Tears welled in the eyes of Linzi Smith as she explained, her voice shaking, why she can no longer attend Premier League soccer games at the stadium 10 minutes from her home to root for Newcastle United.
“I struggle to even come near the ground,” Smith told Toby Young of the Free Speech Union in a recent interview. “I get upset when I talk about it. I just don’t understand where it’s come from. I don’t know why someone’s gotten so offended by me just speaking my mind.”
Smith, a 34-year-old woman from Newcastle and a lifelong soccer fan, said she received an email from team security in November that her membership was suspended pending an investigation for an alleged hate crime. The investigation stemmed from tweets Smith had posted on X that she was told “could be seen as transphobic.”
Smith, who is gay and helps her mother run a tea shop to pay the bills, assumed the matter would soon be cleared up since she had not engaged in anything she considered “hate speech.”
She assumed wrongly. For tweets stating that transgender women are not really women, Smith was banned for the remainder of the season and the following two, a decision she described as “devastating.”
“I avoid the city now, especially if it’s match day,” she told Young. “I won’t even come down here and drink … every time I’m around here now, I’m just sick to my stomach, and I’m afraid of who’s around and who’s watching me.”
The fear Smith describes is understandable. Her life was upturned by social media comments. She was investigated and summarily found guilty (without being able to defend herself) by a soccer league.
The idea that the Premier League is monitoring the social media posts of fans in search of “wrongthink” and launching independent investigations is startling, and it led some to brand the league’s intelligence unit “the Stasi spy agency.”
“As a historian of the Gulag and the Soviet secret police, this is one of the most chilling things I could ever have imagined seeing in the U.K.,” Giles Udny, an English writer, said of Smith’s case. “No exaggeration — it is straight out of the NKVD/KGB/FSB playbook.”
Just how many fans have been similarly targeted is unclear, though the Free Speech Union told MailOnline it is likely “hundreds of fans, possibly thousands.”
And though comparisons to the Stasi and NKVD are imperfect — both organizations were formal police units operated by socialist states — there’s no question that the word chilling is appropriate.
In the United States, free expression is a right codified in the First Amendment of the Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” But it’s a value that existed well before the legal document was ratified and represents the foundation of a moral and tolerant people.
“Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression,” Albert Einstein observed in Ideas and Opinions. “In order that every man may present his views without penalty, there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.”
The effort to classify political dissent as “hate speech” and punish heretics for their supposed crimes is one of the most pernicious threats at work in the world today. It is a force rooted in dogmatism, not truth, and a thirst for control over others.
Historically, efforts to control speech have been employed by those with power to cement their own control. Those with power tend to be those in government and those closest to it, and it is they (and their supporters) who get to decide what speech qualifies as “hate” and “misinformation.”
The view that dangerous, hateful, or fascist speech should be disallowed — No Free Speech for Fascists, the title of a 2021 book declares — is itself a deeply fascistic view. This is evidenced in no small part by the fact that the most notable fascist states of the 20th century despised free expression and free speech, which undermined their stated and actual goals (unity and control, respectively).
The fact that many governments, including the United States, are now outsourcing their policing of language to private companies and institutions that share their views on what constitutes “hate speech” and “misinformation” is not a sign of progress. It’s but a pivot by authoritarians in their effort to control what is seen as true and false.
“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth,” George Orwell once observed.
Few could agree with this statement more than Linzi Smith, who is now banned from cheering for Newcastle United at St James’ Park after expressing her opinion that a biological man is not a woman.
The regulatory body that oversees broadcasting in Canada has opened a public consultation about potentially banning Fox News from cable TV. Initiated on May 3, the process was prompted by the LGBTQ advocacy group Egale Canada, which asked for the consultation in early April in response to a Tucker Carlson segment that, in their view, “aimed to provoke hatred and violence against 2SLGBTQI communities.”
“This programming is in clear violation of Canadian broadcasting standards and has no place on Canadian broadcasting networks,” wrote Executive Director Helen Kennedy in an open letter. “Egale has experienced firsthand the hate that is generated from a single segment aired on Fox News in Canada. We cannot begin to imagine the broader impacts and potential rise in hate that might result from allowing more content like this to air in Canada.”
“The CRTC maintains a list of international channels cable, satellite and IPTV providers can include in their packages,” the National Postexplains. And the list does change every now and then. “In March 2022,” the Post writes, “the CRTC removed Russia Today and RT France from the list, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Fox News was originally approved for Canadian viewers in 2004 and has been available in Canada ever since.
You Got a License for That?
The specific regulation Egale Canada is accusing Fox News of breaking is section 5(b) of the Television Broadcasting Regulations which prohibits broadcasts of “any abusive comment or abusive pictorial representation that, when taken in context, tends to or is likely to expose an individual or a group or class of individuals to hatred or contempt on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age or mental or physical disability.”
Prohibiting what amounts to hate speech on public television may sound somewhat reasonable, but it opens the door for considerable censorship, as this story illustrates. After all, who gets to define hate speech?
Now, we could quibble about this specific regulation and how it should be interpreted or whether it should even exist, but there’s a much bigger issue to highlight, namely, the issue of broadcasting regulations as such.
For context, radio and television broadcasters in Canada are heavily regulated, much more than most people realize.
For one, foreign ownership of broadcasters is significantly restricted. As University of Ottawa law professor Dr. Michael Geist notes, “The foreign ownership rules generally limit [broadcast] licensees to 20 percent foreign ownership (up to 33 percent for a holding company). This covers all types of broadcasters including television, radio, and broadcast distributors.”
There are also strict rules about the amount of Canadian content—often called CanCon—that broadcasters must feature. The Canadian YouTuber J.J. McCullough draws attention to these requirements in an article for the Washington Post. “It is thanks to the CRTC, for instance, that Canadian radio stations ‘must ensure that at least 35% of the Popular Music they broadcast each week is Canadian content,’” he writes, “and that Canadian television stations must ‘devote not less than 50 per cent of the evening broadcast period to the broadcasting of Canadian programs.’”
As you can imagine, there is a complex list of rules that specify exactly what is required for media to be considered “Canadian Content.” Many of the personnel involved must be Canadians, for instance, and at least 75% of program and post-production expenses must pay for services from Canadians or Canadian companies.
Notably, it was these CanCon requirements that prompted much of the backlash against the recently passed Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, which essentially aims at expanding these kinds of requirements to online platforms such as Netflix and YouTube. The legislation, originally called Bill C-10, has become quite contentious in Canada over the past few years because of the new powers it gives the government to regulate online content platforms.
Now, some proponents of Bill C-11 point out that the current system is rigged against legacy media and in favor of online content creators, and that Bill C-11 will level the playing field. I agree the current system is unfair in this regard. But the way to fix that is to deregulate legacy media, not to impose the same restrictions they face on new media.
Plain Old Protectionism
Deregulating the broadcasting industry may sound radical, but it’s actually the status quo that should be cause for concern. Though they are rarely labeled as such, the current broadcasting regulations in Canada essentially amount to a form of protectionism. Steven Globerman comments on these regulations in a refreshingly candid 2014 study published by the Fraser Institute.
“One of the longest standing shibboleths of Canadian public policy is that popular culture industries in Canada must be financially supported and protected by government if those industries are to survive,” he writes. “While it is certainly incorrect to characterize all culture policy as protectionist, Canadian content regulations and foreign ownership limitations can be fairly characterized as such.”
The truth that is rarely spoken is that there’s a whole “Canadian Content” industry being propped up by these regulations, and it stands to lose a lot if the quotas and other protections were to disappear.
A group called SOCAN, which lobbies on behalf of Canadian musicians, eagerly boasts about the success of these regulations.
“In 1971, the Government of Canada recognized a problem: Canadian music wasn’t being played on Canadian radio, but foreign artists (mostly American) were. This meant that non-Canadian artists received the vast majority of radio airtime. Money flowed from Canada to support foreign talent rather than our Canadian talent.
Those rules have been enormously successful in ensuring that Canada has its own cultural industry and Canadian voices, creating, sustaining, and building a significant source of monetary, emotional and cultural value. There are few, if any, aspects of Canadian culture that foster as much national pride and value as the success of music made in Canada.
Today, we’re facing a similar but new challenge: Canadian music isn’t sufficiently prominent on internet-based services.”
They go on to advocate for Bill C-10 (the precursor of Bill C-11) to “bring the Broadcasting Act into the digital era” because “it’s imperative to continue to sustain and build Canadian-made music.”
If this reminds you at all of the whole “Made in America” rhetoric, then you understand this issue perfectly. And if the emphasis on “preserving Canadian cultural identity” strikes you as a Baptist cover for a Bootlegger motive, then you’re really paying attention.
Why does this group favor the existing regulations and their expansion with Bill C-11? Because they represent the beneficiaries, the creators of “Canadian Content” who are given a competitive edge against their foreign counterparts with these quotas. An industry that owes much of its existence to a certain set of regulations tends to push pretty hard to keep those regulations. And if they can gain even more quotas in the increasingly dominant new media, all the better.
Toward a Free Market in Broadcasting
Should broadcasting regulations be scrapped then? Absolutely. Not only is broadcaster licensing protectionist, it’s also censorious, because it gives the government the power to control who is allowed to broadcast. The economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard discusses this in his book For a New Liberty.
“Because every station and every broadcaster must always look over its shoulder at the FCC, free expression in broadcasting is a sham. Is it any wonder that television opinion, when it is expressed at all on controversial issues, tends to be blandly in favor of the ‘Establishment’?”
Just imagine if the government tried to create licensing for books or newspapers, Rothbard says. “What we would all consider intolerable and totalitarian for the press and the book publishers is taken for granted in a medium which is now the most popular vehicle for expression and education: radio and television. Yet the principles in both cases are exactly the same.”
So what would a free market in broadcasting look like? Fortunately, we don’t have to guess. It would look like the internet, which the CRTC has thus far not been regulating (hence the push for Bill C-11). In other words, it would look like more choice and by-and-large better content.
Now, some might object to a free market in broadcasting because certain producers of “Canadian Content” would go under as a result. This is probably true, but success in content creation should depend on your ability to win viewers, not on your ability to rig the system in your favor.
Others may object because they believe patriotism and a national identity is important to foster. But it’s not the government’s place to foster culture. If the Chinese government imposed “Chinese Content” requirements for their broadcasters and had state-approved content creators to fill these quotas, wouldn’t that be considered an unwarranted interference with press freedom? Why should it be considered any less egregious when we do it?
Still others may object because of concerns about hate speech, such as with the Fox News case. But hate speech laws already exist in the Criminal Code. Now, whether those laws are themselves legitimate is another matter. For the purposes of this discussion the point is that specific hate speech regulations on broadcasters are at best redundant with existing laws and at worst censorious. In either case they shouldn’t exist.
A final objection that might be raised is that without regulation, Canadians would be allowed to watch foreign propaganda like Russia Today. And it’s true, RT would probably be on cable TV in a free market. But there’s a couple of points to make in response. First, it should be up to consumers to decide what constitutes state propaganda, not bureaucrats. And second, if your concern is genuinely that Canadians might be allowed to watch RT on TV, I would simply point out the irony that you are advocating for government censorship in the name of opposing authoritarianism.
Speaking of irony, it’s curious that Canadian politicians love to posture on the world stage about their commitment to freedom. If they actually want to practice freedom and not just pay lip service to it, the complete deregulation of broadcasting would be a great place to start.
This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Clickhereto sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.
Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
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Government Surveillance and Academic Thought Policing Are Taking Us to 1984
There are some books you should read only once, and others you should reread occasionally. George Orwell’s 1984 is one you should read repeatedly and deeply. Without it, no education is complete.
It tells the story of a man, Winston, grappling with ordinary desires for love and privacy – but in a totalitarian socialist world in which every word and even desire is subject to control and punishment by “the Party.”
1984 teaches timeless truths and shows its characters grappling with questions that do not have easy answers. The dystopia Orwell presents emerged out of the soil of a society in which little by little, inch by inch, thought by thought, and idea by idea, people forsook their liberty, their dignity, and their humanity.
Parallels between the world of Orwell’s 1984 and our own are increasingly obvious – and troubling.
Surveillance and Thought Policing
For one thing, we live in an ever-growing “anti-terror” surveillance state, and one that is encouraged, if not openly embraced, by fearful people who are, if I may be blunt, really bad at math and really lacking in perspective. Every death is a tragedy, but terrorism is far down on any list of mortality risks – and it always has been. And there is little evidence that all the surveillance and security programs added since 9/11 have caught or prevented terrorists in any significant number.
For another thing, on college campuses across the country, we are seeing disinvitations of controversial speakers, demands for “safe spaces,” and shout-downs of ideas deemed heretical – proof that the open and rigorous exchange of ideas does not come easily and must be defended.
In their Atlantic cover story, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explain and explore how higher education is fast becoming a place where students expect not to be faced with or to contend with controversial ideas but to be protected from them.
Commentators such as American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Summers have drawn unflattering comparisons between Orwell’s Junior Anti-Sex League and those controlling campus discussions today. The subtle change from “these ideas are incorrect as matters of logic and evidence” to “it is immoral to even subject these ideas to rigorous inquiry” threatens to subject the liberal arts and sciences to a thought police.
Obedience Only
The way the characters in 1984 are “conditioned” once their subversive activities are found out turns this novel from interesting dystopian fiction to an absolutely terrifying classic. Mere obedience is not enough for the Party officials. They can only be satisfied, if that’s the right word, once they completely occupy the thoughts and wants of their subjects.
An obedient objector is still a potentially dangerous revolutionary. Dissent – anything other than wholehearted, brainwashed obedience – is intolerable. The humanity of Winston is completely abolished, and in a fate worse than death, his resistance is crushed and he comes to love Big Brother.
On this, the 68th anniversary of 1984’s publication, it is perhaps worthwhile to take a few minutes and consider whether we have unconsciously adopted the three slogans of the Party – War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength. In our unthinking rush for “safety” of all kinds, I’m afraid that in some ways, we have.
Art Carden is an Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University’s Brock School of Business. In addition, he is a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network. Visit his website.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
