“One day they might come for you”

Digital rights activist Andrew Lowenthal on progressives' support for the censorship-industrial complex

In this guest post, Maike Gosch, a German communication strategist, writer and former lawyer — whose article on the banning of the German magazine Compact I published recently — interviews Andrew Lowenthal, the founder and managing director of the digital civil liberties organisation liber-net.

Lowenthal is an Australian digital rights activist of German-Jewish descent. For almost 18 years he was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression and open technology. The digital rights environment in which Lowenthal spent most of his adult life was avowedly progressive — as was Lowenthal himself. Then came the pandemic, and Lowenthal, as many of us, experienced an anthological shock that led him to reconsider much of his worldview — especially about his activist milieu and the progressive left more in general. As he explained:

For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms. In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation”.

Elsewhere he noted:

[D]uring the pandemic, I watched the digital rights movement lose its voice as champions of online freedom of expression. Instead, they began to echo the positions of governments and companies with far from stellar records on human rights and corporate integrity. This recasting of governments and corporations as allies, rather than institutions to be held to account, has perverted the mission of digital rights and harmed public health.

Increasingly estranged from the progressive former-digital-rights-now-turned-pro-censorship movement, Lowenthal began to focus his work on the emerging digital censorship regime — or censorship-industrial complex — even collaborating with journalists like Matt Taibi and Michael Shellenberger on the Twitter Files. This eventually led to the founding of liber-net. As the organisation’s website reads:

Free speech, privacy, and human autonomy are under assault. Under the cloak of countering “misinformation,” governments, NGOs, academics, and Big Tech now often collaborate to suppress information, ideas, and opinions expressed by everyday people. Meanwhile biometric ID systems are being built to control people’s movements and access, and digital currencies threaten citizen’s basic right to economic independence.

In a strange twist, many of those who defended our digital rights now lead this new authoritarianism. Recent revelations show many civil society leaders partner with government and Big Tech to promote top-down information controls — with some even seeking to break encrypted private messaging. During the Covid-19 crisis, rather than defending and protecting human rights from government abuse, many in the digital rights field cheered on and even collaborated to dismantle our rights and freedoms.

It is now the supposed liberals, as much as the conservatives, that most threaten digital civil liberties. liber-net combats this new authoritarianism in order to reestablish free speech and civil liberties as the default standard for our networked age.

To stay on top of all things online censorship-related, make sure to follow Lowenthal’s great Substack, Network Affects.

In this interview, Maike Gosch spoke to him about his career, his work, and the current situation regarding censorship and freedom of expression in Germany and Europe.

MG: Dear Andrew Lowenthal, thank you for agreeing to this talk. To start off, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to work on the topic of free speech and censorship?

Lowenthal: I was born in Australia and mostly grew up there. I did a degree in media and got very interested in left-wing activism in my late teens and early twenties — mostly the networked style of left-libertarian activism that was emerging in the late Nineties. This including working on issues including refugees anti-nuclear, indigenous, environmental and particularly what was known was “anti-globalisation”.

We had a big protest in the year 2000, that I helped organise, in Melbourne against the World Economic Forum. It was very much a coalition of left-wing groups. But my main thing was really working in new Internet-based media in the early 2000, like Indymedia. Then eventually, I had to get a job. So, I decided to make a job for myself, which was to create an NGO called EngageMedia, which still exists after almost twenty years, and focuses on digital free expression and human rights. EngageMedia is focused on the Asia Pacific, active in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia, as well as some part of East and South Asia. I know they’re about to do an event in Taiwan, all around digital free expression. We started as a project to build an online video platform for documentaries on human rights and social and environmental issues in the Asia-Pacific. That was the original mission that still continues at Cinemata.

Then we moved more into focusing on the digital aspects of free expression and digital security after five or six years of doing that. I handed over to a new director about a year and a half ago. And then I started liber-net, which focuses on digital civil liberties and digital authoritarianism in the West, issues including censorship, free speech, surveillance, ways in which technologies increasingly create digital gates and barriers around access, such as what we saw during Covid with the vaccine passports, that are now coming more, in terms of digital ID issues around programmable currency, so essentially systems of digital social control.

MG: What was your role in the Twitter Files investigation?

Lowenthal: Matt Taibbi, a US Journalist who was the first journalist to be allowed in to look at the Twitter files, put out a call for someone to help him understand who all these NGOs, academic institutions, philanthropies and government bodies were, that he was seeing inside the Twitter files and that seemed to be talking to Twitter employees a lot. And because of my role of running a progressive NGO, I knew a lot of the networks, institutions and people that he was seeing. So he brought me on to go through those files that he had access to. And with him and a larger team, we mapped what came to be known as the censorship-industrial complex. I project-managed that initiative and this led to research around it.

MG: What was your motivation personally to work on these topics, like censorship and digital civil liberties.

Lowenthal: There are a number. My grandparent’s experience as Jewish refugees from Germany probably had a big influence. There was a very anti-authoritarian ethos that was drilled into me. Not in a in a kind of hippie way, but in a way of: “Beware, authoritarians!” and an understanding that the biggest threat of all to human rights and freedom is the state.  That meant paying attention to people being marginalised, etc. “Lest they come for you”. That understanding pushed me into a left-wing activism that was very concerned about human rights and injustice and similar issues. And that led me to see that the way I could make a contribution was through media and by leveraging the possibilities of the internet for free speech and expression and for independent media.

MG: Can you tell our readers a little bit about the Westminster Declaration that you were also involved in?

Lowenthal: In many respects the Westminster Declaration built off the Twitter Files, in that it was initiated by Michael Shellenberger (one of the Twitter Files journalists) attempting to be a positive declaration for what would we like to see. I worked with Michael Shellenberger to coordinate a meeting of journalists and free speech advocates that happened in London in June of 2023. It was a “big-tent-meeting” that had people both from the left and the right and the politically homeless in it. All were concerned about free speech and expression, and the end result, which wasn’t planned was: “Let’s put out a declaration”, since there was no declaration that specifically talks to the issue of internet-based censorship. There are other letters say, like the Harpers letter, but that was more of a call for civil conversation, whereas the Westminster Declaration specifically wanted to plant a flag around this new system of digital censorship, that had been discovered and exposed to the public by the Twitter Files.

We wanted to explain what the problem was, and then provide a positive description of what we wanted to see. It was a critique of the weaponisation of “countering disinformation” and “countering hate speech” as means through which censorship was justified. It was signed by a very broad spectrum of people. You had on the left people like Chris Hedges, Aaron Maté, Slavoj Žižek, Edward Snowden, Oliver Stone, Tim Robbins, Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, Yanis Varoufakis and Stella Assange. And then there were people who would be identified as on the right, such as Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, John Cleese, also Jordan Peterson and Barry Weiss. It’s very much a left-right thing and designed specifically to be that, because we wanted it to be an “Everyone thinks this is a bad idea” type of statement.

MG: What were the reaction and its impacts of this declaration?

Lowenthal: The distribution was really quite high. For example, in Germany, it was published by Die Welt, Cicero and Nachdenkseiten, and it appeared in quite a few magazines as well. It was published in newspapers in France and in Spain, in the New York Post in the US, and in the Times and the Telegraph in England. It really got quite a lot of media coverage. As to the reaction, it depends who you talk to, from some people it’s very positive, the media on the other hand rather dismissed it, or they just focus on the right-wing people who signed it and ignored the left-wing people who signed it to try and suggest that it was very bad, and you should stay away from it.

I think the impact was good in terms of raising the issue, and people having an understanding around the ways in which “anti-disinformation” is principally used to suppress free speech. And I think it was a kind of rallying call. There was a follow-up meeting just a month or so ago in Westminster, a three-day event. They are going to put out a lot of the videos of all the talks soon. I think the main impact was awareness raising, and I think it’s being used by a lot of people as a kind of flag they can wave, that said: “This is how we want to think about free speech into the future”. There are no plans to leverage it any further other than the events in Westminster, which will be an annual event from now on.

MG: Often the reaction in Germany when people hear about the censorship-industrial complex is that it gets called a conspiracy theory. What would your reply be to that? What do you think of that criticism?

Lowenthal: There’s huge amount of evidence now that there are a massive number of organisations coordinating to censor content on the internet. In fact, a lot of liberal and progressive groups now acknowledge that this is happening. At the start of the Twitter Files, the line was, “Oh, no, it’s a conspiracy theory. None of this is happening, etc.”. Now, most people are saying: “Well, yes, the government and NGOs are involved in content moderation. But it’s okay. It’s legal. Governments should be paying attention and protecting people from misinformation”. So now it’s very hard to find people saying this is not happening. I think the battle about the recognition of its existence is kind of being won in many respects. Now people are debating whether or not it’s a good or a bad idea.

MG: The other criticism is that this whole fight is being driven by a right-wing/populist agenda. What would your response be to that?

Lowenthal: Well, conservatives sense and experience the censorship probably more than progressives. But that’s only part of the story. A lot of people and groups on the left are also increasingly censored, for example around the Israel-Gaza question. So, it impacts anyone who’s outside of the power core. Right now, it effects the so-called right a bit more, but it can easily switch in the other direction. And this is one of the key arguments for progressives who still think this kind of system of government-sponsored content moderation is a good idea: “One day they might come for you”. And I think that has certainly already happened around the Palestine question.

And as to the “populist” accusation: it is populist, it’s popular voices that are being censored by elites. That is actually the main thing. It’s not left or right. It is populist in the sense of “for the people”. It is a threat to the elites.

MG: How do you see the situation around censorship and free speech evolving in Europe and Germany right now, if you follow them from Australia?

Lowenthal: Well, Germany from afar it looks quite bad, possibly the worst in Europe. Germany is extremely important, because of Germany’s power in the EU and because the cultural work that is leveraged to justify new systems of censorship (mostly through NGOs and academia) has a very large presence in Germany. It seems to me that it is the US, then the UK, then Germany in importance. There have also been victories — there is a lot more understanding of the censorship-industrial complex and what it does, and there are more people who are speaking up and out against it. The Stanford Internet Observatory, a key player in the complex, is closing down. At the same time the new Labour Government in Britain plans to repeal the Free Speech Act that was designed to protect free speech on university campuses and the censors aren’t giving up the fight easily at all. So, there’s a lot of work still to be done.

MG: How do you see the situation in Europe and Germany evolving? Where do you see this going?

Lowenthal: I think there’s going to be a very big battle. It does not seem like the elites want to back down from trying to censor the internet. So, I think, if they’re not willing to leave the internet open, more and more people are going to mobilise, to demand that the internet remain free and open.

MG: That brings me to my last question: what would your call to action to the public, and particularly the German or European public, be? What do you think needs to be done now?

Lowenthal: Well, my understanding from talking to a lot of people in Germany is that there are very few organisations that have a strong focus on defending free speech and freedom of expression here. I don’t know if it’s completely true. But a number of people, when I ask them who the organisations are that are defending free speech and expression in Germany, they find it difficult to point to any organisation, at best maybe one or two. So there seems to be a massive gap there in terms of organising around these things. That obviously seems critical to set up well-considered, institutionalised organizations for free speech.

And then of course, the other thing is to get out there and make sure that the government understands that free and open internet and free speech and freedom of expression are a line in the sand, and that they should leave the people to speak freely. The problem, of course, is that many people on the left have decided that they want the government to get involved in curtailing speech on the internet. And I think until a significant number of progressives actually realise just how dangerous that is, it’s going to be very hard to win this fight and renormalise free speech. The easiest and practical way to support free speech is to speak freely. The power is right there in your very own body.

MG: Sorry, I said last question, but I just thought of something which I see nearly every day on a poster here in Hamburg and it’s some public persona with a quote that says: “Hate is not an opinion”. What’s your response to that?

Lowenthal: Well, who defines hate? What is hate? And is the government defining it? Are political parties defining it? What’s the threshold? What’s the barrier? Wasn’t it Ursula von der Leyen who said: “Hate is hate”? If that’s the definition, that is a very poor definition. I also think that repression so often fuels hate speech. If you try and repress it, it actually grows rather than subsiding. I think there are better tactics and strategies than censorship.

MG: What do you think a good strategy would be? What should the government do in your opinion? How would things get better?

Lowenthal: Well, I think, one is just for the government to be less coercive. Because I think the coercion actually encourages more hate speech and bad actors. The other one is a very neutral form of education. The third thing is to pay less attention to hate speech, because again, like with coercion, attention will actually foster it. It then becomes a great way to get attention. Like with children, when they learn that breaking their toys gets them attention, they will do it more. I think having open conversations is much better. I understand that a lot of times on the internet that can be hard. But the other thing is, you can turn the internet off. You don’t have to read and look at all of this stuff. A lot of it, you can just ignore. And I think that not creating a moral panic about it is probably one of the key things, and learning how to have calm and open conversations across differences.

MG: Thank you very much for this conversation.

This article first appeared in the German magazine Nachdenkseiten.

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Thomas Fazi

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Twitter: @battleforeurope 

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)