I’ve written the cover story for the June issue of the Critic setting out my concerns about the Online Safety Bill. In essence, it’s a gold-embossed invitation to woke activists to censor the speech of their political opponents in the name of protecting vulnerable people from ‘harm’. Why a Conservative Government with an 80-seat majority is handing this weapon to its enemies is a mystery. Here is an extract:
The Bill will empower Ofcom, the broadcast regulator, to fine social media companies up to 10% of their global turnover if they fail to remove harmful content — and not just harmful to children, which is hard to argue with, but to adults as well.
What does the Government mean by ‘harmful’? The only definition the Bill offers is in clause 150, where it sets out the details of a new Harmful Communications Offence, punishable by up to two years in jail: “‘harm’ means psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress.”
But, confusingly, it won’t just be harmful content that meets this definition that the bill will force social media companies to remove. After all, this relates to a new criminal offence — and content that meets the threshold for prosecution under this new law will, by definition, be illegal. Notoriously, the Bill will also force social media companies to remove ‘legal but harmful’ content — and exactly what that is, is anyone’s guess. I’m sure political activists and lobby groups claiming to speak on behalf of various victim groups will have a lot to say about it.
The bottom line is that stuff it is perfectly legal to say and write offline will be prohibited online. And not just mildly prohibited — YouTube or Twitter or Facebook could be fined of up to 10 per cent of their annual global turnover for a transgression — so in Facebook’s case $11.7 billion, based on its 2021 revenue.
That’s a powerful incentive for social media companies to remove anything remotely contentious — and they hardly need much encouragement. Facebook deleted 26.9 million pieces of content for violating its Community Standards on ‘hate speech’ in the first quarter of 2020, 17 times as many as the 1.6 million instances of deleted ‘hate speech’ in the last quarter of 2017.
More than 97% of Facebook’s purged ‘hate speech’ in the last three months of 2020 was identified by an algorithm and removed automatically. It’s a safe bet that the sensitivity dials on the algorithms social media companies use to censor questionable content will be turned up to 11 if this Bill ever becomes law.
Worth reading in full.
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Censorship is already very present on Twitter. My account was abruptly cancelled yesterday for stating the obvious truth that men are men, women are women and trans-people are simply suffering from a regrettable mental illness.
Suggest that people with Anorexia Nervosa get liposuction on the NHS?
I was thrown off for saying that I hate Lewis Hamilton. That apparently amounts to racism!!
It just makes you intolerant of woke p-r-a-t-s. I wonder when he finally realized he was b-l-a-c-k?
Has he given up bearding with Shirtswinger?
Or that racism has held him back and he was never allowed to progress and become successful at motor racing.
Well, you should have said you hate Russians. That would have been fine.
P.S. I’m not suggesting that you do!
For now. But then it becomes an historical offence. Twatter never forgets, and never forgives, any more than WuTube restores verboten truths about clot shots when reality finally become undeniable.
And his mom was white. Poor lamb.
Obviously it was your truth, not their truth. Your truth is considered to be misinformation, fake news, etc. We can’t allow the proles to have doubleplus ungood thoughts.
I was thrown off a while ago for questioning someone’s assertion about a report. They claimed something it didn’t say, so telling lies is ok if you’re on the ‘right’ (woke/left) side, but questioning the lies is forbidden!
Eh, I’m on my 21st account or so. Just roll up a new character and start over at level 1. It’s just part of the game.
The insanity of this is hard to describe -and I would imagine it won’t end with online and be extended to offline at some point.
The Ricky Gervais programme has had all sorts of self entitled morons stating on Twitter etc that it was ‘offensive’
someone posting a comment that a. Claims that there’s an objective measure of offence and b. Claims to speak on my behalf I find grossly offensive, likely to cause me psychological harm and substantial distress.
So how would I get them prosecuted….?
A rich man who owns a castle staged a cultural event on his estate. Hundreds of peasants attended. One of the entertainers told some jokes that some of the peasants thought were hilarious but others among the peasants found offensive.
It’s like that.
Never mind the details of government-company relations – they’re a red herring.
Just because they let you “participate” doesn’t mean the set-up isn’t totalitarian.
I just hate this thing of people being mortally offended by every little thing, similarly, people requiring ‘trigger warnings’ if anything contentious or alarming (to them) appears in front of their eyes. Why are people so bleddy wet and pathetic these days? Get a grip and grow up for gods sake. I don’t know how such delicate flowers manage to negotiate life successfully at all.
It’s Totalitarianism …. which creates a vicious cycle of delusion as the sceptics are silenced, and that group delusion often leads to the most appalling atrocities.
What happens in Totalitarian regimes is that governments produce dishonest propaganda … that is not unusual, most governments do that. But in a Totalitarian government they so repress any form of scepticism or criticism, that there is no effective critique of the lying propaganda … and so it appears to be without fault. And, at that point the Totalitarian government propagandists start believing their own lies. So, like all propagandists, they don’t want to be just telling the (new) truth, so they increase the lying.
The result is a vicious cycle which slowly turns an honest sane society, into a delusional society believing the most appalling lies (as happened in Nazi Germany, as happened in Pol Pot, as happened in so many governments that controlled the media and suppressed any scepticism)
“It’s Totalitarianism”
Much of it run automatically by computers.
‘They’ know where you are every minute of every day, ‘they’ know what you have bought (unless you pay in cash), ‘they’ know how many times you’ve withdrawn cash from an ATM, ‘they’ know everything about you – your bank account details, your medical details, and ‘they’ can dig up everything you’ve written on-line, and all of your text messages, and ‘they’ know who you’ve phoned to.
‘They’ know who went on the march round London last Saturday. ‘They’ know who the Guardians300 ‘Common Law Constables’ are and who the ‘Alpha Men Assemble’ members are.
Will there soon be a time when it’s best not to say much at all on-line, if, indeed, anything?
My computer does very little without a programmer telling it what to do…
It’s those speccing and configuring the censorship who you need to blame.
Yes!! Or just use it for a bit of relaxation occasionally maybe. But for anything important – OFFLINE all the way.
The pattern is one that has been repeating itself and is the method by which collectivists – those who live to tell others how live – get their way.
They use the harm or more often the potential harm to a few to impose rules on everyone. But the real motivation is controlling others through the setting of rules.
It’s not just believing their own lies. They are even more f***ed up mentally. For example if you take a medic – let’s say a GP – who is on say 100 lies a day. He will obviously have contempt for “patients” who believe every word he says and who treat him as if he’s some kind of god. (He may even vary what he tells them – switching from one explanation to another that conflicts with it – just to take the p*ss and for a bit of variety, and perhaps without even knowing he’s doing it.) He will certainly have deep contempt for all patients he considers to be in a lower caste than his own and who try to find stuff out about their illness and discuss it with him. (“Looked it up on the internet, did you? Which website was that?”) But he will have the deepest contempt of all for those who can see right through him, especially if they – shall we say? – treat his lies the way they deserve to be treated, and who perhaps hand out written leaflets to their peers to warn people about him. He will despise such rebels. But who started it all with their filthiness? He did! He is utter scum – I mean what else can you call someone who sh*ts all over other people and who blames his victims for being covered in sh*t and shouting about it?
^ That’s how the system works.
Digital fascism here we come.
See Ian Tillium, “Technological Despotism”, 1994.
http://www.geocities.ws/cordobakaf/tillium_techno.html
…one of the only people to have understood the dynamic, in the early days of the mass internet.
Take this:
And what is the internet other than interactive TV to the power of interactive TV?
He wrote that ^ in 1994.
Boris Johnson’s first speech as Prime Minister:
“Everyone knows the values that flag represents: it stands for freedom and free speech and habeas corpus and the rule of law – and above all it stands for democracy”
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/boris-johnsons-first-speech-as-prime-minister-24-july-2019
Speak as I say not as I do.
Did he repeal arch tyrant blair’s change to double jeopardy?
Not a chance! That would mean standing by your “principles”.
He’s a marxist, if you don’t like his principles he has others.
Well, there you have it. A speech with a massive potential contradiction.
Freedom, the rule of law and democracy are all very different things and much more incompatible than people would like to think.
One of our many problems is that things like freedom, rule of law and democracy are used interchangeably when they are not, end in any case mean very different things to different people
For example, what is democracy? Is it the will of the majority? If the majority capriciously decide to put some of its population behind bars, then that is democracy but certainly neither freedom nor rule of law.
If a majority decides they want to censor a minority of the population that disagrees with them, then that’s democracy in action. As is the decision or will of the majority to decide that only those who take a COVID jab are allowed to participate in society. A majority of Austrians seemed to think that was absolutely fine. Again, the outcome of democracy.
To me democracy seems increasingly like the right of a majority to gang up on the minority and force them into doing what they want.
He was invoking what are supposed to be traditional British values – notably belief in freedom of speech. Ironically, within weeks he was already trying to work out how to ban vaccine criticism from social media but nevertheless he said it.
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3099/rr-5
“He was invoking what are supposed to be traditional British values – notably belief in freedom of speech.”
He’s talking sh*te then. What does that guy know about the history of publishing in Britain, or for that matter the history of stage play licencing?
“Freedom of speech” has never been a “traditional British value”.
To be fair we’ve always had freedom of speech – just so long as your speech agrees with that of the establishment and “elites”.
Where was habeas corpus when they put almost the entire population under house arrest?
The government response to the petition is a classic bit of double-speak:
<b>The Government is committed to protecting free speech. The Bill contains strong protections for freedom of expression and will not prevent adults from accessing or posting legal content.</b>
So free speech is safe – as long as it’s legal!
Tony Blair’s Ofcom will be given powers to remove any online content they consider “harmful” whether it’s legal or not, that will include our weapons against their lies – videos, memes and official statistics that don’t fit the narrative.
This is solely to destroy the alternative media that helped awaken so many to the covid scam and beyond. They’re rolling out the next scam now and don’t want the truthers getting in the way again.
People have been fooled into thinking that the problem with social media it is a source of fake news.
Actually it’s the complete opposite. The ruling establishment hates it because it’s many times the only source of real news. And real news is dangerous.
Assange and Snowden can attest to that.
It is (or was) both at the same time. It’s already become less a source of real news due to the increase in censorship over the past few years, and this bill aims to convert it into pure propaganda.
The rulers hate social media? You can’t be serious. That’s akin to saying they hate young people showing “rebelliousness” by wearing this or that clothing brand.
What government ministry doesn’t post messages to Sh*tter?
Even ambulances advertise Faecebook.
Once they’ve got the “mass” of people (and the word “mass” is thoroughly appropriate here) living their lives around smartphones and social media and the internet, they’ve got rings well fixed into their noses. Whatever the “content” is, it won’t undermine the form, the basic relationship.
The establishment’s next target will be The Light paper:
https://thelightpaper.co.uk/
i.e., after censoring its online version out of existence.
I picked a copy of that up in a motorway service station last year. Perhaps that avenue of distribution has been denied to them now.
“Why a Conservative Government with an 80-seat majority is handing this weapon to its enemies is a mystery”
There is no mystery.
There are no sides, parties or enemies.
They all work for the same cult.
And the cult is the WEF, who boast that they have penetrated most western governments to the highest level.
This is a statement stuck in the past.
The main political parties are no longer adversaries. The general population is their common adversary.
Modern states are now almost entirely focused on controlling their populations, regulating their behaviour and limiting their actions to the ever narrower range of action that the state considers acceptable and non-threatening.
if everyone on the clapham omnibus can see this is a bad law, why can’t the government?
Madness, utter madness.
I’m afraid most people on the Clapham omnibus aren’t even aware the law is being introduced.
It’s not a mystery, the Tories are just following orders from their lords and masters in Davos.
I’ve been suspended 9 times for 30 days at a time by Facebook this past two years, each time for posting materials that no one today could seriously claim are not true. Social media censorship is squarely aimed at blocking truth, and instead supporting media lies. I dare say in five days when my current ban is up, I’ll be banned again. Could be about Covid, could be Ukraine, could be monkeypox….
Censorship is always wrong, and censors are always the bad guys. Oh, and this is not a conservative government, at all. We have had no conservatives in government since 1997.
Nothing at all conservative about this bunch of commies in power now. The latest hair brained scheme to be announced soon is a windfall tax on energy companies, a short sighted action that will in the long term deter investment in the UK. Classically socialist….do well and we’ll raid your success
If the logic behind the windfall tax is that energies companies have made huge profits not through their own hard work but because of fortunate circumstances outside of their control, then where is the windfall tax on Big Pharma?
Surely the same logic applies……..?
This. Toby is asking the question all on our lips. The principle of free speech is something any Conservative should ascribe too, such an inescapably fundamental construct which you would expect to be happily embraced by the conservative party. Yet here we are. The most obvious answer to the question Toby poses:
We don’t actually have enough principled Conservatives in the conservative party to make it Conservative.
We see this in other policy: the destructive shutdown of society and economy, lack of support for the family unit in taxation, erosion of parental rights etc.
So what’s going on? I’d posit that we’ve entered an autocratic technocracy of some kind. It seems that commonwealth countries are following similar patterns (see “conversion therapy” bans) regardless of party, which suggests some sort of collusion outside of political party affiliation.
I also suspect that social media and big tech might be behind the lobby for this bill. Despite this concept of fines for content, I think it would actually make their policy decisions easier.
Yes, but ‘its enemies’ are now its woke, Lefty friends. I know Toby still thinks Bozo et al are right-wing, but it must finally dawn on him that the Cons are no such thing.
The prevention of ridicule, which is a pretty good weapon to use against incoherent idiocy, or ‘takin’ the mick’….Prevention of criticism or disapproval, governments don’t like it up ’em..
The wokerati are the professionally offended. They even want to stop thoughts and what is said in the home. The Tories have already lost the next election.
There will be no reprieve via mainstream politics, that is simply wishful thinking.
indeed why? Is this one of Carrie’s pet projects? Bc there is no reason to be doing this. I don’t care about parties or such. This, this being pushed should bring down Boris’ govt, because this will damage the nation decades after Boris’ autobiography is sitting in the “Take free” bin at Oxfam.
Gawd knows how much damage Oxfam has done…
This clip from the WEF about amending human rights led to a Twitter ban for the account which posted it there….
Toby, this is where the PM is getting his instructions from & what the WEF want, the WEF usually get when the politicians in power are fully paid up members of the WEF.
Australia’s eSafety Commish: We Need To Re-Calibrate Free Speech (rumble.com)
censoring content by the state or a state organ in this case offcom is not going to end well, if there was absolutely no dissent, alternative information or say video footage during the last two yrs, its not inconceivable to think that anyone who refused the jab could have been rounded up and put in prisons etc. History has shown many many times that if you allow the state to have too much power, it snowballs into terrible outcomes.
I do worry that in the future there won’t be any contradictory information out there, this will then lead to the state even more so believing it is right and any measures are correct, even too the extent of concentration camps etc. Also, if people only ever get one side of the information, it will slowly change them into something different because they won’t be able to imagine anything other than what is presented to them.
the west is turning into a Chinese censorship blueprint, the aims maybe presented differently, but the outcomes the same.
“I do worry that in the future there won’t be any contradictory information out there…”
I will always be the owner of contradictory information simply because I do not accept or believe anything spouted by officialdom.
Im still not sure how this will work in reality with sites or apps that are based oversees with no UK revenue or infrastrucure. Why would they have to take notice of any fine issued by the UK gov. Surely non compliance would mean it would have to be censored by the isp, similar to what they have done to the conservative woman. But then that is ip address based and so a vpn will get around that, for now at least. If this is correct there must be ways of registering a site ‘offshore’ and then access through a vpn wont be subject to any censorship.
In theory you could have every country in the world with slightly different content restrictions and all threatening to fine the content provider. They wouldnt last very long in that scenario. I have heard people talking about an alternative internet, dark net style. Maybe this is where we are heading. Hopefully the pendulum will start to swing back but who knows how long that will be. Trump 2024 might help.
The concept of harmful but legal is bonkers. Dorries is either extraordinarily naive or just a bit thick. (I’m just saying while I still can.)
Until we can clear these people out totally and there can be a total regime change, the only answer is to set up parallel systems.
So some thought they had a right to read and post stuff on the internet? Fools.
Practice what you preach on your own website, Toby, y’know, by not censoring people with (considered and otherwise legal) opinions different to your own, like Dr Sam Bailey’s…
…or on the Telegraph, which you regularly cite in your ‘News Roundup’, which IMHO regularly censors its own readers for having opinions different to its Establishment agenda.
Yes, doesn’t it? A great many of my comments are removed, especially ones critical of the covid ‘vaccine’. If they get too many comments they don’t like they just remove the commenting ability from that article.
Well, IMHO they have to do as old Bill says on the ‘vaccines’, given he did ‘give’ them $3.2M back in 2017 for their (in my view sinister-sounding) ‘Global Health Security’ section.
Presumably now to change up from the Coronavirus section to the Monkeypox section, after Bill’s pontificating last year on the subject and the ‘predictions’ he made ‘coming to pass’.
IMHO,besides all the increasingly poor (and leftist/woke) so-called journalism they are undertaking, for me it was the blatant censorship of readers that finally convinced me to leave. I’d only stayed until 2020 because I couldn’t find something suitable in one place to change to. I just have to now go to several different (mostly free and small-scale) independent media sites for my news.
Finally I think that readers are catching on to what the Telegraph has been up to these past few years and starting to take action. Despite the top brass there saying how ‘brillinatly’ they are doing in terms of profits and new subs this past year, the tide has turned of late with first a stagnation in new subs and most recently a drop in subs. There are also a lot more dissenting voices on the BTL comments areas – probably why censorship is getting worse.
They certainly won’t be achieving the ‘goal’ of 1M subs and far more ‘registrants’ (no where near target and so bad [dropping for the last few months before] they’ve stopped publishing the numbers 6+ months ago) by 2023. The picture when looking at money spent per sub is also not so rosy either, which has been steadily dropping for some time now, because of the drop-off of physical copy subs and the cost of making endless ‘offers’ to entice new readers.
In my view, you can tell they are starting to get desperate as they’ve just reduced their already cheap offer (for the last month or so, previously get 3 months free then full price) of 1 years’ (online only) sub from £48 to £39.
When I left in 2020, they ‘offered’ me a year’s sub at around £80 instead of the (then) normal price of around £95. I was lucky to ‘get out’ when I did, because I’ve heard many tales of woe regarding trying to unsub and cancelling annual subscription payments.
I suspect the reason I was ‘lucky’ was that I had just had a new credit card (with a different number) and thus the DT could not take any more money, thus they just ‘let me go’ without issue.
I refuse a medical procedure, as is my right. A venomous old woman calls me selfish. I am deeply hurt and offended. Cancel her for using hate speech, yeah?
My most recent Facebook block was because I wrote (in a private comment) As far as I’m concerned, muslims can ramadan whatever they want, provided they don’t do it in my garden. I really don’t care.
That’s obviously hate speech.
“Why a Conservative Government with an 80-seat majority is handing this weapon to its enemies is a mystery.”
Sorry Toby, but it is because they are not a Tory government they are a WEF UN puppet government.
The WEF say jump, they jump, and pocket “the incentives” of course.
If harm to children or adults means the mass fear porn carried out by sage, Neil F and many medics in this country, yes by all means let’s stop that type of misinformation by all means. Free speech that simply presents science timid information with integrity and a moral compass is entirely something else. How dare any democratic gov’t try to prevent free speech. I have written to Simon Jupp my MP on this subject. To his credit he always responds. I would highly recommend everyone who has concerns about this attempt to remove freedom of speech, do the same. Get involved.
“Why a Conservative Government with an 80-seat majority is handing this weapon to its enemies is a mystery.”
This is anything but a Conservative government. In reality it’s an old school 1970s Socialist government, devoted to tax and spend and crushing the poor. I’m not sure Corbyn could have damaged the country as Bunter.
I’m not worried. Law & Order in the UK is policed by the Keystone Cops. Rest easy
I am just copying below the letter I have sent to my local MP David Warburton which I felt was necessary to explain how I felt about this. I’m sure I am not alone.
Good Morning David,
I have been looking into the so called Online Safety Bill which has the power to remove our free speech and is more something expected from Putin or in earlier days Stalin if the internet had been available in his time. This is not something any Conservative government should ever consider, but your government isn’t Conservative (or Unionist) is it. (not a question, but an obvious fact). Perhaps it should reveal its full colours and call itself the Woke party. This will only add to the numbers of people like me who will never vote for you or your party again. Once your party stood up for British values like honesty, honour, free speech and individual freedoms. This is all gone now and you should be ashamed to be a member of what that once great, decent party has become.
Regards
One is forced to wonder at the general level of ignorance displayed by our “betters” in government… Haven’t they heard of VPNs? Offshore ISPs? How are they going to fine American and other companies spread around the world?
All they will do is encourage tech and social media companies to remove their presence from the UK. “They” really don’t understand how the internet works.
I just checked and found that rt.com is indeed blocked, which surprised me.
You can however access rt.com by using the Tor browser.
Tor may have become the best friend of free speech.
“Why a Conservative Government…”
Because it isn’t a Conservative government of course.
We last had one of those on 28/11/1990.
Its only a mystery to those who refuse to accept what is actually going on. This is a globalist’s dream. Toby – will you ever wake up to the fact that the globalists are in charge??