Introducing the Westminster Declaration

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER (https://substack.com/@shellenberger), MATT TAIBBI (https://substack.com/@taibbi), ANDREW LOWENTHAL (https://substack.com/@lowenthal), AND 2 OTHERS

In March of this year, two of us, Matt and Michael, testified to Congress about the existence of a Censorship Industrial Complex comprised of government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and Big Tech companies working together to suppress disfavored views and disfavored people.

At that hearing and ever since, elected members of Congress, the mainstream news media, and the NGOs have argued that there is no Censorship Complex, just people doing research into and trying to correct misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

But now, a group of 138 scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists from across the political spectrum have issued a strong call warning the public of the Censorship Industrial Complex and urging governments to dismantle it in the name of the “first liberty,” freedom of speech. It’s called The Westminster Declaration.

How did it come about?

In June, we convened individuals from around the world who share our concerns. With a team of people from this original meeting, we worked to write the Declaration and to share it with a wide range of signatories.

The signatory list includes scholars like Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, and John McWhorter, actors like Tim Robbins and John Cleese, journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, and Lee Fang, and scientists like Jay Bhattacharya. It includes prominent free speech advocates like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Nadine Strossen, Greg Lukianoff, and many more.

You may notice that the signatory list features thinkers from the Left, like Slavoj Žižek, as well as thinkers from the Right, like Jordan Peterson. People with very different political views have signed the declaration, and you may also notice that individuals with significant disagreements have signed it. That is precisely the point. It is only through free speech that robust political, ethical, and scientific debates can take place.

“Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society,” reads a line from the Westminster Declaration. “Speech protections are not just for views we agree with; we must strenuously protect speech for the views that we most strongly oppose.”

Some may wonder how the Westminster Declaration differs from the 2020 Harper’s letter, which raised concerns about cancel culture. “We do not want our children to grow up in a world where they live in fear of speaking their minds,” write the authors of the Westminster Declaration. “We want them to grow up in a world where their ideas can be expressed, explored, and debated openly – a world that the founders of our democracies envisioned when they enshrined free speech into our laws and constitutions.”

The difference is that the Westminster Declaration is focused on formal censorship by governments of online speech, not censorship at the level of the workplace or media. “Across the globe,” the Declaration reads, “government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. …the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance.”

Why was such a Declaration necessary?

Because all around the world, not just in the U.S., governments have stepped up their efforts to censor legal speech. “Authorities in India and Turkey have seized the power to remove political content from social media,” the Declaration notes. “The legislature in Germany and the Supreme Court in Brazil are criminalizing political speech. In other countries, measures such as Ireland’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill, Scotland’s Hate Crime Act, the UK’s Online Safety Bill, and Australia’s ‘Misinformation’ Bill threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.”

Nearly all the countries that have sought to institute online censorship regimes have something in common: they’ve seen recent rises of “populist” movements, at times followed by shocks at the ballot. The phenomenon pre-dated Donald Trump, and includes parties as different as SYRIZA in Greece and Fidesz in Hungary, Brexit but also the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, along with Catalan Independence, the Gilets Jaunes, and others. New censorship laws are clearly designed, at least partly, as authoritarian responses to these movements, and often confuse real threats to public safety with legitimate political challenges.

The Censorship Industrial Complex is a fundamental attack on human rights. “The attack on speech is not just about distorted rules and regulations,” explains the Declaration, “it is a crisis of humanity itself. Every equality and justice campaign in history has relied on an open forum to voice dissent. In countless examples, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, social progress has depended on freedom of expression.”

Those who claim they are simply “fighting misinformation” are, in truth, attempting to control the minds of the public. This is exceedingly dangerous since, ”time and time again, unpopular opinions and ideas have eventually become conventional wisdom. By labeling certain political or scientific positions as 'misinformation' or 'malinformation,' our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defense against disinformation.”

In the three years since the publication of Harper’s letter, government demands for censorship grew stronger, not weaker. So, it is reasonable to wonder if our Declaration will have any effect at all. The desire for censorship isn’t coming simply from on high, from politicians, NGOs, and the news media. It’s coming from the young, from college undergraduates, and from a culture of intolerant people.

Why do we think the Westminster Declaration warning against the Censorship Industrial Complex will work when the 2020 Harper’s letter warning against cancel culture didn’t?

The difference is that the dismantling of the Censorship Industrial Complex has already begun. Indeed, it began before the Twitter Files when the Biden administration was forced to cancel its proposed “Disinformation Governance Board.” Since then, the Twitter Files, Facebook Files, and revelations about Britain’s “Counter Disinformation Unit” have alarmed lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic. X, formerly Twitter, laid off much of its censorship (“content moderation”) staff over the last year, and Facebook has significantly reduced the flow of news in general. 

And there is good reason to believe the U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide to hear Missouri v. Biden, the lawsuit from the states of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration for censorship of protected speech about COVID-19 and other issues. What’s more, the dismantling of the formal censorship apparatus, including the defunding of government agencies and NGOs, may help push back against cancel culture more broadly. To some extent, that is already happening.

Successive waves of puritanical awakenings have swept over American culture periodically since the 17th Century, and yet our First Amendment remains intact. By standing strong in defense of free speech at a legal level, the Westminster Declaration may help push back against censorship at a cultural level.

What’s clear is that exposing the Censorship Industrial Complex, testifying about it before Congress, and publishing a statement urging its dismantling won’t, on their own, be enough. We need to change hearts and minds, and that will require a new free speech movement and news media committed to free speech, not censorship. It may be that the Complex of government officials, NGOs, and Big Tech companies never fully disappears or stops demanding censorship, but rather that it loses most of its money, power, and consent from the public to moderate online content on our behalf. 

The Declaration has already been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. While we do not intend to add any additional signatories to the Declaration, given the significant amount of time already invested, we welcome endorsements in the form of articles and social media posts by those who agree with it. 

We are happy to note that The New York Post, The Telegraph of London, The Times of London, Die Welt, France-Soir, La Veritá, and other newspapers have written about or will soon publish articles about the Declaration. As such, it will become increasingly difficult for mainstream news media to maintain the charade that there is no Censorship Industrial Complex and that it’s perfectly normal for governments, NGOs, and Big Tech to create special agencies, committees, and boards of individual people to decide what can and cannot be said on the Internet.

It’s not normal, it’s not right, and it needs to stop. Now.