The European Union has been working hard over the last few years to legislate its way to global internet censorship. From its recent advocate general opinion to its “Right to be Forgotten,” the EU has worked tirelessly in its attempts to extend its regional control over the Web to global control, enabling it to censor what citizens of other countries are permitted to see and say online. Unfortunately, in our globalized Web, the censorship powers gained by one government are the censorship powers gained by all governments, meaning if the EU succeeds, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and other countries will similarly gain the right to dictate what those in the US and EU are permitted to see and say. Looking more closely at the powers demanded by the EU, in the hands of a nation like Russia they offer an almost perfect blueprint for the future of disinformation and foreign influence.
As the EU has worked to refine and expand its signature Right to be Forgotten protections, it has increasingly looked to extend those censorship rights beyond the EU’s borders. As the EU has argued, it should have the right to force search engines and social platforms to remove content in all countries around the world, granting the EU global censorship rights.
The problem with this argument, of course, is that in our globalized Web the censorship rights of one country are the censorship rights of all countries. What the EU can do to Russia, Russia can do back to the EU.
The protections of the EU’s Right to be Forgotten flow from the government to the citizenry, meaning it is the government in which the powers are actually vested and exercised on behalf of citizens. Another government vested with those same powers could choose to exercise them on behalf of the state rather than its citizenry, censoring any criticism worldwide of its government.
Moreover, the EU is seeking unrestrained censorship powers that do not require the censored topic to be related to the state itself in any way.
Where this becomes intriguing from a disinformation and foreign influence perspective is that the confluence of these factors means that if the EU were granted the powers it desires, a government like Russia could exercise those same powers not just to censor criticism of Russia within the EU, but to go beyond this to censor topics unrelated to Russia but of great political importance within the EU.
Russia could require search engines and social platforms to remove all content critical of Brexit from across all EU countries, forcing them to preserve only pro-Brexit links and posts. Similarly, they could require that all content critical of pro-Russian EU politicians be deleted and all content supporting anti-Russian EU politicians be similarly removed. Any pro-NATO material could also be removed.
All content mentioning that Crimea was ever part of Ukraine could similarly be struck from the Web within the EU, effectively rewriting history.
Iran would likely be quite eager to erase all EU access to coverage of sanctions evasions while North Korea would surely like to wipe away any criticism of Dear Leader within the EU.
This is not idle speculation. Russia has a long history of exploiting evolution in the technological and legislative landscape to advance its foreign influence goals. Much as it leveraged the rise of personalized behavioral advertising and the virality of the digital sphere to conduct its information operations in 2016 so too will it almost certainly leverage its newfound global censorship powers to interfere within the EU if the EU succeeds in its quest.
It is important to remember that a little over a decade ago certain repressive governments discovered the global censorship potential of DCMA to delete conversation within the US they disagreed with. Several countries regularly reported influential US social media posts and Web pages that were critical of their governments as DCMA copyright violations knowing that Web platforms were likely to simply remove the content and place the burden on the content authors to prove their material was not infringing, meaning much of it was never restored. While governments eventually moved on to more precise censorship tools, this early misuse of DCMA as a global censorship tool reminds us that governments are quite adept at creatively repurposing any new legislation to repressive ends.
Putting this all together, once governments have the right to dictate what other countries are permitted to see and say, it is almost a given that some of those governments will turn to those powers to censor speech not only critical of themselves but to intervene in the domestic affairs of allies and adversaries alike.
In the end, if the EU succeeds in gaining the right to enforce its Right to be Forgotten globally, it will simultaneously have granted Russia the right to conduct a new era of information operations that would make its 2016 efforts look like child’s play.
Once again, the EU’s failure to understand the globalized nature of the modern Web means that rather than enhance privacy, it is investing in a more powerful Russian disinformation machine.
