ABC Good Morning America co-host Robin Roberts spent her Wednesday fawning over former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her schemes to curtail free speech under the guise of combatting “violent extremism and terrorism.”
Roberts asked, “You know, because you did face some challenges, of course, as prime minister. And one of those were the terrorist attacks…at the mosque… that led to some work that you wanted to continue some of that work at Harvard. How so?”
Ardern replied that it was all an innocent project working to combat violent extremism and terrorism on the internet:
Yes. That attack was live streamed and it was one of the first times we saw such an atrocious attack in that forum, on an online platform in that way and so New Zealand as a whole said "we don't want anyone else to experience this." So, we’ve started work with tech companies, governments, and civil society, we’ve been doing it for several years to try and rid the online environment of violent extremism and terrorism and now the next step is this new emerging technology, we need to keep being prepared for the challenges of AI in that space. So, that’s another small project I work with great people on.
Roberts did not follow up by asking about any guardrails to protect standard political speech. This isn’t just some paranoid right-wing hypothetical slippery slope fallacy about how if the government works with Big Tech to remove livestreamed terrorism then it is also likely to curtail basic political speech. In a 2022 address to the United Nations, Ardern declared:
After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?
It didn’t take long to go from terrorism to disagreeing with the left on climate change. Additionally, what does “hateful and dangerous rhetoric” mean? Does it mean saying that only women can get pregnant? If only there was somebody at ABC to ask these questions.
This segment was sponsored by Progressive.
Here is a transcript for the September 20 show:
ABC Good Morning America
9/20/2023
9:17 AM ET
ROBIN ROBERTS: You know, because you did face some challenges, of course, as prime minister. And one of those were the terrorist attacks—
JACINDA ARDERN: Yes.
ROBERTS: -- at the seminary, no, not seminaries—
ARDERN: At the mosques in Christchurch.
ROBERTS: At the mosque, yes, yes, exactly and that led to some work—
ARDERN: Yeah.
ROBERTS: -- that you wanted to continue some of that work—
ARDERN: Yes.
ROBERTS: -- at Harvard. How so?
ARDERN: Yes. That attack was live streamed and it was one of the first times we saw such an atrocious attack in that forum, on an online platform in that way and so New Zealand as a whole said "we don't want anyone else to experience this." So, we’ve started work with tech companies, governments, and civil society, we’ve been doing it for several years to try and rid the online environment of violent extremism and terrorism and now the next step is this new emerging technology, we need to keep being prepared for the challenges of AI in that space. So, that’s another small project I work with great people on.
