The Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, recently spoke at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit, a major gathering of the global censorship industry held annually at the University of Cambridge in the UK. In his remarks, the Republican governor praised foreign governments for clamping down on American social media platforms while blaming tech companies for creating “discord” and “polarization.”
By speaking at the conference, Cox shared a platform with Center for Countering Digital Hate CEO Imran Ahmed, whose organization’s stated objective is to “kill Musk’s Twitter,” and who was banned from entering the US by the State Department for his role in censoring Americans.
The event host acknowledged that Cox – a longtime critic of Donald Trump – had been invited to the summit due to his previous remarks in the media labeling social media a “cancer,” which he defended at the summit, adding that his early optimism around online free speech had been proven wrong.
I have to say, I have a tech background. I ran a telecommunications company before I was lieutenant governor and then governor of the state of Utah. And I made the case early on that that social media was going to change our world for the better — during the Arab Spring, and and other incredible opportunities that we were seeing to shrink the globe, bring us closer together, help us understand our differences, and and make humanity better.
I don’t think it’s turned out quite that way. Certainly what we’ve seen in Utah, and all across the the the industrialized world, we’ve seen a a significant increase in anxiety, depression, self harm, loneliness, of course, suicides, sadly, and it correlates almost perfectly to the the advent of of social media and the explosion of smartphones with with our youth. The data, the research, continues to drive that point home that this has caused more more divisions, not to mention what has happened with polarization in in our politics and the discord that we’re seeing in in so many of our our nations.
The Utah governor made his “cancer” comparison last year, when he also blamed the assassination of Charlie Kirk on “evil algorithms” and “conflict entrepreneurs” on social media platforms.
In further remarks at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit, Cox praised foreign governments including Australia for their clampdowns on American tech companies.
I want to thank the people in the room who have been so influential, our friends from Australia and and other nations now that that are working to significantly limit the age gates, the uh social media for our young people. I do believe that that is that is an important step in this in this process.
The governor went on to compare tech companies to opioid producers:
I’m really we’re we’re treating this the way we uh we treated the tobacco companies in the in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, the way we’ve looked at the opioid companies in the uh in the 90s and the early 2010s.
Gov. Cox’s comparison of social media companies to tobacco companies and opioid producers echoes the public health approach to social media platforms that has been embraced across much of the censorship industry. Also known as the harms framework, it seeks to exert external control over social media algorithms by using health concerns to bypass first amendment defenses which assert that algorithms are speech.
