US Under Secretary of State Sarah B Rogers has told GB News that the British government is really trying to “suppress political viewpoints it dislikes” by threatening to ban X.
She told The Late Show Live on GB News: “Trying to conflate speech and violence is something that advocates of censorship have done for a long time. If the UK bans X, it won’t be the first country to do so. Russia bans X, Venezuela bans X, Iran bans X. Free societies generally don’t.
“Now notice the sleight of hand that Liz Kendall is doing there, because the topic of the day is a potential ban of X, and she speaks more narrowly about non-consensual, intimate images being illegal. Guess what? Bev, there are already laws against revenge porn, and there are already laws against defamation.
“So if you were to depict someone credibly in a way that could be mistaken for a real image of that person, depicting that person in some kind of sexual degrading scenario that she’d never undertaken herself, you could already be sued under existing legal devices.
“Creating a new legal device isn’t out of the question. Our First Lady, Melania Trump, has championed a statute called the Take It Down Act, which would give the victim of that image a notice and take down remedy similar to what we have for copyright.
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“I think cautious regulation is the best approach here, but when you’re at a new technological frontier, sometimes there’s a temptation to just enact a flurry of new technological regulations designed to put that technological innovation back in the bottle…
“There was about a 24-hour period in which people were generating these images of children. And Elon Musk, to my understanding, swiftly banned every single account that had done that. He does not seem to be messing around when it comes to kids.”
Asked if he was doing enough to reassure the British government, she said: “I think that’s an impossible task, because what the British government wants isn’t a reasonable, safe online discursive environment for women or whatever it claims. If the British government cared about women’s safety, it would have acted differently on grooming gangs.
“What the British government wants is the ability to curate a public square to suppress political viewpoints it dislikes, and that is why it has targeted X for a potential ban, even though other AI widgets afford similar capabilities.
“X has a political valence that the British government is antagonistic to, doesn’t like, and that’s what’s really going on.”
On what the US could do if X is banned in the UK, Rogers said: “America though has a full range of tools that we can use to facilitate uncensored Internet access in authoritarian, closed societies where the government bans it.
“We are facilitating uncensored internet in Iran right now. We’ve done that in the past elsewhere, and with respect to a potential ban of X, Keir Starmer has said that nothing is off the table, and I would say from America’s perspective that, likewise, nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech.
“So, let’s wait and see what Ofcom does, and we’ll see what America does in response. But I have an apparatus at the State Department called the Office of Digital Freedom. And this is an issue dear to us. And I think we would certainly want to respond.
“This President has been a huge champion of free speech. No surprise to see the Vice President share that value. And you know, our leadership understands this, because President Trump was himself a target of censorship.
“President Trump was banned by Twitter, the old regime before Elon bought it. There was another platform called Parler that hosted him, and that app was removed from the app store for allowing a sitting President to speak.
“Alexei Navalny, a famous Russian dissident who was censored and allegedly assassinated by Putin, compared President Trump’s ban from Twitter and from Parler to something the Russian government would do, and I think you have to take that comparison seriously.
“So that’s why our President cares about this issue, because people couldn’t deal with his popularity, they couldn’t deal with his success, and they tried to just shut him up so no one could hear him. How will they feel? I think all Americans will feel disappointed. But frankly, Bev, given the pro-censorship inclinations of the British state in recent memory, I can’t say that we’ll be shocked.”
