A group of 138 journalists, academics, technologists, celebrities, authors, activists, public intellectuals and thought leaders this month signed a declaration calling on the government, tech companies and the public to protect free speech and open discourse.

Prominent signatories include WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whistleblower Edward Snowden, actor and filmmaker Tim Robbins, filmmaker Oliver Stone, journalist Glenn Greenwald, psychologist Dr Jordan B. Peterson, comedian John Cleese, biologist Richard Dawkins, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, and Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker.

The authors of the Westminster Declaration, which warns of “increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms,” wrote: “Coming from the left, right and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation’ and other ill-defined terms.”

Also among the signatories were people who publicly criticised official Covid-19 counternarratives, including Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Dr Aaron Kheriaty and Dr Robert Malone, pioneer and expert in mRNA and DNA vaccines and therapies.

Other signatories include journalists connected to the release of the “Twitter Files” such as Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and David Zweig.

Catherine Austin Fitts, publisher of The Solari Report and former US assistant secretary of housing and urban development, also signed the declaration. She told The Defender the declaration “communicates the widespread commitment to free speech of journalists and publishers around the world and the covenant we share to protect and support transparency.”

The declaration states: “This abuse of these terms [‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation’] has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists and dissidents in countries all over the world. Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.”

The declaration cites domestic and international law, including the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and specific instances where free speech rights, including speech made by some of the signatories, have been threatened by public and private actors in many countries.

According to the declaration, legal protections for free speech are being eroded by new legislation aiming to combat purported “misinformation” and “disinformation” and by private entities, such as social media platforms and “fact-checkers,” who operate without any democratic accountability.

The Westminster Declaration resulted from a meeting of “free speech champions from around the world” who met in Westminster, London, at the end of June 2023. The declaration, which was delivered to the office of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, states that a “censorship-industrial complex” consisting of public, private and academic actors, is “increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices.”

‘Entities named as part of the “censorship-industrial complex” included the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was implicated in several “Twitter Files” releases and “‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers’ in the mainstream media, who have abandoned the journalistic values of debate and intellectual inquiry.”

According to the declaration: “Although foreign disinformation between states is a real issue, agencies designed to combat these threats such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States, are increasingly being turned inward against the public.

“Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.”

Fitts described such actors as “a secret governance system that is financially dependent on organised crime and war and is moving to complete control of financial transactions.”

According to the declaration, “large-scale coordinated efforts” to conduct censorship” which often operate “through direct government policies.”

The declaration cited several examples of such policies, including the UK’s Online Safety Bill, Australia’s Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, Ireland’s Hate Speech Bill and Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Bill, as examples of legislative attempts that “threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.”

“Authorities in India and Turkey have seized the power to remove political content from social media,” the declaration adds, while “The legislature in Germany and the Supreme Court in Brazil are criminalising political speech.”

The declaration accused the censorship-industrial complex of operating “through more subtle methods” than direct government intervention, including “visibility filtering, labelling and manipulation of search engine results.”

“Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance,” the declaration states, adding that this has been accomplished “with the full support of ‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers.’”

The declaration cited the EU’s Digital Services Act, which “will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.”

“As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society,” the declaration stated, adding that “end-to-end encrypted messaging apps” such as WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram are now being targeted by the same entities.

“If end-to-end encryption is broken, we will have no remaining avenues for authentic private conversations in the digital sphere,” the declaration said.

Writing on Substack, several of the journalists behind the release of the “Twitter Files,” including Shellenberger and Taibbi, referenced their March testimony to Congress on the existence of a “Censorship Industrial Complex comprised of government agencies, non-governmental organisations, and Big Tech companies working together to suppress disfavoured views and disfavoured people.”

Yet, the authors claimed, “At that hearing and ever since, elected members of Congress, the mainstream news media and the NGOs have argued that there is no Censorship Complex, just people doing research into and trying to correct misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.”

Toby Young, director of the Free Speech Union and a signatory of the declaration, told The Epoch Times that the declaration is “an attempt by a group of people who value free speech to push back against a new and growing rationale for censorship, which is to protect people from misinformation, disinformation, malinformation and hate speech.

“We believe that, in the words of the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the best remedy for bad speech is ‘more speech, not enforced silence,’” Young added.

Israeli journalist and signatory Efrat Fenigson, in her Substack article about the declaration, described herself as “a dissident voice to many of the mainstream narratives.” She said she’s “paying a price for raising tough questions and for speaking out.”

Fenigson wrote that people need to need to strive for truth even when it’s inconvenient and educate themselves about “history, global powers, local and corporate interests.” Without this knowledge, she said, “We’re blind to manipulation, apathetic to its consequences on us, and are doomed to keep playing in the matrix without being aware of it.”

Fenigson said, “In the face of unspeakable atrocities, where people suffer, are exploited and victimised, it becomes our moral duty to speak out for those who can’t or won’t, highlighting needed information to improve their circumstances.”

• The Defender report