After state-guided social media censorship has been suspended during the political transition in America, News24 insists that South Africa must suppress undesirable speech
Foreign editor Phillip de Wet recently wrote an article in which he advocated for the South African state to prepare to shut down any social media platform that allows ideas undesirable to the consensus position of its leaders.
This position was taken in response to Facebook's declaration that they will remove the strict ideological censorship apparatus they and other social media sites and news outlets have had imposed upon them by the State Department of the United States.
While claiming to champion free speech in principle, de Wet argued that the freedom of speech granted by Facebook's new policies were bad, because they were given for the wrong reasons. Speech should be free, he argued, so long as it does not include speech that he disagrees with, and that the urgency of banning politically undesirable speech is on par with the necessity for democracy itself.
Facebook (Meta) plans to replace official state-guided "expert" fact-checking with community-driven fact-checking, a move de Wet views a step backwards, as it could allow people to valourise information not sanctioned by the selected "experts".
But he believes even expert censorship is not enough, given that popular politicians could gain additional legitimacy by pointing out that they are being censored.
As a result, de Wet argued that South Africa's government should be empowered to shut down social media platforms entirely if they allow speech acts that are undesirable, though he did not disclose how this state of exception should be determined.
de Wet argued that the sorts of people who can be regarded as fact checkers include him and his colleagues, and that a broad campaign of "education" needed to be undertaken to make people agree with the measures he is proposing, so that they do not try to push back on it.
He argues that the political elites should arrive at a consensus on what ideas should be allowed to be uttered, and what is to be treated as the official truth, so that they can shut down "weaponised" speech that disagrees with that consensus.
South Africa would be joining a very short list of countries which have used the shutting down of online communication platforms for political reasons, including Brazil, China, Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, Russia, Turkmenistan and Uganda.
