate some aspects of social media, such as age limits, these regulations should never infringe on the human right to freedom of expression.
Censorship in the name of ‘preserving democracy’ inverts what should be a bottom-up system of representation into a top-down system of ideological control. This censorship is ultimately counter-productive: it sows mistrust, encourages radicalization, and de-legitimizes the democratic process.
The Declaration calls on governments to:
We call on governments and international organisations to fulfill their responsibilities to the people and to uphold Article 19 of the UDHR.
We call on tech corporations to undertake to protect the digital public square as defined in Article 19 of the UDHR and refrain from politically motivated censorship, the censorship of dissenting voices, and censorship of political opinion.
We call on the general public to join us in the fight to preserve the people’s democratic rights. Legislative changes are not enough. We must also build an atmosphere of free speech from the ground up by rejecting the climate of intolerance that encourages self-censorship and that creates unnecessary personal strife for many. Instead of fear and dogmatism, we must embrace inquiry and debate.
The following are the signers of the Declaration:
Matt Taibbi, Journalist, US
Michael Shellenberger, Public, US
Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist, NYU, US
John McWhorter, Linguist, Columbia, Author, US
Steven Pinker, Psychologist, Harvard, US
Julian Assange, Editor, Founder of Wikileaks, Australia
Tim Robbins, Actor, Filmmaker, US
Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, NYLS, US
Glenn Loury, Economist, USA
Richard Dawkins, Biologist, UK
John Cleese, Comedian, Acrobat, UK
Slavoj Žižek, Philosopher, Author, Slovenia
Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University, US
Oliver Stone, Filmmaker, US
Edward Snowden, Whistleblower, US
Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, USA
Stella Assange, Campaigner, UK
Glenn Greenwald, Journalist, US
Claire Fox, Founder of the Academy of Ideas, UK
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Psychologist, Author, Canada
Bari Weiss, Journalist, USA
Peter Hitchens, Author, Journalist, UK
Niall Ferguson, Historian, Stanford, UK
Matt Ridley, Journalist, Author, UK
Melissa Chen, Journalist, Spectator, Singapore/US
Yanis Varoufakis, Economist, Greece
Peter Boghossian, Philosopher, Founding Faculty Fellow, University of Austin, US
Michael Shermer, Science Writer, US
Alan Sokal, Professor of Mathematics, UCL, UK
Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, Oxford, UK
Jay Bhattacharya, Professor, Stanford, US
Martin Kulldorf, Professor of Medicine (on leave), Harvard, US
Aaron Kheiriaty, Psychiatrist, Author, USA
Chris Hedges, Journalist, Author, USA
Lee Fang, Independent Journalist, US
Alex Gutentag, Journalist, US
Iain McGilchrist, Psychiatrist, Philosopher, UK
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Human Rights Activist, Author, Netherlands
Konstantin Kisin, Author, UK
Leighton Woodhouse, Public, US
Andrew Lowenthal, liber-net, Australia
Aaron Mate, Journalist, USA
Izabella Kaminska, Journalist, The Blind Spot, UK
Nina Power, Writer, UK
Kmele Foster, Journalist, Media Entrepreneur, USA
Toby Young, Journalist, Free Speech Union, UK
Winston Marshall, Journalist, The Spectator, UK
Jacob Siegel, Tablet, US/Israel
Ulrike Guerot, Founder of European Democracy Lab, Germany
Heather E. Heying, Evolutionary Biologist, USA
Bret Weinstein, Evolutionary Biologist, USA
Martina Pastorelli, Independent Journalist, Italy
Leandro Narloch, Independent Journalist, Brazil
Ana Henkel, Independent Journalist, Brazil
Mia Ashton, Journalist, Canada
Micha Narberhaus, The Protopia Lab, Spain/Germany
Alex Sheridan, Free Speech Ireland
Ben Scallan, Gript Media, Ireland
Thomas Fazi, Independent Journalist, Italy
Jean F. Queralt, Technologist, Founder @ The IO Foundation, Malaysia/Spain
Phil Shaw, Campaigner, Operation People, New Zealand
Jeremy Hildreth, Independent, UK
Craig Snider, Independent, US
Eve Kay, TV Producer, UK
Helen Joyce, Journalist, UK
Dietrich Brüggemann, Filmmaker, Germany
Adam B. Coleman, Founder of Wrong Speak Publishing, US
Helen Pluckrose, Author, US
Michael Nayna, Filmmaker, Australia
Paul Rossi, Educator, Vertex Partnership Academics, US
Juan Carlos Girauta, Politician, Spain
Andrew Neish, KC, UK
Steven Berkoff, Actor, Playright, UK
Patrick Hughes, Artist, UK
Adam Creighton, Journalist, Australia
Julia Hartley-Brewer, Journalist, UK
Robert Cibis, Filmmaker, Germany
Piers Robinson, Organization for Propaganda Studies, UK
Dirk Pohlmann, Journalist, Germany
Mathias Bröckers, Author, Journalist, Germany
Kira Phillips, Documentary Filmmaker, UK
Diane Atkinson, Historian, Biographer, UK
Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck, University of London, Canada
Laura Dodsworth, Journalist and Author, UK
Nellie Bowles, Journalist, USA
Andrew Tettenborn, Professor of Law, Swansea University, UK
Julius Grower, Fellow, St. Hugh’s College, UK
Nick Dixon, Comedian, UK
Dominic Frisby, Comedian, UK
James Orr, Associate Professor, University of Cambridge, UK
Brendan O’Neill, Journalist, UK
Andrew Roberts, Historian, UK
Robert Tombs, Historian, UK
Ben Schwarz, Journalist, USA
Xavier Azalbert, Investigative Scientific Journalist, France
Doug Stokes, International Relations Professor, University of Exeter, UK
James Allan, Professor of Law, University of Queensland, UK
David McGrogan, Professor of Law, Northumbria University, UK
Jacob Mchangama, Author, Denmark
Nigel Biggar, Chairman, Free Speech Union, UK
David Goodhart, Journalist, Author, UK
Catherine Austin Fitts, The Solari Report, Netherlands
Matt Goodwin, Politics Professor, University of Kent, UK
Catherine Liu, Cultural Theorist, Author, USA
Stefan Millius, Journalist, Switzerland
Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law, Columbia, USA
Rueben Kirkham, Co-Director, Free Speech Union of Australia, Australia
Jeffrey Tucker, Author, USA
Sarah Gon, Director, Free Speech Union, South Africa
Dara Macdonald, Co-Director, Free Speech Union, Australia
Jonathan Ayling, Chief Executive, Free Speech Union, New Zealand
David Zweig, Journalist, Author, USA
Juan Soto Ivars, Author, Spain
Colin Wright, Evolutionary Biologist, USA
Gad Saad, Professor, Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist, Author, Canada
Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, USA
Jill Glasspool-Malone, PhD., USA
Jordi Pigem, Philosopher, Author, Spain
Holly Lawford-Smith, Associate Professor in Political Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Australia
Michele Santoro, Journalist, TV host, Presenter, Italy
Dr. James Smith, Podcaster, Literature Scholar, RHUL, UK
Francis Foster, Comedian, UK
Coleman Hughes, Writer, Podcaster, USA
Marco Bassani, Political Theorist, Historian, Milan University, Italy
Isabella Loiodice, Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Bari, Italy
Luca Ricolfi, Professor, Sociologist, Turin University, Italy
Marcello Foa, Journalist, Former President of Rai, Italy
Andrea Zhok, Philosopher, University of Milan, Italy
Paolo Cesaretti, Professor of Byzantine Civilization, University of Bergamo, Italy
Alberto Contri, Mass Media Expert, Italy
Carlo Lottieri, Philosopher, University of Verona, Italy
Alessandro Di Battista, Political activist, Writer, Italy
Paola Mastrocola, Writer, Italy
Carlo Freccero, Television Author, Media Expert, Italy
Giorgio Bianchi, Independent Journalist, Italy
Nello Preterossi, Professor, University of Salerno, Scientific Director of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies, Italy
Efrat Fenigson, Journalist, Podcaster, Israel
Eli Vieira, Journalist, Genetic Biologist, Brazil
Stephen Moore, Author and Analyst, Canada
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