[D66] Macron voert internet censuur in

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/08/fran-j08.html

Anti-“fake news” bill gives French state unchecked Internet censorship
powers
By Alex Lantier
8 June 2018

On Thursday, the National Assembly began debating French President
Emmanuel Macron’s draconian bill empowering the state to censor the
Internet during the three months prior to any national election. The
bill marks a vast new attack on freedom of speech, amid a wave of
threats to Internet freedom worldwide based on the pretext of fighting
“fake news.”

The bill would allow candidates and political parties to take articles
and Internet statements to court, where judges could force Internet
service providers to censor material by declaring that they believed it
to be “fake news.” Due to the French president’s broad powers to name
and control the promotion of top magistrates, the French judiciary is
widely acknowledged to be dependent on the executive. The bill thus
places enormous power over the Internet in the hands of the president.

The bill defines “fake news” not as information that is false, but as
“any allegation or implying of a fact without providing verifiable
information that makes it plausible.”

This anti-democratic definition poses vast dangers to legitimate
journalism and political activity by removing any obligation on the
state to prove that a statement is, in fact, false and harmful before
taking legal action to suppress it. It lets judges order that legally
protected speech be censored simply by asserting that they personally do
not believe it to be convincing. It also allows judges to censor any
article based on confidential sources such as whistleblowers on the
grounds that the information contained in the article is not “verifiable.”

The bill grants the Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) powers to censor
and suspend television stations that are “controlled by a foreign state
or under its influence.” This paves the way for the banning of media
outlets such as the Russian state-backed RT and Sputnik.

While the bill purports to limit its reach to the three months before
elections, a press campaign is underway to demand that no time limit be
placed on these powers. When asked by “20 Minutes” whether he supported
the bill, Sorbonne Professor François Jost replied: “The real question
is why would this law go into effect only during election campaigns…
Claiming that you can just tell any old lie at a certain time but not at
another is absurd.”

In France, opposition parties across the spectrum of official politics
have criticized Macron’s bill, aware not only that censorship is
unpopular, but also that Macron could turn it against them. Marine Le
Pen of the neo-fascist National Front called the bill “a danger to
liberty” in a column for Causeur, while Stalinist deputy Elsa Faucillon
warned that it “set up the idea of an official truth.” Right-wing
parliamentarian Christian Jacob said Macron was establishing “thought
police.”

The bill moves France toward a situation where the state can censor the
Internet at will. The justification advanced by Macron and his
supporters in an attempt to give the bill a quasi-democratic veneer is
the claim that Macron suffered intolerable damage to his reputation when
his electoral rival in last year’s presidential run-off, Le Pen, alleged
in a TV debate that Macron had a hidden offshore bank account in the
Bahamas. This is a cynical pretext and political lie.

Le Pen’s allegation did not do significant damage to Macron. Voters
largely shrugged it off and Macron won the election by a large margin.
Now, however, broad sections of the press are trying to whip up outrage
at the fact that a neo-fascist made an unsourced accusation to justify
an attack on the freedom of expression of the entire population.

France does not need to pass a new law to make publishing false and
defamatory statements illegal. An 1881 law already provides for heavy
fines for making such statements.

What is driving Macron’s moves to censor the Internet is not outrage at
a few statements by Le Pen or RT, but fear of the growth of social anger
and anti-war sentiment. Ruling circles want to dictate the political
views to which masses of workers have access. This drive to remove
oppositional information and opinions from social media and the Internet
has taken its most virulent form in the collaboration of US tech firms
such as Google and Facebook with the US government.

On April 25 of last year, Google publicly announced that it would
implement an algorithm to exclude “fake news” from its search results
and then blacklisted socialist and anti-war web sites, including the
World Socialist Web Site. It refused to respond to press inquiries,
including from the New York Times, as to whether it was deliberately
targeting the WSWS, whose traffic coming from Google searches plummeted.
However, later that year Google executives publicly boasted that they
aimed to “improve” search results by blocking material from RT and
Sputnik News.

At the beginning of 2018, Facebook announced that it would de-prioritize
political news on its user feeds in favor of “personal moments.” It said
this would make Facebook “good for your well-being and for society.”

French officials planning mass Internet censorship are no less terrified
of public opinion. As Macron was preparing his censorship bill earlier
this year, a press campaign erupted denouncing the French people for
believing in “conspiracy theories.” The so-called “conspiracy theory”
that angered the press the most was the belief that NATO governments,
including that of France, work with the Islamist networks that carried
out terror attacks in Paris in 2015 and elsewhere in Europe since then.

That US and European intelligence agencies have poured billions of
dollars into the arming of Islamist militias that serve as proxies in
their war for regime-change in Syria is, however, not a paranoid
“conspiracy theory” or “fake news” produced by “Kremlin trolls,” but a
widely-reported fact.

Official circles are concerned that broader and broader layers of the
public are concluding that the “war on terror” and the French state of
emergency imposed after the terror attacks are based on lies. Mass
protests erupted in Barcelona last year shortly after the terror attack
there, in which demonstrators denounced Madrid’s complicity with the
terrorists.

Macron’s moves to censor the Internet are directly bound up with this
growth of political opposition and a revival of class struggle. Mass
strikes have broken out against Macron’s austerity policies among rail,
airline and energy workers, and dissatisfaction is growing among
strikers over the efforts of the unions to isolate these different
struggles to keep them from coming together in a common movement against
Macron. Strikes are breaking out across Europe, from teachers and rail
workers in Britain to airline workers in Spain and metal and autoworkers
in Germany and Turkey.

The United States has seen a wave of teachers’ strikes and protests
organized by rank-and-file educators independently of and largely in
opposition to the unions.

Fifty years after the May-June 1968 general strike brought French
capitalism to the verge of collapse, the ruling class again lives in
fear. Macron is well aware of the findings of the European Union’s
“Generation What” poll. It showed that after a decade of austerity, over
60 percent of youth in Europe are ready to participate in a “mass
uprising” against the established order. Moreover, two thirds of the
French population say the class struggle is a daily reality of life—20
percent more than on the eve of the 1968 general strike.

Under such conditions, imperialist policy makers and strategists
increasingly view public opinion in military terms. One EU strategist
wrote four years ago that since “the percentage of the population who
[are] poor and frustrated will continue to be very high, the tensions
between this world and the world of the rich [will] continue to
increase, with corresponding consequences. Since we will hardly be able
to overcome the origin of this problem… i.e., the functional defects of
society, we will have to protect ourselves more strongly.”

Macron’s attempt to censor the Internet in the guise of fighting “fake
news” is a key part of the desperate, anti-democratic maneuvers of the
ruling elite as it seeks to save itself from the growing threat of
social revolution.

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