United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights doesn't think free speech is a human right.
In a letter to Elon Musk, Volker Turk demands that he makes 'human rights' “central to the management of Twitter”, and to “address harms” associated with the platform.
Volker Turk also finger-wagged at Twitter’s new CEO for sacking the 'human rights team' which had been front and centre in the war on free speech.
In the letter to Musk, Volker Turk suggests that free speech is hate-speech, and that Musk is promoting it. Predictably, Türk attempts to emphasise the 'importance of protecting free speech' yet, in the next sentence, declares that “free speech is not a free pass” and that the “viral spread of harmful disinformation…results in real world harms”.
Turk pays lip-service to Free Speech saying “stand up for the rights to privacy and free expression to the full [sic] extent possible under relevant laws” but then implies that if Musk didn't self-police the platform that the UN would do it for him.
In his view, Twitter must take responsibility to “avoid amplifying content” that results in harms to people’s rights – whether or not, by implication, it is technically legal. Scepticism about the efficacy of vaccines, legally expressed, ought nonetheless to be suppressed given the impact it might have on the right to health.
Türk's letter to Musk essentially summarises the position adopted in a recent report to the UN General Assembly by the Secretary-General himself, that free speech is hate speech and if Musk won't block it, then the UN will do it for him.
Turk says information concerning “public health, electoral processes or national security” are not free-speech issues and that they should not fall under the same rules. The same schizophrenic attitude is adopted in Türk’s letter, but the message is clear enough: while it is necessary to pay lip service to the importance of freedom of expression, the system as a whole now disavows the “indivisible and interdependent” doctrine, and instead sees freedom of expression as being potentially antagonistic to other rights (those 'rights' being far left ideologies).
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