(25) Not undemocratic, not illiberal

By Onno Hansen-Staszyński | Last Updated: 21 January 2025

A U.S. perspective on the concept of disinformation is on the rise that is uncomfortable for all those who subscribe to the EU’s Digital Services Act. The core claim of this perspective is that state-inspired initiatives to counteract disinformation are often politically biased and equal censorship. As an illustration of this perspective, I’ll present two recent examples.

Two examples

A U.S. House of Representatives Report states (pdf): “This interim report details the monthslong campaign by the Biden White House to coerce large companies, /…/ to censor books, videos, posts, and other content online. By the end of 2021, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon changed their content moderation policies in ways that were directly responsive to criticism from the Biden Administration. While the Biden White House’s pressure campaign largely succeeded, its effects were devastating. By suppressing free speech and intentionally distorting public debate in the modern town square, ideas and policies were no longer fairly tested and debated on their merits. Instead, /…/ the Biden Administration and other officials needlessly imposed harm and suffering on Americans across the country.”

The Chairman of the U.S. Congress House Small Business Committee, Roger Williams, declared: “The committee uncovered a vast networks of non-profits, research groups, and other entities that receive government funding with the goal of stopping misinformation. As these groups attempt to define what is true, there are many voices and businesses whose reach is being reduced simply because they believe something that is against the mainstream narrative. /…/ To put this plain and simple, the government has been caught collaborating with private entities to censor narratives that they don’t like.”

GEC

The perspective is more than just talk. In December 2024, “[t]he legislative authority for the Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which carries out activities to counter foreign disinformation and propaganda and coordinates related interagency efforts, terminated”. This termination follows up on “criticism by some Members of Congress for its connections to partner organizations accused of restricting free speech on digital platforms in the United States”.

Defensive reactions

The opposition to Meta’s decision sounds defensive. A European Commission spokesperson for instance declared: “We absolutely refute any claims of censorship.” And the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) stated: “Fact-checking is not censorship, far from that, fact-checking adds speech to public debates, it provides context and facts for every citizen to make up their own mind. Fact-checking has been proven to be effective in countering misinformation time and again. Equating fact-checking with censorship is a false and malicious claim. Fact-checkers do not ‘censor’ anyone. Our members investigate and publish the evidence of claims potentially being false. It has always been Meta’s decision what to do with the content fact-checkers label, not ours.“ The Chair of the EFCSN added: “This seems more a politically motivated move made in the context of the incoming administration of Donald Trump in the United States than an evidence-based decision”.

Counter perspective

EFCSN’s Chair summarizes the main line of defence against the opposing U.S. perspective: you are not evidence-based. The European Commission uses the same perspective when examining X and its decision to turn to a system of user-generated comments on content (Community Notes) rather than fact-checking by paid professionals: “Whatever model a platform chooses needs to be effective, and this is what we’re looking at… So we are checking the effectiveness of the measures or content moderation policies adopted and implemented by platforms here in the EU”. That, and the criteria of transparency and accountability. This seems to be grounded in the supposed mutual exclusivity of “fact-speaking” versus “belief-speaking”: while the counter perspective claims to be guided by facts and scientific methods of research, the opposing U.S. perspective seemingly wants free speech to play out freely with all of its underlying messy feelings, instincts, personal values, gut notions, common sense, and intuition.

Challenging situation for VLOPs

The perceived mutual exclusivity of “fact-speaking” and “belief speaking” is likely to create a challenging situation for very large online platforms (VLOPs). In the European Union VLOPs are guided by the DSA. According to the DSA, the platforms are held accountable for their efforts of dealing with illegal content and so-called “lawful but awful” content. As EU DisinfoLab writes (pdf): “Platforms must act on non-illegal content in order to mitigate systemic risks [and] apply their own terms and conditions”. In the opposing U.S. perspective it is interventions against mis- and disinformation that trigger accountability for very big platforms since they transform VLOPs from forums into publishers (see Trump’s Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship).

This situation is untenable. None of the possible outcomes are desirable: a total victory for one of the perspectives or a stalemate potentially leading to serious conflicts.

No mutual exclusivity

Both “fact-speaking” and “belief-speaking” are needed in a liberal democratic society to be able to translate an analysis of what “is” to a decision on what “ought” to be done (see blog post nineteen). This means that we cannot limit free speech to fact-based speech alone, neither can we limit it to whatever a person “authentically” thinks. What is needed is a position that salvages the most valuable elements from both perspectives. A first step is to identify which elements in the current positions are not constructive to come to a more balanced perspective.

Illiberal democrats

At the extreme end of the opposing U.S. perspective are the illiberal democrats. They are willing to sacrifice liberal processes and institutions without much hesitation to further the cause of responsiveness to “the people”. Their low regard for democratic processes and institutions is an unacceptable threat to liberal democracy. Also, the most radical version of their view on reality is destructive. According to Stephen Lewandowsky in this view “truth is a personal experience, based entirely on intuition”. Lewandowsky call this a shift to “an unbounded constructivism” and sees it as “the most critical aspect of the current “post-truth” malaise”: it precludes any mechanism to overcome political positions and come to an agreement. A scary solution to this is to appoint a person, a party, or an institution as the embodiment of the will of the people, uniquely capable of channelling all authentic speech into policy-decisions, thereby reducing the chaos to a dichotomy of being either with the will of the people or against.

According to me, the big take-away from this is that we should not elevate freedom of speech to the status of the ultimate. Personal experiences are crucially important and should have their rightful place in a liberal democracy but cannot be the only building block. We should also deny any person or institution the right to claim access to an absolute and binding political truth.

Undemocratic liberals

At the extreme end of the counter perspective are the undemocratic liberals. They are willing to sacrifice responsiveness to individuals and citizen well-being to safeguard the integrity of institutions and procedures. The Dutch childcare benefits scandal is an illustration of that. The Dutch parliamentary investigative committee on the Dutch state approach to fraud (pdf) concluded that “in a hardened political and societal climate, the three branches of government have been blind to people and the law. As a result, lives of individuals have been crushed. The committee finds it painful that precisely the system of social security and allowances, intended to support people, has wreaked havoc on those very individuals. The government and parliament have failed, the implementation has acted unlawfully, and the judiciary has fallen short in providing protection to people. As a consequence, fundamental rights of individuals have been violated, and the rule of law has been set aside.”

Perceived focus on processes and institutions

The undemocratic liberal position seems to seep sometimes through in the European Union’s approach to disinformation. For instance, the European Commission writes on the public harm that is assumed to be a potential effect of mis- and disinformation: “Public harm includes threats to democratic processes as well as to public goods such as Union citizens’ health, environment or security.” (Action Plan against Disinformation - pdf) And: “Disinformation erodes trust in institutions and in digital and traditional media, and harms our democracies by hampering the ability of citizens to take informed decisions.” (Tackling online disinformation: a European Approach). As my wife and I note in our upcoming book Interdemocracy: “‘Processes’ and ‘institutions’ in both instances are mentioned first, rather than the direct effect on the experiences of citizens.” For those who stipulate the existence of a deep state, the focus on protecting processes and institutions reeks of self-protection of the deep state.

This is not to say that the European Union is actually prioritizing processes and institutions over citizen well-being. Rather, it is to point out that the optics are wrong. It should be crystal clear that the focus of dealing with information threats should be on protecting society rather than the state, as I wrote earlier in this blog. By doing so, it also becomes clear that governmental administrations function as an independent referee or counsellor rather than as a direct party in dealing with information threats.

Paternalism

At the moment, a strong paternalistic current exists in contemporary thinking on human rights of which illiberal democrats are an example. Within this current, individuals are seen “not as a self-willing moral agent but as a needy individual whose vital interests need protection … this reconceptualization of rights opens the door for a paternalistic political practice, in which an external, third party “exercises” the rights rather than the rights-bearing subject himself”.

It is not uncommon to encounter this view by those who see “the masses”, the lesser educated, or the vulnerable as gullible and thus in need of protection against information threats. The same disdain can be found for instance in the domain of technology innovation and adult education (see blog post seventeen).

This air of paternalism is to be abstained from. The essence of liberal democracy is that all animals are equal, not that some animals are more equal than others.

True fact-speaking

Kneejerk reactions to opposing perspectives are to be avoided. Rather than defending a “fact-speaking” perspective with seeming “belief-speaking”, it is essential for “fact-speakers” to resort to evidence, just as the European Commission is doing with regard to X’s Community Notes. Not that there is anything wrong with “belief-speaking” but is cannot be used while credibly defending “fact-speaking”.

In a provocative text, Jacob Mchangama, Executive Director at The Future of Free Speech, writes: “Some studies suggest that crowdsourced fact-checking can rival expert fact-checking. A University of California, San Diego study of Covid-related “community notes” on X revealed a 96% accuracy rate, with 87% citing high-quality sources. Other studies show that crowdsourcing increases trust in fact-checking. Cornell research, meanwhile, has highlighted how crowdsourced fact-checking in Taiwan, for example, often outperforms traditional fact-checkers at debunking pro-Chinese disinformation.”

He also points at another research outcome: “According to our report, a staggering majority of the content removed from platforms like Facebook and YouTube in France, Germany, and Sweden was legally permissible. We examined deleted comments from 60 of the largest Facebook pages and YouTube channels in these countries, revealing that, depending on the platform and country, between 87.5% and 99.7% of the removed content was legal. Now, platforms have long banned “lawful but awful” content. But our study showed that over 56% of the deleted comments were merely general expressions of opinion, and not remotely offensive or hateful.”

Resilience Councils’ raison d’etre

In order to avoid the perception of being politically biased and inflicting censorship when dealing with information threats, the European Union may not allow its institutions to seem to act as if they are merely defending themselves, to seem paternalistic, or to allow for the deletion of legal expressions of opinion.

A fundamental step in this direction is the installation of Resilience Councils. It should not be state institutions by themselves deciding whether information incidents and campaigns constitute a sufficient threat against society - and the individuals who constitute society - to trigger a need to intervene and if so, how to intervene proportionally. Representatives from society should have a decisive say in this.

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