This Week in Censorship: January 22-28

This week’s curation on the RealClear Public Affairs Censorship page began with Maya A. Bodnick’s endorsement of Jenny Martínez for Harvard President in the Crimson. Martínez is currently the provost of Stanford and, Bodnick argues, “the best option [of the potential appointees] because she is such a strong defender of free speech.” While the proximate cause of former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation earlier this year was the discovery that she had plagiarized in a significant portion of her scholarship, her mealy-mouthed and poorly lawyered performance in a congressional hearing cast the longest shadow. She appeared incapable of offering an unequivocal condemnation of antisemitism—real or exaggerated—on her campus, sparking outrage and a journalistic inquiry into her academic record. Bodnick is right to remind us that free speech is as vital on campus as it is in public life, and that we should therefore not rush to fill Gay’s post with someone uncommitted to its protection. University bureaucrats have presided over a baffling double-standard for campus speech in recent years, and Harvard would do well to re-establish its commitment to true diversity of thought and opinion.

Berlin-based American playwright and satirist CJ Hopkins received a verdict in a German court this week on the allegation that he had violated article 86a of Germany’s penal code, the prohibition of Nazi propaganda. Hopkins is an inspired critic of mask and vaccination mandates and in 2022 published a book on the topic, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. German prosecutors alleged that, in Tweeting a promotional image of the book’s cover, which depicts a Swastika faintly glowing through a white surgical mask, and later criticizing a German public health official, Hopkins was “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” He has been fighting the case since he fell under investigation in June of last year, and this week he was acquitted.

Independent journalist Aya Velázquez reported from the Tiergarten District Court, noting that she was one of very few reporters present. Hopkins’ case has received functionally zero mainstream press coverage, save for James Kirchick’s recent and very good essay in the Atlantic, “What Happens Where Free Speech Goes Unprotected.” Matt Taibbi has also covered the case on his Substack. Germany’s legal system is understandably, if overzealously, hostile toward the use of Nazi iconography for purposes other than Art or History. Hopkins’ defense contended that his persecution was due more to the object of his critique—the “totalitarian” impulse behind pandemic responses in much of the Western world—than to the iconography he used to argue his point. As evidence he cited an issue of German magazine Stern from 2017 showing Donald Trump performing a Hitler salute, among other blatant hypocrisies.

While the acquittal is encouraging, the trial itself has been an embarrassment for Germany and a Kafka-esque nightmare for Hopkins. In his opening statement to the court, the author noted that one of his books is still banned by Amazon in Germany. He has suffered reputational harm from the allegation that he minimizes the Holocaust and has spent thousands of euros defending himself. Velázquez writes that “the Hopkins case is not an isolated incident in Germany,” and the judge, in her acquittal, made sure to label Hopkins’ eloquent rebuke of creeping totalitarianism “ideological drivel.” A small battle was won, but the war rages on.

Following last week’s two-part investigative series on Moderna’s censorship strategies, Lee Fang again collaborated with RealClear Investigations this week on “Logically.AI and the Global Reach of Censorship.” The article is a survey of British-based tech firm Logically.AI, “whose eponymous product identifies and removes content from social media.” Fang’s writing on Logically begins with Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent most famous for having assembled intelligence reports about journalists while working for the Department of Homeland Security, for which he was reassigned. Murphy is now an executive at Logically, which contracts with state and federal government agencies in order to “reduce the harms associated with mis- and disinformation.” Oregon used the company’s service to monitor midterm campaign information in 2022; the Chicago Police Department piloted a Logically product that analyzes rap music to predict and deter violent crime; the U.K government paid the company over $3 million for “far-reaching surveillance” on critics of pandemic policy. Both the Pentagon and the DHS have contracted with the company as well.

Lacking the safeguard of constitutional free speech protections, the UK is uniquely hospitable to this growing cottage-industry of “misinformation” and “disinformation” technologies that, as Fang tirelessly shows, are consistently weaponized to monitor and censor legal speech. Recall that the Global Disinformation Index, a British non-profit media watchdog known for blacklisting conservative outlets, was shown last year to have received significant financial support from the US State Department. RealClear Politics was placed on the organization’s “riskiest sites” list last year along with fellow nonpartisan outlet Reason Magazine. While framed as a tool to help news consumers and advertisers make informed decisions on what content they engage with, the GDI list is transparently political and functions to deprive disfavored outlets of advertising revenue. That the State Department allocated money for this work is unacceptable.

Upward News was handed a scoop this week when Instagram flagged a post of theirs claiming, accurately, that a New York City public high school had been shut down for a school day to house some 2,000 illegal migrants. The video showed migrants entering James Madison High School in Brooklyn. Citing an Associated Press “fact-check,” Instagram added a tag to Upward’s post reading: “Migrants in NYC were temporarily housed in a local school…The school has not shut down” (my emphasis). In other words, AP’s quibble was not at all with the factual content of Upward’s post, which has been widely reported and confirmed, but with the narrow semantics of the phrase “shut down.” The post was given a blanket “false” rating—and therefore a throttling on the platform—because AP decided that shut-downs are by definition permanent. A quick search of every major English-language dictionary refutes this interpretation.

Writing in Upward, Hudson Crozier notes that the author of the AP fact-check article was formerly employed at NewsGuard, a government-funded media watchdog known to target non-partisan and conservative outlets with accusations of “misinformation” peddling. Crozier goes on to speculate that the increased attention paid by so-called “fact checkers” to media claims about immigration is a bid to shore up support for President Biden, who hurts on the issue.

This week saw many great multimedia pieces on free speech and censorship. These included Thomas Chatterton William’s appearance at the Knight Foundation’s “Informed” conference, as well as an appearance on WBUR public radio by Steven Pinker. Williams, a staff writer at the Atlantic, reflected on the seminal Harper’s Letter of 2020 and where the culture of free speech and open debate finds itself almost four years later. On WBUR, Pinker defended his former colleague Carole Hooven, who was forced out of her department at Harvard after writing a book on the biology of gender. We republished Hooven’s essay on the ordeal last week.

This article was originally published by RealClearPublicAffairs and made available via RealClearWire.