Using the Chinese Communist Party's Great China Firewall of Internet censorship as a benchmark, a top legal adviser to Joe Biden says that the U.S. government "must play a large role" in "monitoring and speech control" on Big Tech platforms.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School Professor who was named an adviser on Biden's exploratory commission on reforming the U.S. Supreme Court, argued in an August 2020 Atlantic op-ed that "in the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong."
“Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing Internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the Internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values,” Goldsmith, who is also an alum of the George W. Bush administration, asserted in the op-ed co-written by University of Arizona College of Law professor Andrew Keane Woods.
Goldsmith lauded Big Tech for its practice of censoring anything that does not follow the chosen narrative on Covid-19 – which includes the covert installation of tracking programs and censorship of stories promoting the now widely-accepted link between the virus and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Such corporate behavior demonstrates "enormous public good," Goldsmith said.
"As Google and Apple effectively turn most phones in the world into contact-tracing tools, they have the ability to accomplish something that no government by itself could: nearly perfect location tracking of most the world’s population. That is why governments in the United States and around the world are working to take advantage of the tool the two companies are offering," Goldsmith wrote.
Washington Examiner columnist Becket Adams noted that The Atlantic op-ed "is not merely a clinical study in how world governments treat free speech rights in times of crises. The article is written from the perspective that China is ahead of the curve and that the U.S., with its outdated First Amendment, must change."
Adams added a reminder: "It is not unprecedented for a mainstream publication in the U.S. to publish praise for the Chinese Communist Party. Members of America’s commentariat have been cheering this murderous, authoritarian regime for decades."
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