Across the world, censorship is on the march. Almost every Western democracy, from Britain to Australia, has embraced legislation that, while couched in terms of protecting us from harm, restricts what people can see and say online. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before the mounting wave of global censorship reached the shores of the Caribbean.
The government of Barbados’s proposed cybercrime bill, currently being debated in the Barbados Senate, is a case in point. If passed, this bill will criminalise online content that causes ‘annoyance’ or ‘emotional distress’, among other farcical criteria, with penalties of seven years in prison and approximately £27,000 in fines. The bill generated so much controversy when the government first announced it last year that it sent it to a Joint Select Committee for further review. Shockingly, the committee didn’t see a problem with its draconian punishments, and instead recommended increasing them.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the bill is how it criminalises individual speech in the name of tackling ‘cyberbullying’ – that is, content seen by someone as annoying or anxiety-inducing. Any law that criminalises online content on such subjective grounds is obviously absurd in a free society – no one should have the right to be free from social-media content they find annoying or that causes them anxiety.
But then legislators in Barbados are merely following a common playbook used by would-be censors around the world. Under the guise of combating subjectively defined concepts, such as ‘hate’ or ‘disinformation’, they are trying to control what people can and can’t say.
Take Kamala Harris’s pre-election pledge to crack down on social-media companies. She said that ‘if you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber-warfare, if you don’t police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable’. We see the same language repeated the world over, and the outcome is a state-backed land grab of the digital public square.
Another ominous warning for the people of Barbados comes from Canada. Prime minister Justin Trudeau has intensified efforts to regulate online content through his Online Harms Bill, which was introduced to parliament earlier this year. If passed in its current form, Canadians could be sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘hateful conduct’. They could even be subject to house arrest and electronic tagging if a judge considers them ‘likely’ to express so-called hate speech in the future.
The winds of censorship have even blown all the way down to Australia. Consider the example of Canadian advocate ‘Billboard Chris’, known for traveling the world wearing billboards with statements about gender ideology and its effects on children. In February 2024, Chris posted a Daily Mail article on X questioning the suitability of a transgender activist’s appointment to a World Health Organisation panel. Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, requested that X remove the content, citing it as harmful because it ‘misgenders’ the activist. The social-media platform initially refused, but after a formal removal order from Grant, the content was geo-blocked in Australia. Billboard Chris, supported by ADF International, is taking this violation of his right to peacefully share his convictions to court.
This global censorship trend is effectively being driven by something like a global censorship industrial complex. This complex comprises governments, NGOs, media, corporations and academia, who are working together in similar ways to erode free speech. The result is a global attempt to redefine free expression as a threat, and to use state authority to suppress dissent.
As the censorship industrial complex expands, the fight to defend free speech must rise to meet it on a global scale. We must be ready to expose censorship wherever and whenever it manifests itself. The fight to preserve freedom of speech is not just about one bill, one country, or one moment – it is a universal calling to safeguard the fundamental freedoms that underpin our democratic societies, all over the world.
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