The following are excerpts from a speech recently given by Seth Hertlein to the Patriots for Europe Foundation, Brussels. Mr Hertlein is Vice President and Global Head of Policy at Ledger, a leading hardware wallet company for securing cryptocurrencies and digital assets.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Media Freedom Act (more Orwellian naming there) are not policies for freedom; they are tools of narrative control.
The DSA’s Article 34 on “systemic risks” and Article 35 on “crisis response” are catchalls, just like the Soviets’ Article 58, the “thought crime” statute, which had sections for propaganda or agitation against Soviet power. The EU articles are blank cheques for the Commission to define what is “disinformation,” “misinformation,” or “harmful speech,” as it sees fit, and then to muzzle it.
What is “misinformation”? It is any fact the managers do not want you to know. What is “hate speech”? It is any opinion that challenges the managers’ agenda.
In Germany, we have already seen police raiding homes and making arrests for “hateful” online posts. A German was criminally investigated for calling a fat politician “fat.” A German rape victim was given a harsher sentence than her rapist because she called him a “pig” in a private, encrypted message! And, just last month, the Finnish Supreme Court heard arguments in a case going back six years in which a former Finnish MP was prosecuted for “hate speech” for posting Bible verses! This is the Digital Gulag’s Article 58-10. It is the criminalisation of undesirable thought, enforced by the state’s monopoly on violence.
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