I switched on the TV on Saturday morning at 6:30am expecting to get a mixture of different short news stories, but what followed was 26 minutes of a film on the news story of the tragic death of Molly Russell – you can watch it here.
It began with melancholic music, which continued in the background. Molly’s father said that he could see how, if one was exposed to the sort of online content his daughter was exposed to, “it could destroy you”. He described the “toxic corporate culture” at the heart of social media platforms. You could feel the father’s pain and grief. The reporter, BBC’s Angus Crawford, said the coroner ruled that “social media did play a part in Molly Russell taking her own life”.
I am truly sorry for the Russell family’s loss, but the way this story has been presented here feels wrong. The general presentation bears the hallmarks of propaganda techniques I will describe later. There is little other content than what I have described above and it is repeated ad nauseum. In Molly’s death the coroner ruled that “social media played a part” but there was no mention in this media report of any of the possible multitude of other factors that may have been involved. Such a one-dimensional synopsis may even be harmful in itself because it might misrepresent the complexities underlying suicide, giving false hope or belief, with the potential to exacerbate the myriad of other factors that can lead to mental health problems and self-harm, regardless of the reporter’s intent.
It is right that the media should devote a fair amount of news discussion to the very important subject of suicide, but this should be delivered responsibly, sensitively, without pulling at the heart-strings, and provide balanced, accurate reporting that doesn’t dumb down debate or put suicide down to singular causes. The Suicide Prevention Resource Centre lists the eight major risk factors for suicide. It seemed to me that Molly’s father and indeed Molly herself were being exploited in connection with a drive to restart the upcoming Online Safety Bill. Might this particular news story coverage be a form of propaganda?
The Online Safety Bill was put on hold at the beginning of the Conservative leadership contest. It was due to have its second reading in the House of Lords. The Bill is complex and the details of what it constitutes can be found here. There are now, however, renewed calls for it to be brought back by a number of organisations in the wake of the inquest into Molly’s death. My concern is that the Online Safety Bill will effectively reinforce the tendency towards Government-approved media propaganda. To explore the potential minefield of issues that this subject raises I want to pursue the matter from a sceptical angle and understand more about the meaning and techniques of propaganda.
Propaganda might be defined as a special form of communication used especially in news media to manipulate public opinion by distorting the representation of reality. Some descriptions I’ve seen seem to embellish propaganda with a slightly positive spin, in that the ultimate aim may be for the greater good as, for example, suggested in the case of military war. I, however, can only see the term in a negative light because the whole ethos is based on deception, usually on a mass scale. The widespread use of propaganda undermines trust of those in power and eventually leaves the public confused and largely unable to establish what news is actually genuine.
Among other ‘harms’, the Bill creates incentives for social media companies to remove online content that is supposedly ‘legal, but harmful’. Is the targeting of this content simply a way of circumventing a democratic justice system for political purposes, by setting up a parallel system of censorship outside the courts of law to suppress online speech? Justice should be seen to be done and the suppression of legal content must surely be anathema to the idea of fair treatment for all members of society.
Recent articles in the Daily Sceptic and TCW have demonstrated the dire effects propaganda has in relation to the Covid pandemic regime. News of the many confirmed deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines have been buried and the professional bodies relating to healthcare (the GMC), and law (the SRA) have made it almost impossible for concerned parties to dare speak out or whistleblow. Wouldn’t the Online Safety Bill close the partially open door that challenges the mainstream media narrative and Government diktats? Isn’t a far greater harm the one where Dr. Hoenderkamp’s child patients (in the Daily Sceptic article) with confirmed post-vaccine heart damage will live with the possibly lasting consequences for the rest of their lives, and will forever wonder why they were essentially coerced into receiving a medical intervention that, based on their clinical need, was completely unnecessary? All this because they and many other children and young adults and their parents potentially do not obtain and are prevented from receiving properly informed consent – and this even before such a Bill is on the books? Isn’t the far greater harm the one in which the public have not been given all the information and warnings from experts about lockdowns and the COVID-19 vaccines because those dissenting voices and the potential whistleblowers cannot afford to do so for fear of the proposed consequences of the Bill, which will only make the situation worse?
The full list of propaganda techniques is long but here are some apposite Covid-related examples that demonstrate further harmful effects:
- ad hominem – ‘to the person’; used against scientists opposing lockdowns and emergency inoculation;
- ad nauseum – tireless repetition of slogans such as ‘save the NHS’, ‘safe and effective’, ‘don’t kill granny’, etc.;
- emotional appeal and agenda setting – e.g. the death by suicide of Molly Russell;
- appeal to authority – the deployment of the Chief Medical Officer (U.K.), Fauci (U.S.), celebrities and even the Queen (to encourage vaccine uptake);
- appeal to fear – the instruction that, despite decades of study showing no clear benefit from mask-wearing in relation to airborne viruses, it was suddenly made compulsory in public places;
- appeal to prejudice – that non-mask wearers and the unvaccinated will spread disease;
- bandwagon technique – reinforcing people’s natural desire to be on the winning side, be team players and win the battle against those who refuse to join up (vaxxers v anti-vaxxers);
- black and white fallacy – presents only two choices, e.g. lockdowns or no action, when a middle ground could have been reached as with the Great Barrington Declaration.
The obvious problem with propaganda is that it never works both ways, it only works the way those in power dictate. I don’t want a Bill that bans governments from saying that the Covid vaccine is 95% effective, extremely safe and will prevent transmission of the virus. All these claims were made by the Government at the beginning of the pandemic and have now been proved wrong. I just want the opposing views to be heard. If there is to be an Online Safety Bill, I would demand that it essentially work almost directly in the opposite fashion – by outlawing media censorship (not just online) of experts with contrarian views and by emphatically protecting whistleblowers.
An Online Safety Bill will only be practical and feasible if it can robustly answer the following:
- How does the source making an accusation that content is harmful prove just that; what is the evidence?
- Does the evidence stand up to scrutiny and does it take into account the possibility that things can change over time or that present unknowns will later come to light?
- How can we be sure that those responsible for scrutinising the evidence are unbiased and accountable?
- ‘Harmful’ to whom and to what proportion of the recipients? Might some content that is harmful to a minority be beneficial to the vast majority, and who decides?
Ofcom will be appointed as the state regulator of social media but, as I explained in my previous article, this regulatory body is clearly failing in the things it already has a duty to fulfil and should be scrapped in its current form. In business, lawyers warn that the new online rules will have a chilling effect and hit businesses unnecessarily hard.
Thus, in conclusion, I can see no way in which an Online Safety Bill can be made workable without undermining free speech and being far more harmful than any ‘misinformation’ it manages to suppress. The proposals, rather than being kicked into the long grass, should be scrapped altogether.
Dr. Mark Shaw is a retired dentist.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“The Online Safety Bill.”
It doesn’t get any more Orwellian than this. Translation, The Online Harms Bill. There will be no safety considerations to this Bill, indeed just the opposite. Unless of course we believe safety means constant repetition and spewing of every dangerous government diktat.
The only subjects deemed safe by government will be those designed to undermine the nation’s health, both physical and mental. Any issues raised to challenge government directions will be considered harmful. As usual lies and dishonesty will be badged as ‘truths’ and all challenges to ‘the truths’ will be treated as illegal and harmful. Much as The $cience is treated now.
We are rapidly approaching George Orwell’s 1984 where fiction becomes reality. It won’t take many years of this before even those spouting the lies will be unable to spot the blatant falsehoods. They will know they are lying but be unable to identify what the lie is, very much like “safe and effective.”The days of 2 + 2 = 5 are not far away.
There can be no clearer indicators of the precariousness of our position than the fact that words such as ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ are in frequent daily use. And we now believe these words belong in our daily lexicon. Ten years ago such nonchalant use of these words would have labelled the user a ‘conspiracy nutter.’
We have arrived!
It would have drawn mockery and would have been associated with the Soviet Union or communist China.
What has changed is the same thing that has made people during the corona nonsense lose their minds and start demanding all kinds of authoritarian measures like forced masks and forced vaccines – also things we would never have drreamed possible.
Fear.
In this case it’s the fear of disorder and chaos, a fear which once again is exploited and stimulated by the establishment to get people under control. Our society seems to be gripped by all manner of fears now: climate hysteria, gender lunacy, economic meltdown, migrant invasion. There’s something for everybody.
For the most part it is hugely exaggerated and irrational, but the prevailing mood in our world today is fear. And in that climate, we’re being fed one authoritarian measure after another.
https://off-guardian.org/2022/10/04/the-morning-after/
An excellent piece posted at Off-G by CJ Hopkins which slots in very neatly here. All about the desire to fit in.
”The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command…”
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth…”
George Orwell 1984
Thanks for that Trev.
Interesting article from Robert W Malone, shedding some light on how/why Orwell was so spookily accurate.
Excellent article which centres on an interview with Aldous Huxley who shines a light on the present from 70 years ago.
Oops, my mistake. Thanks for pointing it out so gently. It was, as you say, an interview with Huxley (Brave New World).
I did toy with the idea of editing that reply but decided against it.
It is probably fair to say that thanks to the internet the public have the opportunity to be more informed about almost anything than at any time previously in history.
Governments want to put that genie back in the bottle and go back to the times when they had a pretty firm control on the national discourse.
The problem is that once you taste freedom, you don’t want to go back.
Establishments fear disorder and chaos but they have to accept that a better informed population is better not worse, messy as the process might be. Just like democracy, messy as it is, results in far more robust societies than autocracies that look very calm but where all the tension is bubbling up underneath the surface.
The only people who don’t believe in freedom of speech and don’t want to put their faith in the public to make their minds up about things for themselves are people with authoritarian, totalitarian streaks. And these people need to be pushed back hard. Very hard.
“It is probably fair to say that thanks to the internet the public have the opportunity to be more informed about almost anything than at any time previously in history.”
Quite right Stewart, which is why my disdain for the medical ‘profession’ is so vehement. I found the evidence which brought me here. They are in the industry. It was their duty to seek the truth. They failed, by and large, completely.
Safe and effective vaccines in six months? For crying out loud!
The intention of the Online Harms Bill is to suppress free speech. They want to control thought, speech and YOU.
Anything else they say about it is a lie.
Fear has been a massive part of the harms inflicted on the populous by TPTB in the name of ‘safety’. This has been known for years, especially the impact of fear on health, the ‘nocebo’ effect, clearly explained in this substack.
The killing started with fear even before they started to overdose patients on midazolam & morphine protocols, ventilate & stick needles into arms.
We are experiencing a democide.
https://drsimon.substack.com/p/the-nocebo-effect-how-fear-and-panic?sd=pf
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/58-03/0121/220121.pdf
Sorry for this very long comment, but this is important. It’s worth anyone who hasn’t at least skim read this bill giving it a look. No matter how bad you think it might be, it’s worse than that.
It’s hardly surprising that the mainstream media are hustling for its introduction using every means of manipulation, propaganda and spite in their arsenal. They’re dying for many reasons, and for them this bill offers the promise or resuscitation. It will regulate any non-state sanctioned media out of existence. I expect this is its exact purpose – it would not just restore the influence of media (and their oligarch backers) over discourse, it would give them total control of it.
Hacks who work for them are convinced their enlightened journey through journalism school put them on a special plinth of moral righteousness. They use this as a cover for intellectual laziness and absence of integrity, and are riven with jealousy toward the thriving world of online and citizen journalism. They’d love more than anything to kill the competition. It’s a lethal situation for free speech and thought, when they still have the edge on influencing mass opinion, particularly that of the political classes.
This, coming at a time when the UN and WEF are overtly making noises about limiting free speech for our own good, and the police are dragging regular, decent people from their houses for liking the ‘wrong’ tweet, is doubly dangerous. The tinfoil hatted part of me says these are practice runs to normalise this state of affairs for both for us and a police force who might otherwise feel uncomfortable about what they’re asked to do.
So why is it so bad? It confers on Ofcom – a non-judicial, unelected body – powers that would only previously have been in the domain of the courts. It allows unelected officials to police and shut down any speech, based on the most loose definition of harm, and impose mandatory fines for perceived infractions. Failure to abide by their diktat – even failure to produce documents requested by Ofcom or sensitive passwords – means a prison sentence. Can you imagine the sorts of sociopaths this would attract to their ranks? There is some waffle about accountability to the Home Secretary, but this is effectively meaningless filler. They will effectively become a branch of the security services.
The bill offers a sop to detractors in claiming to ringfence debate ‘in the public interest’ or ‘democracy’. It fails to answer the question of who gets to define what is the public interest or democracy? Who would be left with the power to define it? We’ve already seen how eagerly authorities and their media lackeys have taken to redefining words (like ‘vaccine’ or ‘hate’) when it suits them.
Moreover, these sorts of punishments wouldn’t just apply to purveyors of ‘harmful’ content, they would also apply to individuals running or working for platforms that are deemed to have published it. This is a focal point of the proposed legislation:
Here’s a hypothetical situation: some variant of Covid makes a return, along with coordinated propaganda pressure from the government to have a 10th booster, despite well known adverse effects. mRNA vaccine sceptics, having been portrayed by mainstream media campaigns as borderline terrorists, continue to challenge the orthodoxy. Dr Mark Shaw publishes an article on the Daily Sceptic pointing to worrying ONS figures on vaccine harm / efficacy, but makes a small mistake in the presentation of a certain dataset. This is immediately leapt on as ‘disinformation’, and used as a trojan horse for claims that reading the article would cause harm to a section of the population. Toby Young faces a crippling fine, as the controller of the publishing platform. If the DS uses a non proprietary blogging platform, its owners could also face crippling fines. Both organisations could be asked to hand over their computers, passwords and any documentation on Dr Shaw to Ofcom. If they refuse, both could face a prison sentence.
By a certain point, it wouldn’t get this far – the threat of it is enough to silence dissent and enforce orthodoxy outside authorised opinion. A sternly worded warning from Ofcom would be enough to make anyone think twice about publishing anything. The public sphere will be reduced to cute cat videos, so long as animal rights activists approve.
On this note, the bill also gives activists free rein to harry and harass their opponents into silence. Its definition of ‘harm’:
Section 151 (4): “”Harm” means psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress”.
Section 190 (4): “References to harm presented by content, and any other references to harm in relation to content, include references to harm arising or that may arise in the following circumstances-
(a) Where, as a result of the content, individuals act in a way that results in harm to themselves or that increases the likelihood of harm to themselves;
(b) where, as a result of the content, individuals do or say something to another individual that results in harm to that other individual that increases the likelihood of such harm (including, but not limited to, where individuals act in such a way as a result of content that is related to that other individual’s characteristics or membership of a group.”
In a culture where feelings must be ‘validated’ rather than addressed or questioned, when victimhood status must be accepted at face value, can anyone imagine any limit to how these definitions might be abused? The ‘hate crime’ laws already giving the police the power to intimidate people for wrongthink based on spurious radical activist’s claims are bad enough – this bill would just seal them into a regulatory framework.
And if the power to determine what constitutes ‘at least serious distress’ is left for a magistrate to decide? Now male rapists are being allowed to ‘self identify’ as women and request transfer to women’s prisons, does anyone feel it safe to leave that sort of decision in their hands?
Again, activists, on whatever side of the political spectrum the current administration aligns with, will have untrammelled power to shut down any debate before it can even get started.
A lot of the proposed legislation covers areas of genuine harm that are arguably already covered by existing legislation on publishing, were it enforced properly. It makes an effort to deal with online fraud, intimidation, harassment, violent pornography and so on. But this scattergun approach underlies the fact that these considerations (which undoubtedly need to be addressed in fair debate), are in this bill nothing more than a moral trojan horse, in which can be smuggled the power to police and control internet content in its totality; a way for those pushing this state of affairs to fuel their illiberal agenda with moral panic, to cow the public into compliance, as this headline article rightly points out.
If this bill passes, speech in the UK will no longer be free. It will cost the price of a license from a state regulator (be it Ofcom or IPSO), who will be able to withdraw it at their pleasure. No doubt similar legislation is in the wings all across the Western world, with predictably suspicious timing.
I might as well say here that the people responsible for it should be tarred and feathered, while I still can.
I don’t doubt the validity of the case you make. We must be prepared to keep ourselves properly informed via the samizdat route.
This father trying to blame everyone but himself for the fate of his depressive teenage daughter deserves a kick in the posterior.
I don’t want to give them ideas, but my crystal ball tells me the media will soon start to blame suicides on anxiety caused by ‘disinformation’.
Something I also thought about about writing: So, they first leave people with depression alone until it kills them and then try to use these deaths to further their political agenda?
Keep on protecting those children, Nadine!
[insert vomiting emoji here]
Much more than a kick, and in a much more senstive part of his anatomy. He gives fatherhood a very bad name
Great article!