German Economics Minister renews calls for widespread internet censorship, claims that an "axis of autocrats" is using domestic "populists" to poison democratic discourse via social media algorithms

As they continue to lose elections and influence, our political elite will just get crazier and more dangerous.

Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs, Robert Habeck, is increasingly a deranged and dangerous man, obsessed with unusual conspiracy theories. He believes that an “axis of autocrats” have instrumentalised TikTok and X to wage “hybrid warfare” on liberal European democracies. Specifically, he holds that these autocrats are directing domestic populists to poison public discourse with the help of Evil Algorithms. To beat back this nefarious influence, the European Union should comprehensively regulate – that is, censor – social media. Once again, we must much abridge central democratic freedoms, like the freedom of expression, to protect democracy from itself.

Habeck has been saying things like this for a while now, but his ominous Saturday speech in the Schinkel Church at Neuhardenberg Castle broke new ground in both detail and emphasis. Habeck’s remarks followed the twin political catastrophes of Trump’s election and the collapse of the traffic light coalition, and they came just as Habeck announced his intention to stand as Chancellor candidate for the Green Party. This was just not any speech, in other words, but rather a major policy statement by one of Germany’s most prominent politicians in advance of the approaching elections.

Habeck will never be Chancellor, but chances are high that the Greens will return to government when we vote again in February, and Habeck is a dominant voice in his party. Green policy statements also bear significance extending well beyond Green circles, reflecting as they do the general political outlook of the German elite. Demoralised by Trump’s election and their growing domestic unpopularity, our rulers are determined as never before to find some way of shutting up those inconvenient people who disagree with them. If only they can get us to stop sharing our unfiltered views on the internet, we can get back to the halcyon days of 2019 again, when the child saint Greta Thunberg was leading the children of the world on a glorious crusade against carbon dioxide and the Greens were polling stronger than ever before.

Habeck gave his talk (entitled “Liberal democracies under pressure – a plea for a strong, capable Europe”) on 9 November, the 35th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Thus he used the opportunity to provide various depressive reflections on how just a few years ago things were looking very up for liberal democracy, and how now, unaccountably, things are looking very down:

Today on 9 November, after the US election and the collapse of the German government, I wonder – do you understand what era we have entered today? I mean, can you really recognise what is actually happening in Germany, in Europe and the world?

The “peace … freedom, security and prosperity” that we “took for granted” these past decades are in jeopardy, according to Habeck. Specifically, it is the twin forces of “nationalism and anti-semitism” that are threatening “freedom and democracy.” Because Habeck has been in government since 2021, he has no choice but to blame Germany’s manifold problems on Angela Merkel. Under Merkel, “cheap gas from Russia” and demand from the Chinese market lulled Europeans into a false sense of security. We pursued futuristic projects like the energy transition with too little enthusiasm and became dependent on illiberal enemies. There was too much market globalism:

The belief that markets, not ideologies, shape world events, that a globalised world is growing ever closer together, and that the exchange of goods, capital and people ultimately benefits everyone, has been turned on its head. Markets are becoming increasingly monopolised, protectionism is returning, energy is being used as a weapon, trade relations have the potential for blackmail, and supply chains mean dependency. And Germany, as the main profiteer of the old world, must ask itself …how it could have been so naive as to misjudge this development.

All this is a preamble to one of Habeck’s most central anxieties, namely the allegedly unregulated world of social media, where Evil Algorithms controlled by bad actors like Elon Musk and the People’s Republic of China sow confusion and undermine European liberalism:

… A network, or – to quote journalist Anne Appleaum – an axis of autocrats has emerged, and they are causing discord within our societies, in many different ways, for the purposes of attacking our liberal democracies...

Disinformation is being spread on TikTok and X to blur the difference between truth and lies and to make people compliant. Most of the refugees in Germany come from Ukraine and Syria, where war is being waged again by whom? by Russia. And refugees are being shuttled across the Belarusian border to Poland. In Germany, as in so many other EU countries, the discourse on migration is straining the democratic consensus...

But don’t believe that any of this is a coincidence. This is hybrid warfare. It is a deliberate strategy to blur the transition from peace to war. Now almost nothing is clear anymore … People sense danger without knowing exactly who is responsible for what. This hybrid warfare is a completely new challenge for government institutions … This is happening, and it is happening here and now.

And what we can no longer afford to do is play our little games and let the others use AI algorithms. This applies to Germany above all. In the international context of this autocratic axis, Germany is seen as an ‘easy target’... Germany ravaged and torn, disordered and divided– that is how we appear to those who do not mean well by us.

Note how Habeck discusses mass migration. It is now impossible even for the most dogmatic open-borders Green to deny that letting millions of foreigners into Europe was a bad thing. All those happy wir-schaffen-das nostrums from 2015 are dead. Suddenly the migrants are no longer the bearers of a deeply vibrant diversity that will enrich our society; instead, they have become weapons in Putin’s “hybrid war” – a means of “straining the democratic consensus.” Still, we cannot close the borders; that would violate human rights. Instead, we need to close the internet to prevent people from drawing the wrong conclusions about mass migration.

Habeck meanders to other topics, but at the end of his speech, when he lists six policy recommendations to secure “a strong and capable Europe,” he gets back to the Evil Algorithms. In fact they head his list of policy proposals, that is how algorithmically threatened Habeck feels right now. The Evil Algorithms, he tells us, are the conduit via which the “axis of autocrats” and the “populists” – their “useful idiots” – pour “poison into public discourse”:

The autocrats’ methods include the targeted spread of uncertainty. Terms and images seep like a poison into public discourse and are then taken up in everyday life. The troll mines of dictators and their useful idiots, the populists, have already come a long way with their agenda of uncertainty.

This uncertainty usually originates from digital platforms or social media. Freedom of expression is a precious asset, the most precious asset in liberal democracies. And that is precisely why we cannot let opponents of freedom of expression destroy it … Freedom of expression means that people can express their opinions freely. It does not mean that artificial intelligence controls the algorithms in such a way that social opinion is manipulated. That is not what freedom of expression means … So, the regulation of algorithms on X or TikTok by applying European legal norms is a central task. We cannot put democratic discourse in the hands of Elon Musk and Chinese software.

We must be clear about what this means: “Uncertainty” is Habeck-speak for a political environment where most people disagree with Habeck, and “populists” are what Habeck calls the benighted ignoramuses who hold views he finds distasteful. This is a sitting German cabinet minister declaring wide swaths of his own citizenry to be, at worst, enemies, and at best, the “useful idiots” of foreign dictators who are ruining politics in the Federal Republic. People like you and me are fifth columnists, working from within the free world to erode the rules-based democratic order and establish the evil Putler’s hegemony over European affairs.

All this shows what a hard time Greens like Habeck and the Eurocrat elite in general are having right now. These people grew up believing that they were the future and that progressivism would just keep progressing down the same path indefinitely. With every passing year, things would get more gay, more transgendered, more Green, more interconnected, more international and more left. They really seem to have believed all of their own bullshit. By opening the borders they thought they could atone for Germany’s historical sins and found a new proposition nation of immigrants in the heart of Europe. Trump’s first term especially became an opportunity to one-up the United States with environmental virtue-signalling like the Green Deal. They had all the answers and they were on the right side of history.

All the while – and unbeknownst to them – the popular will was slipping through their fingers. They wrote off the twin populist backlashes of Trump’s first election and Brexit in 2016 as aberrations of the Anglosphere. Here in enlightened Europe, we knew better; we had the Summer of Greta instead. Now, however, men like Habeck are getting out of bed to find Trump elected to a second term. Dreaded “populist” parties are surging not only in France and Italy, but also here at home in East Germany, and their own popularity is in the toilet. What is worse, every time they open Twitter they face a massive deluge of dissident opinions. This can’t be because they were mistaken, or because their policies were wrong, or because people disagree with them, or even because state media have a lock on banal progressive liberalism and people go onto the internet to find other, more interesting views. It cannot be for any of those reasons, oh no. It must be because of Evil Algorithms.

It is amazing to type, but shutting the people up by getting these Evil Algorithms under control is rapidly becoming the most urgent agenda item for our political elite. In Habeck’s list of policy recommendations, algorithmic censorship precedes European rearmament, it precedes his demands for protecting European infrastructure and securing our “strategic sovereignty,” it precedes his calls for EU expansion and even his renewed fealty to attaining carbon neutrality. It is terrifying to think what these people might do, should they get their wish and manage to direct the entire weight of the state against the problem of people saying the wrong things on the internet.