They Do Not Hide It: Another Top Politician Wants To Clamp Down On Free Speech

Former US Secretary of State John Kerry wants to limit free speech on social media because it prevents the creation of “consensus” and makes it "really hard to govern".

Kerry, a long-time top politician in the US Democratic Party, took part in a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on green energy last week and was asked at the end by a member of the audience what should be done to push back against disinformation about climate change circulating online. In the WEF community, anything that challenges the postulates underlying the climate crisis is considered misinformation or disinformation on the subject. As we've written before (see e.g. here, here, or here), the objections can be entirely fact-based, and made by world-renowned academics – but if they don't fit with today's general climate catastrophe stance, they are being called misinformation or disinformation.

In order to counter such truthful yet inappropriate information, in his own view and that of today's power circles more broadly, Kerry felt it important in his response to stress that this kind of plurality of assertions or opinions is in fact a 'problem' in a democracy. “It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It's really hard to govern today,” Kerry said. In the past, he said, we had 'referees' who determined what was fact and what was not fact. What Kerry was probably referring to was the fact that, in the pre-internet and pre-social media era, the mass media was one-way and there was no meaningful way of challenging what was being said by an ordinary person in front of a wider audience. Thanks to social media, the situation is quite different. “And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle," Kerry added.

According to Kerry, a 'major block' to ending this situation is the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech. “You know there's a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you're going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they're putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” Kerry said, adding that he hopes the elections will be successful in getting enough votes to remove this constitutional obstacle.

Kerry is a long-time top politician in the US Democratic Party, having served as a senator for decades and as the party's presidential candidate in 2004. In President Barack Obama's administration, Kerry served as Secretary of State from 2013 to 2017, and now, in President Joe Biden's administration, until March this year, as a climate envoy, tasked with travelling the world and negotiating on climate issues with representatives of other countries.

In other words – once again we can see that this is no average Joe pushing for censorship but a member of the absolute political elite. And the sad thing is that Kerry is, of course, not the only top figure in the Western political world who wants to clamp down on free speech on social media. We recently wrote about the growing pressure from the powers that be to control Elon Musk's X and the continued suppression of free speech on it, using the example of several top US and European politicians. For example, Robert Reich, a professor at the University of California in the US, former Secretary of Labor in the Bill Clinton administration, and still an influential member of the Democratic Party, recently published an op-ed in The Guardian suggesting that in order to get Musk and X under control, regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest.

We can already witness that such government pressure is effective if we look at what has happened with X in Brazil. Although the platform initially tried to resist the state's censorship demands and not restrict or delete the accounts of pro-opposition users, they essentially gave up last week and started to comply with demands. The events show that the unprecedented state pressure to censor users, which has seen X banned in the country, company representatives threatened with arrest, fines imposed on both X and those who attempted to use X despite the ban, seizure of property from Musk's other companies, etc., has borne fruit.