South Africans, says Phillip de Wet, should reach political consensus on implementing a “Great (Political) Internet Wall”, à la China, to shut out social media platforms.
An urgent mental health intervention is needed for Phillip de Wet, who lately earns his crust as News24’s foreign editor. He appears to be suffering from an acute case of authoritarianism, which is a recognised psychological condition.
In psychology, the term ‘authoritarian personality’ can be applied to people who are disposed to respond to authority figures with unquestioning obedience and respect, or, conversely, to those who are strict and demanding towards others.
Authoritarianism in individuals is associated with anxiety caused by the perception that the world is dangerous and out of their control. In governments, it is often caused by the response to a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens. In recent years, we’ve had a large dose of both disease and threats to safety and security. I fear these stressors have addled De Wet’s mind.
I’m only half-kidding. I’ve known De Wet for a very long time, and though we haven’t spoken in ages, I consider him a friend. Back in the day when we worked together, I enjoyed bouncing arguments off him. I found him instinctively liberal-minded, incisive, and often very funny. I always thought he had a great head on his shoulders.
Now I’m not so sure anymore. By his own admission, he has slipped his liberal moorings and “become something approaching a censorship maximalist”, “to the point I now think South Africa should get politically ready to shut off parts of the internet”.
Radical position
This is a pretty radical position to take, and it is an impossible position to take while still being considered even remotely liberal. This is straight out of the authoritarian playbooks of repressive states like China and Russia.
He describes how his own beliefs about free speech eroded gradually over the years into an acceptance that minimal censorship, “only where there is direct, tangible harm”, was justifiable, but that this view burgeoned last week into a full-blown pro-censorship position.
The tipping point, he says, was “when Facebook’s parent company chose to change its approach to fact-checking in light of the election of Donald Trump”. (For more on that story, see here.)
If you have a News24 subscription, you can read De Wet’s entire column here.
It includes some meandering musings on the role of journalism, and whether expert fact-checking can ever stem the tide of mis- and disinformation. (Misinformation being claims that are merely mistaken, and disinformation being claims that are intentionally dishonest.)
He notes that in a world that relies on fact-checkers, bad actors will simply go after the fact-checkers, to discredit them with claims of bias, or gatekeeping, or censoring information “they” don’t want us to know.
“Reluctantly in favour”
He says that he is “reluctantly in favour” of Meta’s move to back away from fact-checking information on its social media platforms, in favour of a user-driven system similar to the community notes of X (formerly Twitter).
(As a practical aside, I never thought social media platforms should have gone into the fact-checking business in the first place. They had a legitimate claim not to be liable for user content, until they started moderating that content. Fact-checking or moderating billions of messages per day is a practical impossibility and a financial black hole. Inevitably, most content will fall through the cracks, while moderation will be delegated to massive sweat shops in cheap-labour countries where people speak English poorly and where context, humour, satire, sarcasm and parody go way over the moderator’s head.)
De Wet is correct, of course, to note that Meta’s change in policy drips with obsequious acquiescence to US president-elect Donald Trump’s right-wing politics. It is a craven admission that Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has no principles and is willing to do anything to curry political favour.
De Wet doesn’t think the move he is (reluctantly) in favour of will actually work, however. “[S]elf-policing by way of community notes… just takes us back to the ‘more speech is always better’ nonsense, with a few extra steps.”
Shutting down Facebook
Disillusioned with free speech, community moderation, and expert fact-checking alike, he drops his bombshell: “Somebody in government needs to start championing the idea of digital sovereignty and running the education campaigns around what it means in practice. To wit, shutting down Facebook if necessary.”
His reason? Now that Meta, which owns Facebook, has joined Elon Musk’s X in bending the knee to Trump, De Wet says: “Entire platforms can become hostile to the values South Africa holds dear, or can be weaponised in favour of a particular ideology.”
He adds: “That the current non-US targets for Musk are Britain and Germany, and that Zuckerberg has shown little interest in the world beyond America, is neither here nor there when it comes to preparedness. Judging when it might be necessary to ban Facebook, or X, or TikTok, is another impossible problem … [b]ut judging the time when we need to be thinking about it urgently is not hard at all.”
So, to be clear, De Wet is proposing to entrust South Africa’s government with deciding when, and why, and for how long, large parts of the internet ought to be blocked in South Africa.
If he is willing to concede such power to the government, he must be willing to hand that power to whomever the government delegates it to. Would he trust Fikile Mbalula with this task? Or Iqbal Survé? Or Khumbudzo Ntshavheni? Or Aaron Motsoaledi? Or Gwede Mantashe? Or Gayton McKenzie? Or Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma?
Trump treatment
Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial written by Mark Dubowitz and Elaine Dezenski of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “South Africa needs the Trump treatment,” read the headline, followed by, “The ANC has been too cozy for too long with the West’s enemies.” (The link to the WSJ article is for subscribers only, unfortunately.)
I entirely agree with the sentiment, although I would be reluctant to endorse foreign intervention in the form of trade penalties or sanctions to interfere in this country’s sovereign foreign policy.
I’m certain that South Africa’s government does not share the view expressed in this article, however, and that it would mightily resent any foreign interference in its friendly relations with the world’s terrorists, despots and basket cases.
How should the government respond? Should it deploy the censorship powers that De Wet wants to cede to it? Should it ban the Wall Street Journal in South Africa, or ban social media platforms that distribute and discuss the article?
It would be nice to think that our government would act always in the best interests of the people, and of the country. That would be a terribly naïve assumption, however, and I did not take De Wet to be naïve.
What does it mean to be “hostile to the values South Africa holds dear”? Whose values, exactly, is De Wet talking about? Is he sure that the government’s values are indeed aligned with the values the rest of us hold dear?
The ANC (which despite the formation of a government of national unity still runs the show) values things like the National Democratic Revolution, and solidarity with socialist nations formerly or presently oppressed by capitalist powers. It considers the Western values of liberal democracy and free markets to be “hostile to the values South Africa holds dear”.
Should our “Great (Political) Internet Wall”, as De Wet calls it, block foreign propaganda which the ANC considers to be anathema?
Authoritarian nightmare
In China, the Great Internet Firewall has “protected” the Chinese people from the degenerate culture and hostile political propaganda of foreigners. The consequence is the rise of a generation of young, patriotic nationalists who will not tolerate dissent. The regime has turned everyone into authoritarians.
Is that what De Wet wants for South Africa?
There is no easy solution to mis- and disinformation in a free world. I sympathise with De Wet’s frustration. It is up to each of us to verify sources, evaluate their credibility, and consult multiple alternative views, before we make important decisions based on information we gleaned online.
But this is not a new problem. In the old days, the crisis was that anyone could acquire a printing press and flood the polity with mis- and disinformation. In response, authoritarian governments assumed the power to banish pamphleteers, close printing presses, ban books, or shut down newspapers when they considered them to be hostile to the values the government held dear.
I’m sure De Wet would have vigorously opposed such censorship back then. The only difference now is that information flows even faster and even more freely. But that is no reason to conclude that the pro-censorship authorities were right all along.
I’m afraid De Wet stepped on a slippery slope, and promptly fell all the way down into an authoritarian nightmare. Someone, please throw him a rope.
[Photo: Take Away My Freedom.webp CAPTION: A protester demands that his freedom be taken away. Photo manipulation by Thomas Blanton of the Project for a New American Revolution. Used under CC BY 2.0 licence.]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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