Australia’s scheme plainly restricts or prohibits speech that would be constitutionally protected in the United States. Likewise the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which covers “illegal content,” a category that is defined broadly to include anything that runs afoul of a member nation’s speech restrictions. E.U. countries such as France and Germany prohibit several types of speech that are covered by the First Amendment, including Holocaust denial, disparagement of minority groups, and promotion of racist ideologies.

These are the models that Ahmed thinks the U.S. should be following. “It’s bananas that you can’t show a nipple on the Super Bowl but Facebook can still broadcast Nazi propaganda, empower stalkers and harassers, undermine public health and facilitate extremism in the United States,” he told the Times. “This court decision further exacerbates that feeling of impunity social media companies operate under, despite the fact that they are the primary vector for hate and disinformation in society.”

Critics like Ahmed, in short, do not merely object to Doughty’s legal analysis; they have a beef with the First Amendment itself, which allows Americans to express all sorts of potentially objectionable opinions. If you value that freedom, you probably consider it a virtue of the American legal system. But if your priority is eliminating “hate and disinformation,” the First Amendment is, at best, an inconvenient obstacle.

[Frankly, one has to wonder whether personal liberty matters at all to such critics — or whether they prefer wielding authoritarian power instead. I suspect it’s the latter, even if Jacob is too polite to say so explicitly. — Ed]