Politicians Urge Censorship Of The Disasters They Create
Unpopular elected leaders from Ireland and France to California and Canada invent fresh justifications for speech crackdown while funding news media to promote their point of view
Ireland must pass new legislation to crack down on the online hatred behind the rioting in Dublin on Thursday, said its Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, on Friday. “It’s not just the platforms that have a responsibility here, and they do,” he said. “It’s also the individuals who post messages and images online that stir up hatred and violence. We need to be able to use laws to go after them individually as well.”
But what triggered the riots were accurate news media reports that the suspect in the stabbing of multiple individuals, including a five-year-old child, was an Algerian immigrant. Either Varadkar is spreading misinformation by attributing the riots to “messages and images,” or he wants to criminalize sharing accurate news stories.
There’s no excuse for the looting and rioting that occurred in Dublin, and the suspect in the stabbing attack had been in Ireland for 20 years, according to news reports, and another immigrant, a Brazilian, physically intervened to stop the attacker. The Dublin riots appeared to have been the work of the same kind of nihilistic young men that engaged in rioting during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and in France this summer.
At the same time, many in Ireland felt they have seen a pattern. “A few days before [the stabbing],” writes Angela Nagle at Compact, “a Slovak Romani immigrant was sentenced for the murder of a young woman, Ashling Murphy. She had been walking home from work by a canal when she was stabbed eleven times in the neck. It was reported that the assailant had been living on disability benefits in a publicly funded council home. Last year, an Iraqi immigrant murdered two Irish gay men, decapitating one of them. In a nation with close-knit, high-trust communities until recently, this new reality is shocking and alien to Irish people. Dublin used to be renowned for its warmth, fun, and friendliness. Now everyone talks about how the atmosphere has taken a dark turn.”
But rather than deal with crime, violence, and homelessness, the government instead wants to crack down on what people say on social media.
“People don’t realise how extreme Ireland’s hate speech bill is,” wrote an Irish commentator on X. “Up to 12 months in prison for refusing to give password to your devices if suspected of committing hate speech. 12 months for refusing to allow the State read messages between you and your spouse.”
Ireland’s government has presented no evidence that any of the riots were caused by “messages and images online that stir up hatred” other than accurate news reports. “In recent decades, Dublin has seen many incidences of rioting,” says Free Speech Ireland. “These incidents never caused calls for scrapping freedom of speech.”
Indeed, Ireland has experienced prolonged periods of low-level civil war in its turbulent past without resorting to such measures. “Organising a riot is a crime,” noted one of Ireland’s most impactful independent journalists, Ben Scallan of Gript. “Participating in a riot is a crime. Arson, attacking police, theft, calling for violence - these are all crimes already. If anyone tells you that we need new ‘hate speech’ laws to deal with these things, they are simply lying.”
Added Christopher O’Flynn, “Where are the new laws to seriously crack down on knife possession in public? Or a mandatory life for attack on a child or public sector worker? I would much rather an extreme law into place to protect people who might actually cause harm than a law prohibiting speech that may or may not hurt someone’s feelings.”
Unfortunately, Varadkar is not unique in turning to censorship.