16 Policy Brief No. 45 Toda Peace Institute entrepreneur and political organiser Maciej Czeglowski pointed out in his excellent 2019 Senate testimony about digital privacy. In general, while banning or deindexing may be tempting to “keep the peace,” suppressing speech entirely is unlikely to build peace. Banning and deindexing should be treated as extreme options, used with enormous care and transparency. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good, short guide about this.) Unfortunately, they are not being handled carefully right now, which is both inflaming tensions across the globe and opening avenues for potential future institutional abuse. Authoritarian governments are proving adept at mastering digital platforms, censoring them where desired, and using them for surveillance and propaganda. This may create “peace” in some sense, but at catastrophic cost to human rights. Democracies hoping to build peace must develop strategies that respect both individual expression, and rights such as privacy. The rapid scaling of digital media platforms has become an uncontrolled social experiment, but there is still time to inject a healthy dose of transparency and accountability.

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