The raise of totalitarian extremist far-leftism has brought with itself an ever-increasing wave of censorship coming from ever higher and higher governmental authorities. In fact, in many European countries and even the European Union itself censorship is being actively discussed and proposed.
The reason for this is quite clear: Totalitarianism cannot survive without censorship. It cannot survive without suppressing dissent and criticism. It cannot survive if it doesn't silence those who would speak against it.
For quite many years the go-to excuse to justify censorship was to remove "hate speech" from online social media and other forums. Everything they didn't like was "hate speech", anything that criticized their policies and principles, pretty much regardless of what it was.
Mind you, the notion of criminalizing and censoring "hate speech" (even if it wasn't described by those exact words) is not new in the post-World-War-2 Europe. There have been proposals for such laws since almost immediately the big war ended, and decades since. However, quite notoriously most if not all European countries categorically rejected such proposals as unconstitutional, as being fundamentally against the ideals of liberty and human rights. Freedom of speech does not exist to protect your right to express agreeable opinions. It exists to protect your right to express dissenting opinions, even if they are offensive in someone's opinion.
It hasn't been but in the last 10 years or so that the political zeitgeist in Europe has shifted, at an ever increasing rate. Today several European governments are actually seriously considering enacting "hate speech laws" and censorship. Something those very countries rejected just 30-40 years ago.
But since the far left just loves to play with words, and that term "hate speech" has become a bit stale and less and less people are taking it seriously anymore, they have come up with a new pet word to justify their attempts at censorship: "Misinformation."
Apparently spreading "misinformation" is such a huge crime against humanity, freedom, democracy and human rights that it must be censored!
The funny thing is that trying to censor "misinformation" makes significantly less sense than trying to censor "hate speech". At least with so-called "hate speech" you could make a somewhat rational argument why it should be removed from online forums and social media (and it's mostly dependent on how strongly you support the concept of freedom of speech whether you agree with that or not).
Not so much with so-called "misinformation". Any argument you could make for trying to remove and censor "misinformation" from online forums is significantly weaker than for "hate speech".
But that's their new pet word, and every leftist news outlet is repeating it like a broken record.
Of course we all know that by "misinformation" they mean "anything that we don't like, which goes against our goals, policies and principles." They are so transparent about this that they could just as well admit it directly. They are just using that label, "misinformation", for every idea and claim they don't like.
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