Belgium criminalizes memes

OPINION:

Europe’s decline into authoritarianism was on display in Belgium last week as an appeals court condemned a former member of the Federal Parliament to a year in jail over internet memes.

The politician, Dries Van Langenhove, wasn’t even the one who shared the offending content. As the appellate panel stated, “It is not the case that it must be indicated which specific material acts the defendant is said to have committed.”

Not that one would know that by reading the media coverage. Mr. Van Langenhove is universally marginalized with a “far right” label because he questions the wisdom of flooding his country with migrants from the Third World. His second, unforgivable sin is advocating for Belgium to be run by its own elected representatives, not by European Union bureaucrats.

Eight years ago, when he was 23, Mr. Van Langenhove founded an organization to encourage political activism among Flemish youths. He set up private Facebook and Discord groups where members could discuss anything.

The unmoderated Discord group had only 164 members, and one teenager asked people to post “their edgiest memes.” This, and nothing more, set the stage for Mr. Van Langenhove’s supposed felony.

Kids can be cruel, and they responded with the crudest items possible. One image showed a frame from a classic Disney cartoon with the caption: “If you watch Cinderella backwards, it’s about a woman who learns her place.” Another featured Adolf Hitler with the caption: “You can’t be a racist if there’s only one race.”

Nasty stuff, but the memes were never available to the public. They surfaced only after someone hired a hacker to infiltrate the chats with an artificial intelligence algorithm to search for “racist and negationist posts,” according to the court ruling. The government treated this as the crime of the century and raided the homes of 11 participants.

Yet Mr. Van Langenhove never endorsed this material. “I have never seen them, liked them or anything else,” he said, but that goes unreported. Politico simply writes that he was convicted of “inciting violence and denying the Holocaust,” leaving the impression that he was the one circulating the images. The Associated Press claims he was convicted of “spreading hate.”

The lower court banned Mr. Van Langenhove from running for public office for 10 years, a decision that even the appellate judges had to reverse. Although they also suspended the prison term, it can be imposed at any time if authorities are upset by something this political leader does.

“The consequences of this verdict are insane,” Mr. Van Langenhove wrote on X. “They’re doing this to me to send you a message. It is now possible in Europe to be convicted for memes posted by someone else in a groupchat. People will now not only self-censor en masse, they will also distance themselves from each other out of fear of being convicted for what others say or joke about.”

That’s why this is less about dumb things someone said in private years ago and more about the abuse of authority to silence an ascendant political force. Mr. Van Langenhove belongs to the Vlaams Belang party, which took second place in elections last year as voters began to turn against far-left parties.

Advocates of freedom on both the left and the right used to agree on the importance of standing up for free speech, even when the underlying ideas were distasteful. Humorless liberals shouldn’t be allowed to change that.