Biden Backs Global Censorship Regime

By | June 1, 2023

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 2 (C-Fam) The Biden administration is spearheading efforts to adopt and enforce global censorship standards against pro-life and pro-family views.

The process to develop digital standards to monitor, moderate, and censor speech online is being carried out under the guise of combatting “technology-facilitated gender-based violence,” and is backed by over a dozen countries.

The standards would require government and the private sector to proactively censor criticism of gender ideology as a form of “hate speech.” They would also require online platforms and internet providers to enforce feminist orthodoxy through automated algorithms and artificial intelligence, according to what is being dubbed a “safety by design” approach.

The idea for such standards was first launched at the Summit for Democracy in 2022 in partnership with Denmark. The State Department initiative, titled “Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse” is geared towards addressing a wide range of conduct, and not just criminal conduct against women.

“Some forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence are criminal; others are not, but are nonetheless harmful,” according to an update on the initiative from the State Department during the Summit for Democracy.

The State Department website describes technology-facilitated gender-based violence as “any act that is committed, assisted, aggravated, or amplified by the use of information communication technologies or other digital tools, that results in or is likely to result in harm, or other infringements of rights and freedoms.”

The definition is broad enough to cover any online sharing of information or opinions against abortion or to promote protection of children in the womb, in line with the definition of “gender-based violence” by UN human rights mechanisms.

“Denial of access to abortion has been identified as a form of gender-based violence against women, which can amount to torture and/or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” reads an information note of the UN human rights office summarizing the issue.

The standards will be funded and promoted through “multistakeholder programming that is survivor-centered, rights-based, trauma-informed, intersectional, and gender-transformative.”

They are expected to be proposed for adoption in a UN agreement called the Global Digital Compact, to be adopted by the General Assembly in September 2024. Google, Microsoft, Meta, and other major players in digital and online technology are already working together with governments to develop and enforce the standards. They should be seen as part of the already ongoing censorship efforts by governments exposed by the Twitter Files and is being dubbed the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”

The Biden administration already attempted and failed to include a broad definition of technology facilitated gender-based violence in an agreement on women’s education earlier this year at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. The U.S. diplomats specifically asked that the agreement recognize the role of governments to direct social media and traditional media platforms to censor and moderate content based on their potential for contributing to “gender-based violence,” even though this kind of government-directed censorship is widely viewed to violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Despite the setback at the United Nations, at the G7 Summit last month, the Biden administration and other progressive governments committed to “strengthen efforts to coordinate approaches to prevent and response to online harassment and abuse and technology-facilitated gender-based violence” as well as to combat misinformation and disinformation under the heading of “supporting media freedom.”

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