US values must not trump valid concerns about social media

Times

10 hours ago

In December 2020, Helen McEntee, then the justice minister, announced her intention to bring forward new legislation to combat incitement to hatred and hate crime the following year. She made this promise at the launch of the findings of a public consultation that attracted more than 3,600 submissions.
She stated that, after in-depth meetings with various civil society and community groups, academics and experts, her aim was to identify how Ireland's law in this area could be improved, based on a clear understanding of the experiences of those affected by hate speech and hate crime.
McEntee ultimately proposed that the new law would cover both incitement to hatred and hate crime with the latter offences being aggravated versions of existing crimes. The idea was that offences against the person, criminal damage or public order offences — when they were carried out because of prejudice against a protected characteristic — would be criminalised.
Close to four years after first mooting the legislation, and with a general election looming, McEntee dropped her plan, claiming the incitement to hatred element of the criminal justice bill did not have a consensus. It would be dealt with, in that classic Irish tradition, at a later time.
The hate speech element had caused unease within her Fine Gael party and coalition partner Fianna Fail, and was criticised by various backbenchers, opposition parties and independents, free speech groups and even the world's richest man, Elon Musk.
• Ireland's 'vague' anti-hate law threatens flood of court challenges
Six weeks later, Donald Trump won the United States presidential election — and on free speech, like much else, the world turned. As Patrick O'Donoghue reveals in today's paper, the US State Department has recently warned Irish regulators against pressuring American tech companies to limit, or what it more evocatively calls chill, free speech following a meeting with the Irish media commissioner, Coimisiun na Mean, and officials from the Department of Justice.
Ireland is an important battleground in the global culture war that is free speech because of the American social media giants headquartered in Dublin. All have proven hostile to any attempts to hold them liable for what is posted on their platforms, no matter how heinous or potentially libellous the context.
All have also been brought to heel by the Trump administration. Their chief executives were only too happy to line up like lapdogs to have their picture taken with Trump at his inauguration, having stumped up large amounts of coin to contribute to the costs of the festivities.
• Who's who in Trump's tech bro club
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google and Elon Musk of X (and much else besides) were centre stage while TikTok's Shou Zi Chew also put in an appearance. Earlier that month, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was to get rid of fact checkers and dramatically reduce the amount of what he called 'censorship' on its platforms.
Facebook kicked Trump off its platform in the aftermath of the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, which led Trump to call Facebook 'an enemy of the people'. Once the American people re-elected Trump, however, Zuckerberg was only too keen to ingratiate himself back into the president's capricious good books.
Musk donated some $300 million to Trump's election campaign and, notwithstanding the pair's rather hilarious X spat last week, must be delighted at how the administration so clearly aligns with his views on hate speech, ie there is literally nothing that cannot be said on his platform.
The US secretary of state, the sycophantic Marco Rubio — a man with no principle he won't change — recently announced a view to impose visa bans on foreign nationals it deems to be censoring Americans. He has rather weirdly tied this into a touchstone for the security of the country, something he also did when supporting Trump's tariffs.
The delegation that came to Ireland to dissuade regulators from doing anything that might cause American tech giants even the slightest discomfort was led by one of Rubio's chief advisers, Samuel Samson, who complained that Europe had devolved into a 'hotbed of digital censorship'. He accused Europe of democratic backsliding, whatever that is, claiming that it affected American security and the free speech rights of US citizens and companies.
Whatever about security concerns — and it seems there is no policy, no matter how esoteric or insignificant, that the Trump administration won't link to the country's security — Americans have always been protective of their first amendment rights to freedom of expression.
Flag-burning, money in politics, pornography, school prayer, mobile phone data, protests at funerals, document leaks and anti-war protests have all gone before the US Supreme Court. While that court has been somewhat haphazard in its judgments over the years, the overriding consistency about free speech cases is that the government can limit free speech if it poses a clear and present danger. Beyond that, almost everything else is fair game.
In that context, the Trump administration now wants to flex its free speech muscles globally — and Ireland is as good a place as any to start. Trump started a metaphorical war on tariffs that has caused division in the European Union as individual states try to protect their patches, including Ireland, as Simon Harris, the tanaiste, showed last week in seeking exemptions from the EU in terms of tariff retaliation.
Another war over any European plans to enforce new laws on social media platforms is also brewing, with ominous threats of sanctions. When McEntee first mooted the idea of combating incitement to hatred through legislation, she framed it in the context of the fundamental right to freedom of expression. There are completely differing interpretations of how far this fundamental right goes in Europe and America.
Under Trump, the US has constantly asserted that it will pursue policies that are in America's interests. Those who come to lobby on its behalf should be told that Ireland and the EU follow their own path.