Philippe Lemoine on X: "The turn against free speech by liberal elites and their push to crack down on the Internet is indeed striking if you go back to what they were saying 15 years ago. I think it's the result of 3 distinct but mutually reinforcing developments:

1) At the time, liberal elites saw" / X<br>Post

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Philippe Lemoine on X: "The turn against free speech by liberal elites and their push to crack down on the Internet is indeed striking if you go back to what they were saying 15 years ago. I think it's the result of 3 distinct but mutually reinforcing developments:

1) At the time, liberal elites saw"

Philippe Lemoine

@phl43

The turn against free speech by liberal elites and their push to crack down on the Internet is indeed striking if you go back to what they were saying 15 years ago. I think it's the result of 3 distinct but mutually reinforcing developments:

1) At the time, liberal elites saw the Internet as a tool that would boost liberalism. The Arab Spring was supposed to illustrate how the Internet would undermine authoritarian governments.<br>Because they were high on their own supply and saw liberalism as the natural outcome when information flows freely, it didn't occur to them that liberalism also hinged on their ability to gatekeeper who had access to people's brains, which was greatly eroded by the Internet since anybody can now reach a large audience without having to be vetted by broadly ideologically-aligned people in a handful of media.<br>But it turned out that authoritarian governments were better-equipped to protect their ability to gatekeep, because they could crack down on people using the Internet to say things they didn't like without being hindered by legal protections for free speech, whereas elites in liberal democracies suddenly realized that when their ability to gatekeep was eroded the outcome wasn't necessarily pro-liberalism.

2) For various reasons, authoritarian countries have become more assertive since then and have started to meddle in Western politics more, often using the Internet to do so. This is something that Western elites constantly do in other countries, but they weren't used to people doing it to them and they didn't like it one bit when it started to happen.<br>This reinforced the previous development because, although in my view most attacks on liberalism in the West have domestic roots, foreign authoritarian governments piggyback on them by supporting anti-liberal political and ideological forces in the West. This led Western elites to believe that, if their ideology was challenged at home, it was the result of foreign interference, which they are inclined to believe in the first place since again they are high on their own supply and find it hard to believe that, absent such foreign interference, a freer and less intermediated public sphere might undermine the hegemony of liberalism.<br>Authoritarian countries have also started to oppose Western foreign policy more openly and forcefully, Russian aggression against Ukraine was a major factor in that respect, which led to a resurgence of liberal imperialism. Liberal elites now see Western governments not as a threat to individual freedoms because they are governments, as they did in the aftermath of Snowden's revelation, but as the guarantors of liberal values and their protectors against authoritarian governments. Trump's victory has somewhat mitigated that in the case of the US, but I think it has only done so in a superficial way.

3) The rise of wokeness occurred during the same period and, since that's mostly a development that concerned young, highly educated people, it had a major impact on Internet companies because they employ many of them and don't really have a choice because their pool of potential recruits has been almost entirely infected. This also reinforced the previous developments because, although the targets of woke attacks on free speech are not exactly the same as those of traditional liberal elites, there is still a lot of overlap and perhaps more importantly the rise of wokeness has greatly facilitated the diffusion of pro-censorship norms and undermined pro-free speech norms. Although there has recently been a backlash against wokeness, polls show that pro-censorship attitudes are still pervasive among young, educated people that spearheaded the movement, so I think that's still true today.

At the moment, the attack on free speech and the efforts to crack down on the Internet by liberal elites have retreated in the US — although it has led to similar but much less systematic and more haphazard, because MAGA doesn't have the same support in the elite, efforts to crack down on free speech from the right — due to Trump's reelection in 2024 and the fact that unlike during his first term by now MAGA is much more in control of the GOP while the liberal opposition to him is demoralized and mired in internecine conflicts.

But this hasn't led to a return to the...