China may ultimately prove that Barlow was wrong and that a high-capacity
authoritarian government is perfectly capable of controlling speech on the
Internet. Indeed, China envisions applying AI/big data techniques to the
monitoring of citizen behavior under a “social credit” system. Short of this
level of control, however, governments in modern liberal democracies that want
to protect freedom of speech nonetheless use various mechanisms to regulate
legacy media, mechanisms that have been carried forward into the digital era.
There are, however, not only large systematic differences in approach
between Europe and the United States with regard to the role of the state but
important differences as well among European countries. We focus here on
France and Germany. These differences did not begin with internet regulation
but are evident in the long prior experience of dealing with legacy media.
Social_Media_and_Democracy