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.”
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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So Toby thinks the 2020 U.S. election was definitely, absolutely NOT fraudulent. Pathetic. The 2020 election was stolen in just 6 swing states. It wasn’t stolen by high tech hacking of voting machines. It wasn’t stolen because of vote harvesting. It was stolen by good old fashioned fraud in the main counting centres in those 6 swing states. To cite just two as examples: In Atlanta, Georgia, Trump was well ahead on election night. Over the next few days the percentage of votes counted never seemed to rise but the number of votes counted did. In other words new ballots were added out of nowhere. Once Biden had overtaken Trump by a few thousand votes the counting miraculously ended. The very same thing happened in Pennsylvania except on a much larger scale. Trump ahead by 700,000 votes on election night, counting suddenly halted…over the next few days the percentage of votes counted hardly changed but the NUMBER of votes did.
A very low tech form of voter fraud but highly effective when you have a compliant and biased Mainstream Media unwilling to properly investigate and report and even more effective when the leader of the Free Speech Union decides to believe the “findings” of a one sided book.
Toby Young, you should take note of Mark Steyn’s take on what happened in 2020. The fraud was very low tech, very traditional, new votes appearing out of nowhere, a relatively low number of votes affected nationally but highly concentrated in just six swing states and enough to steal the election. It’s clear you didn’t follow the events of the 2020 election and the few days following it. Had you done so you would have seen the pattern.
Final nail in the coffin for Toby’s theory that this was a straight election: The Bellweather Counties list. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bellwether-counties-nearly-wiped-out-by-2020-election-11605272400
Toby has probably drunk the establishment press line that Trump lost all his court cases and so assumes there was no evidence supporting him. This is a typical and classic form of reshaping of the truth Toby should be aware by now that the establishment press indulges in on a wholesale basis. He should know by now they LIE ALL THE TIME. Trump didn’t lose his court cases, most of them were thrown out for a “lack of standing.” They were not heard.
To have standing it has to be shown that a plaintiff suffered an actual injury caused by the other party that can actually be addressed by the court. So the lawsuits were never heard and yes it was a technicality. The technicality being the courts didn’t have any power to do anything about it and other than that there is no measurable injury that could be recompensed to Trump. The lesson then is that there is no clear mechanism by which a stolen election can be redressed after the fact – at least not in the form of the legal route taken by Trump. It must not be allowed to happen at the time.
I would say both were used.
The vote fraud was 40 mn. Database votes are easy to flip – as an admin you erase all the logs. They were flipping votes in real time, even the fake news feeds were showing the flips. Mules were used pace DeSouza – 5 million in his movie, just in 5 states. They were used everywhere.
Biden the criminal won 600 out of 3000 counties. Max votes – 40 million or so. Vote fraud – 40 million. Old and New techniques.
The self-satisfied arrogance of Marianna Spring´s smug mugshot is fairly typical of most in education and communications (broadcasting) nowadays: young, without life-experience, ill-educated but opinionated – and a feeling of entitlement.
I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. It might just be an optical effect derived from the bottom half of her face (below the eyes) being from a head proportionately approximately twice the size of the top half of her face.
A 28 year old arseling who is the arbiter of reality?
Who TF is Sping? And Why TF would I care?
Bitter and twisted suits Nick. Hilarious, keep it up.
Toby’s TDS is a tad tedious. Instead of a straw-man like the Dominion voting machine contend with the evidence that 2020 was A/ indisputably RIGGED and B/ almost indisputably STOLEN.
That means to deal with the reasoned critiques in say Mollie Hemingway’s ‘Rigged’ or ‘2000 Mules’ or Navarro’s ‘6 key deceptions‘.
Still no time stamps aaargh
Toby needs to read better books about the US election system. Start with Margo Cleveland’s latest.
Why was US 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections all “rigged”, say the Democrats and their leaders very loudly and continuously, but with voting restrictions in states and counties across the country mostly removed by Democrats “because of the pandemic”, now suddenly “perfect”? How can so many institutions in USA now appear to be corrupt, yet the voting system is pristine?
Given opportunity to cheat, given the stakes, of course there will be cheating.