Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s latest initiative deserves praise.
As announced last week, the U.S. Department of State will discontinue issuing visas to foreign officials and dignitaries who, in the department’s words, “are complicit in censoring Americans.”
Rubio said, according to reporting in the New York Post, that the United States will not tolerate efforts to “undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech.”
While we believe many people throughout the world — and unfortunately, here in the United States as well — often misconstrue what the First Amendment and its principles of freedom of speech mean, it is important in our global economy to push back when officials within foreign governments attempt to pressure or threaten platforms to defer to governments about what can and can’t be said.
Of course social media platforms, television programs and newspapers have the right to set their own standards and policies about what they will publish or broadcast or to what they will provide a platform.
Arguing that “freedom of speech” requires these independent entities to sacrifice such rights and obligations isn’t advocating for freedom of speech — it’s advocating for an encroachment on freedom, a sort of coerced servitude.
But men and women wielding the authority of government, with the implicit power of government, dictating how newspapers, television programs and social media policies determine and enforce these policies is a greater encroachment of freedom — a servitude even more coerced. Discontinuing visas for officials who believe it is the place of government to apply such pressure is an excellent step to combatting that worrisome tendency and in taking an initial step in defense of our nation’s cherished principles.