The parents of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American killed in the Paris terror attacks, have launched a legal case against Google, Facebook and Twitter, who they blame for helping the likes of their daughter’s killers radicalise and recruit.
They call on the firms to take more responsibility for attack, and make sure ones like it don’t happen again by stopping terrorists using their sites.
The problem? It is a muffled cry for censorship.
Whilst there is no doubt that events in Paris – and ISIS’s other attacks – shook the world and the lives of many families within it, attributing blame to the internet is dangerous.
Painting web giants with the blood of the Paris victims can only result in fuelling our increasingly censorious culture.
It should not be down to the man behind the screen to censor extremism, but all of us behind our keyboards to challenge it.
Western society in general – and, understandably, the Gonzalez family in particular – are falling into a vicious circle, where in striving to protect freedom, we demand legislation to restrict it.
Google, Facebook and Twitter last month signed an agreement, pushed by the European Commission, promising to take down from the internet anything deemed “hateful” within 24 hours.
While this may sound wonderful, it leaves it to the technocratic, moral elite to deem what “hatred” is; to decide what isn’t acceptable, what speech shouldn’t be free, and what the everyday majority can’t handle themselves.
Censorship – whether online or off, written or spoken – feeds the ideological interests of those in power. This may be the everyday reality of those living under oppressive regimes in China or the Middle East, but not the freethinking, inquisitive minds of San Francisco.
The argument is clear: we should not aim to take down ISIS’s medieval war on modernity by waging one of our own.
The internet – through sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter– empowers civil society to crush the evil-spirted goals of ISIS, Boko Haram, the KKK, Britain First, Al Shabaab, and anyone else.
Pretending that they don’t exist is not the same as ensuring that they can’t. When their twisted ideologies fall victim to the hollow touch-ups of online censorship, they are merely brushed under the carpet.
Leaving them to fester will do nothing to stop extremism and terror. If anything, it will make us – by being afraid of our own moral freedom – no different from them.
Izzy Lyons is a freelance journalist. Follow her on @LyonsIzzy