Net Censorship Killing Free Speech In Britain

Pam Barker | Director of TLB Europe Reloaded Project

We highly recommend Kurt Nimmo’s perceptive piece on this titled Britain’s OFCOM Regulating Social Media: The Beginning of the End of Free Speech. Of note:
Boris Johnson, like Trump, is a phony populist. His political stepping stone to the position of PM was Brexit. He is a British blue blood raised au pair in the bucolic English countryside. Johnson identifies as a “conservative” but holds mandatory liberal social beliefs, including the sacred touchstone, LGBT “rights” (above and beyond the natural rights every human on the planet is born with). 
The political class in the United “Kingdom” is serious about fully eliminating natural rights. The British state plans to squash the right of the British people to speak their minds, an effort headed up by a woman who has not held a real job her entire life. 
Once upon a time, it was the responsibility of parents to shield and protect their children from harmful content, now that responsibility has been taken up by the state and a legion of bureaucrats, “dames,” “sirs,” “baronesses,” “lords,” and associated “honorable” control freaks and sociopaths in the upper echelon of the British government. The connected effort to silence the plebs and commoners is marching under a banner calling for protecting the children (state sociopaths love this meme—only criminals oppose protecting the children). 
Readers may also be interested in this piece of February 12 from Order-Order, cited below, titled GOVERNMENT PROPOSES ‘MOST CENSORIOUS ONLINE SPEECH REGIME IN THE WESTERN WORLD’.
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Going across the Channel, we also remind readers of a Jonathan Turley piece we recently ran on Mila O. in France, who is challenging attitudes to free speech over religion, titled French Teenager Forces Free Speech Debate Over Her Calling Islam A “Religion Of Hate”. The point being that Turley believes that France is currently the biggest threat to free speech in the West:

We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here and here).

A teenager has sparked a national debate about blasphemy in France after an Instagram post calling Islam a “religion of hate”. Indeed, France has emerged as one of the greatest threats to free speech in the West,and we continue to face calls for European-style speech crimes, including calls by its President on the floor of the House of Representatives.

And now Boris Johnson in Britain.

As Order-Order observes:

The Government has stated a commitment to protect free expression, it is unclear how this will be balanced against a regulatory body that exists to create censorious guidelines.

The Tory’s 2019 manifesto was the only of any party to commit to “support free speech”. The Government has to change course.

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Net Censorship Kills Free Speech In Britain

TECHNOCRACY NEWS

Censorship

Thanks to PM Boris Johnson, Techno-Populism has swept Britain. The Populism element of the political equation will soon be discarded as Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” is established and Technocracy takes over. ⁃ TN Editor

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MARK ANGELIDES

The United Kingdom has become the first Western nation to move ahead with large-scale censorship of the internet, effectively creating regulation that will limit freedom on the last frontier of digital liberty. In a move that has the nation reeling, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has unveiled rules that will punish internet companies with fines, and even imprisonment, if they fail to protect users from “harmful and illegal content.”

Couched in language that suggests this is being done to protect children from pedophiles and vulnerable people from cyberbullying, the proposals will place a massive burden on small companies. Further, they will ultimately make it impossible for those not of the pervasive politically correct ideology to produce and share content.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes*

(*ER: Who’s watching the watchers?)

The new guardian of the internet will be the Office of Communications (known as Ofcom), a government-approved body that already regulates television, radio, broadcasting, and even the postal service. This group has been accused on many occasions of “acting as the moral arbiter” for the nation and, perhaps unsurprisingly, tends towards a very left-leaning position.

Speaking to Order-Order.com, Matthew Lesh, the head of research at The Adam Smith Institute, warned:

“Make no mistake: free speech is under threat. The Government is proposing the most censorious online speech regime in the Western world. We must not be fooled by platitudes about freedom of expression. The inevitably woke bureaucrats in Ofcom will be deciding what sort of speech is and is not allowed across much of the internet. They will have extraordinary discretion to decide who to target and what is harmful.

This is a recipe for disaster for anyone that thinks differently to the Notting Hill set — any correct but unpopular opinions will not just come under attack from the Twitterati, but the law itself.”

Ofcom has a new boss in place to go along with the new powers: Dame Melanie Dawes. Dawes has been a career civil servant for her entire working life and was most recently the Civil Service Gender and Diversity Champion from 2015 to 2019.

The Rules

Among the sweeping and censorious powers awarded to Ofcom are:

  • The ability to create guidelines that instruct content-hosting companies (YouTube, Facebook, etc.) on how to manage online censorship of “user-generated content.” (ER: this affects the Comments section of blogs)
  • Create rules for content that is “not illegal but has the potential to cause harm.”
  • To have the remit for deciding, writing up, and adapting rules on how internet regulation works.

Not only is the government mandating an outside body to orchestrate the regulation of the internet, but they are also handing over the power to decide exactly what should be censored. Boris Johnson, formerly considered the darling of liberty for his backing of Brexit, appears to have handed over control of who may speak and what may be said online to an organization that prides itself on its ability to clamp down on speech it considers fringe.

The nation’s newspapers are owned by a small group of people and companies. Many of the major television and radio stations are under charter with the U.K. government. Book publishing companies are too afraid to publish a single word that goes against the progressive orthodoxy. The ability to congregate and hold rallies is tightly controlled by government bodies. And now, the last realm of freedom, the last place in which like-minded souls can exchange ideas, learn, and express themselves to their fullest is about to fall under the Orwellian control of an agency that will not even be accountable to the government itself.

The Ministry of Truth is here.

Read full story here…

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Original article

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