In a sign of the anti-woke, pro-free speech agenda breaking through in the Conservative leadership race, leading candidate Liz Truss pledged to ensure free speech does not have fewer protections online than offline. On GB News she responded to a question about the Online Safety Bill saying:
I very strongly agree with you, where it’s about adults being able to speak freely, they absolutely should be. It should be the same online as offline. That’s a really important principle. I’ll make sure that the Online Safety Bill does reflect that.
She also confirmed that anti-woke warrior Kemi Badenoch would be in her Cabinet. Calvin Robinson tweeted: “In a @GBNEWS exclusive, Liz Truss commits to having Kemi Badenoch in her cabinet. This will come as welcome news to a majority of the membership. A smart move.”
In a @GBNEWS exclusive, Liz Truss commits to having Kemi Badenoch in her cabinet.
— Fr Calvin Robinson (@calvinrobinson) August 10, 2022
This will come as welcome news to a majority of the membership. A smart move.
Truss’s statements about changing the Online Safety Bill to protect online speech are welcome. But are they enough?
The Online Safety Bill still has the potential to place serious constraints on online speech. Critics have warned that even the protections for children may be used as an opportunity for wider censorship – after all, how do you police whether it’s a child who is viewing something without putting up invasive identity checks all over the internet?
The Government states that “platforms likely to be accessed by children will also have a duty to protect young people using their services from legal but harmful material such as self-harm or eating disorder content”. It doesn’t explain how they will do that without bringing in considerable amounts of censorship and registration requirements.
Platforms will also “have to address named categories of legal but harmful material accessed by adults, likely to include issues such as abuse, harassment, or exposure to content encouraging self-harm or eating disorders”. They will also “have a duty to bring in user empowerment tools, giving adult users more control over whom they interact with and the legal content they see, as well as the option to verify their identity”.
Such measures will greatly reduce the freedom of the internet. The Government appears oddly oblivious to the fact that ‘abuse’ and ‘harassment’ are wedge terms weaponised by woke activists to close down any non-woke discourse they disagree with. Websites under threat of considerable sanctions will err on the side of caution and remove anything the wokesters whine about.
The Government claims that “freedom of expression will be protected because these laws are not about imposing excessive regulation or state removal of content, but ensuring that companies have the systems and processes in place to ensure users’ safety” (emphasis mine). ‘Excessive’ is subjective, and it is obviously missing the point to claim freedom of expression is safeguarded simply because the state requires companies to do the censoring on its behalf.
The sentiments Liz Truss has expressed are fine as far as they go. But there’s a lot more to be done to neutralise the looming threat from the Online Censorship Bill.
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I’m becoming increasingly dumbfounded by the DS’s apparent sudden trust in the same pieces of festering slime that put us under house arrest and coerced the majority of the population into having an experimental product injected into them. The same pieces of sh*te that encouraged the dumb masses to wage a war of hatred and discrimination against the people that wouldn’t do as they were told. Now we should think that these animals are reformed characters – honest, trustworthy?
Let’s stick with the facts: they waged war on their own people and continue to do so. All these terrorists should be locked up. Anyone that’s thinking of trusting these people again are captured, one way or another.
Agreed. Anyone who believes a single word they say is an epic mug. They’re all cut from the same cloth, the only exceptions being the odd one or two who spoke out and challenged Johnson’s decisions in parliament.
I would hope that for any rational and red-pilled person the trust they may once have placed in politicians, and likewise Big Pharma, has been irrevocably lost.
Indeed.
Law of Nature – Politics: people in power get it because all the good people got peed off and left.
Law of Nature – Politics – Part 2: the people in power want power for power’s sake – they don’t care about me or you.
Add your parts.
Probably a case of what is perceived as “the lesser evil.”
Toby is a Conservative supporter and he will therefore support the re-election of a “Conservative” Government over a Labour or Labour/LibDem/SNP hybrid.
When will people finally get this into their heads? There is no “lesser evil”. There is a conservative party that is conservative in name only. How can people on this side of the argument conveniently forget the last 2+ years under totalitarian control? A totalitarian control imposed by a ‘conservative’ government. We need to bury mainstream politics and we don’t do that by supporting these cretins. Never. Ever. Again.
Indeed. However there is the strong chance of short term pain for long term gain. There’s no doubt that, bad as the Tories were over covid, Labour would have been way worse, and IMO the same goes for many other policy areas (but I would say that because I’m apparently “far right”). Destroying the Tories leaves the space open for an actual conservative party, but there’s no guarantee that one will emerge at all or in short order. Meanwhile we’ll have Labour. I think that’s what puts people off – that and wishful thinking that the Tories will suddenly become conservative.
“Labour would have been way worse” – there is no “way worse”, just worse. The only thing that Labour could have done that would have been “way worse” is shooting those with dissenting voices on sight. With all due respect, I think you may be missing the point; it’s not about the illusion of tweaking the elites that rule over us, it’s about removing those elites from politics completely. That’s all mainstream political parties. Let Labour get in, or the damn greens for that matter, I honestly don’t care. In fact that will likely expedite what is really necessary – wholesale change. What needs to happen is large-scale public unrest and that comes in two forms – firstly the ballot box, secondly the streets. What that results in is the people removing the elites from office and disbanding politics in its current form. The people need to realise that WE are the masters, not these self-indulgent pr*cks. Clinging on to the vain hope that the conservatives may become more conservative changes absolutely nothing. Zilch. Zero. Diddly damn squat.
The Tin Foil Hats Get It Right Again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9odrnn09Z0
WE GOT A PROBLEM
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All that this demonstrates is that Miss Trust will do or say what ever she thinks she needs to do or say to get elected. Present day politics 101.
I will repeat what I pointed out a couple of weeks back. Truss comes from a family that are politically to the left of Labour. At university (Oxford) she was a leading member of the youth wing of the LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, she was a Cameron A-List candidate (i.e. fully WEF trained) – handed a safe tory seat, her local party had to be strong armed into taking her due to (amongst other things) allegations of an extra-marital affair, she was a staunch remainer (i.e. happy to ignore democratic decisions if they don’t fit the agenda), she supported Bojo 100% and all the restrictions of the last two year, she didn’t resign when it became obvious that Bojo was a goner….
With the above in mind why would anyone in their right mind believe a single word that comes out of her lying self-centred mouth? This woman is a 100% gold plated Globalist WEF stooge. She will do exactly as she is told by her “advisers” to get elected and then secure HER future position. She doesn’t give a toss about anything other than herself.
I’m no fan of Dishi Rishi but Truss will be an utter disaster on every front. Anyone that believes the BS she is spouting to get elected is, I’m afraid to say, delusional.
Yes its such blatant manipulation its almost laughable. We need less naivety and more scepticism and distrust among the masses. Surely to God the last 2.5yrs have taught the vast majority of the public something?!
I suspect the type of brain dead dingbats who will vote for her are the very people who’ve had 3 shots of the toxic gunk, still got Covid or had an adverse effect, but will roll up for the 4th shot just because someone in a suit told them to. They buy into everything that’s spouted because they’re pathetic suckers who have an inability to think for themselves. Can you tell I just have abject contempt for these morons at this point in time?
Given what I’ve read, I strongly doubt she really believes in freedom of speech or even knows what it means – but then very few people do.
She’s not even talking a good fight IMO because she’s assuming it’s the government’s job to keep us “safe” from speech. They can’t even protect our borders or deter or catch criminals effectively, I think they should concentrate on that.
And if I don’t want to be “kept safe” online by a bunch of self-appointed left-wing, woke, propagandist progressives ….. presumably I’ll be able to opt-out of their “safety” mechanisms?
No?
So it’s not freedom of speech online then, is it. It is surveillance; nanny-statism and curtailment of free speech.
There really must be some safeguards in the law, such as the freedom to offend (but not threaten) and the freedom to question government statements. Without these safeguards (and I’m sure others) we’re going to see a significant reduction in our freedoms.
This law simply needs to go away. It’s impossible to determine who is or isn’t legally minor over the internet, hence, any restrictions supposed to be applied to children must be implemented universally: The only way to ensure that children cannot access it is to make it at all inaccessible. The people behind this are either too technically illiterate or too stupid to understand this or they actually want universal censorship and are just using the impossible-to-solve problem of restricting children unsupervisedly surfing the ‘net from accessing stuff which happens to be accessible there as pretext.
The only solution to this problem (or at least the only thing which comes close to being a solution) is client-side filtering: Children must not have access to devices which enable unrestricted internet access. That’s technically possible even despite Google (et al) do their very best to sabotage it using the pretext of user privacy.
How can any sane person can believe anything any establishment politician promises is beyond me.