We Need to Wake Up to the Dangers of the Online Safety Bill
I’ve just recorded an interview with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster for Triggernometry about the Online Safety Bill, pointing out the risks it poses to free speech. People are far more sanguine about this Bill than they should be – it’s not as if we haven’t been warned. Nadine Dorries, who as Secretary of State at DCMS is responsible for this Bill, has already said that under the new regulatory regime created by the Bill Ofcom will be able to regulate what jokes we’re allowed to read or watch or hear on social media platforms and singled out Jimmy Carr’s controversial joke about the Holocaust as an example of what would be banned. You can watch my interview by clicking here.
Needless to say, the Free Speech Union is doing everything in its power to try to improve the Bill – and you can support that work by joining the FSU here. Membership fees start at £2.49 a month.
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.
Ok, let’s start the ball rolling with some jokes…
Politicians and nappies have one thing in common: they should both be changed regularly… and for the same reason.
The main difference is that one can choose when to change a nappy.
Politicans are like sewage systems: Full of shit which eventually ends up polluting the environment.
The big problem nowadays is that politicians have nothing to do with deciding on legislation. Technocrats do that. Politicians then just sell it to us…
How about:
A Labour leader walks into a pub…
How about turning that around :-): A pub walked into a Labour leader.
A small circle of friends and family will gather for the funeral next Sunday.
We are only two years into the new normal
So far we have
The loss of free speech
The removal of the right to protest
Detention without trial
State organised child abuse
Forced medical experiments
Even Hitler did not achieve such things in his first two years in office
Soon people like me will not be allowed to say such things and then will be done away with
The compliant comply in the hope they will be saved….they need to read history
This is just the start
You will be allowed to say what you want so long as no one is paying attention.
If people start paying attention to you, they’ll come for you.
Another is seizure of property without fair legal process and a finding of criminal guilt as we have seen with the Russian oligarchs.
One minute they are goodies tipping £millions into the Tory party coffers, next minute they are baddies and their assets disappear on the whim of the State.
Schwab has told them it is OK to seize property as no one but the New Elites will have any under the NWO to be imposed by his ‘Great Reset’!
All his many Globalist WEF pupils will just be waiting for the go-ahead!
Object lesson for everyone in the UK there.
Tried to make this point recently. Got blank looks and the usual “but Russians bad” patter.
In reality, except for a very brief moment in time between the emergence of social media and governments stepping in to rein it in, we’ve never really had free speech.
We have and have always had free speech as long as we were saying the right things, or if we were saying the wrong things but nobody was paying attention to us. Quirky things like Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park were allowed because it was never more than a some eccentrics speaking to a docile crowd.
What we have never been allowed is to say the wrong things and have a platform to say them.
So really what we are fighting for is something new that we’ve had a bit of a taste of, that authorities have realised is extremely menacing to them and want to shut down.
They want to take us back to where we used to be.
“In reality, except for a very brief moment in time between the emergence of social media and governments stepping in to rein it in, we’ve never really had free speech.”
As a principle, it seems to have been reasonably well established and accepted in the USA from the founding until fairly recently, though perhaps in practice it was limited as much by access issues as by censorship. But in general I think you’re right – it’s not the norm.
That’s exactly it. The commitment to free speech is being challenged like never before because all of a sudden, potentially, anyone can say something that thousands or even millions of people can read or hear.
When did that ever exist? Never. You needed a lot of resources and infrastructure so only a few had the power to project speech beyond a very narrow scope.
Also, established institutions can be circumvented, just like in the way Trump did. He didn’t seem as beholden to his political party as his predecessors because he could reach people directly so he wasn’t so dependent on the party machinery. In some ways he flipped it around and gained power over the machinery.
In short, those in authority don’t want the plebs getting all uppity and actually having some influence on the way others think.
How ungrateful. We had ‘Letter in the Times’. Wasn’t that enough for you?
Good joke!
A lot of that is true, I was wondering if people will stop posting anything on social media and go back to talking about things in the pub instead where they can say whatever they want to whoever they want.
If they don’t take pubs off us that is
There are an awful lot of pubs becoming m*sq**s. There’s a pub near me, now set for that fate, opposite a Catholic Church, an infants & junior school, and a girl’s secondary school (all Catholic), which is an expression of contempt if ever there was one.
The only way this ends is if people stop trying to police one another and accept that we all have the right to think and act as we wish. If I don’t want to hire someone who’s black, then I won’t. End of
We all have the right to act as we wish? Everybody?
Hmm – is the person you didn’t want to hire because they’re “black” allowed to do whatever they want to you? No “policing”?
Not hiring someone is not doing anything to them.
It’s discriminating on the grounds of skin colour, which is a bit silly if you had two candidates applying for a job and the black candidate was a better fit than the white candidate.
Self harm really.
Agreed it would be self harm in that case, but the key thing is it is personal choice. We are each free to choose whatever we want to do, at least that way there’s nothing to police and get irritated about.
Which makes discrimination self limiting in a society free of endemic discrimination, which is the UK. If you don’t employ the really good bricky on the grounds of his skin colour, he goes to your competition and they benefit.
Which is fine, everyone can choose who they do business with. If I don;t want to bake a cake for a woolly woofter then i won’t.
The minute you try and control people’s freedom with silly rules, you’re on the path to the mess we’re in today where you can’t fart without losing your job
And lose your dole money if you fart in the job centre?
It was Backlash’s chosen example of acting as he might wish. If everyone has the right to act as they wish, no retaliation (even for perceived insults) is off limits.
unfortunately whether its conditioning the masses or the majority of people are not in reality genuinely attached to their liberties, I don’t see a big outpouring against the harms bill whatsoever. This encapsulated it for me last yr when after the euro finals, their was a mob mentality to almost hunt down anyone who had sent tweets to footballers that was not approved of. If people side with multi millionaire footballers who have never been held back and have gained an incredible amount over the average joe then this is where we are at.
also, all this harms bill is for is to implement digital ID, as in order to access most things you will need an ID, all in the guise of protecting children which after two yrs of the state banning children from schooling, friends, trying to force a jab onto them and pumping out endless fear propaganda about “killing your granny” seems a bit of a laugh.
I see the same thing and I see it as the result of the feminisation of society.
Direct conflict, verbal or otherwise, seems to me more a feature of a man’s world. We fight more directly and get over it more quickly. In a woman’s world, conflict is more indirect, passive aggressive and festers.
To me this is how the world seems to be going. We are seemingly more civil to each other and yet more divided and entrenched in our positions like never before – at least in my lifetime.
I’m a woman and I agree with you. There are too many women in positions of authority now. I once had a female boss and I vowed never to work for a woman again. She could reach a level of small-minded nastiness I never experienced before – it was as if she had to ‘prove’ herself to other women rather than to the men, to whom she was decidedly more pleasant.
When someone says child protection you can bet your life an adult is going to get hurt.
To repeat something I wrote earlier in this context: Who authorized Nadine Get me out of here! Dorries to act autonomously on behalf of other people’s children?
That’s a bit like the future generations whose well-being politicians like to invoke. One extremely handy property of future generations (including the children) is that they’re not yet capable of voicing their own opinions on whatever is supposedly done on their behalf now. They’ll be forced accept it without having a voice in the matter.
“Improve the bill” … it should be ditched. It was devised as a way to stop free speech platforms spreading the truth.
Toby is a realist.
Theresa May’s Extremist Banning and Disruption Orders proposal was thrown out, even Harriet Harman and co. could see there was a problem with an ill defined concept such as “extremist speech that falls short of illegal incitement”. This bill is just another attempt to introduce the same concept in different wording “legal but harmful”.
“Joint Select Committee Scathingly Dismisses Theresa May’s Counter Extremism Proposals”
https://chaunceytinker.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/breaking-news-joint-select-committee-scathingly-dismisses-theresa-mays-counter-extremism-proposals/
That said they do seem to be facing less opposition this time as far as I can make out.
It can be improved by shoving it up Kim Jong Johnson’s arse….
“Truth” is now the biggest enemy of all Western Governments
Largely confined to two mediums, Twitter and Facebook. Online abuse could largely be addressed with having them conform to the existing laws of regular publications.
Will we still be able to discuss the lack of real qualifications of those who run the global corporations who wish to decide how we live our lives, or the lucrative incomes they get from their schemes to make their lives better and the rest of ours a miserable existence or the MSM media only interpretation….
How does one stop it in the UK when Twitter, for example, is based in America? If, for example, Musk allows anonymous accounts, it’s impossible to track people. Even if he doesn’t, if he refuses to furnish British authorities with personal details of posters, then nothing can be done.
Then there’s bots.
An excellent interview. Also, kudos again to Toby for setting up the free speech union when he did: That’s called “catching the wave”, although it may be more of a Tsunami.
‘Ofcom will be able to regulate what jokes we’re allowed to read or watch or hear on social media platforms and singled out Jimmy Carr’s controversial joke about the Holocaust as an example of what would be banned.’
When the powerful can’t win the argument they censor.
In the modern era one of the first things that it became forbidden to criticise in many countries were the Holocaust claims, there is good reasons why they powers that be can’t tolerate the Holocaust claims being examined critically.
The Jimmy Carr joke is a classic case of people looking for offence. He warned them yet they still tuned in determined to be offended and duly were. I’ve stopped watching “Ave I Got News for You” and “Mock the Week” because of the continuing tide of left-wing tosh that it contains but I wouldn’t want to ban it.
They will ban any criticism of their favoured policies and interests.
They will ban criticism of – mass immigration, transgenderism and homo everything, sexualising children at younger and younger ages, the green agend, the WEF agenda, any talk of warp speed vaccines being dangerous, any talk of lockdowns being negative, Islamic rape gangs and terrorism.
Basically modern day China is their preferred model and the Tories intend to emulate them.
E ned to Wake up to ye dangers of nearly everything being dumped on us by the Johnson permanent “Emergency Orders” Government – signing us up to the Gates/ WHO domination of all Global medical mandates for example.
There’s an obvious potential unintended consequence to all this and it’s that people don’t look for jokes on the internet, they tell ribald stories down the pub.
Prohibition didn’t work in the USA and thought control won’t work in the UK either.
They think it will work, they wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t worried that they don’t control the narrative as well as they would like online.
Ofcom as the regulator of the Bill’s requirements will have free rein as the new Gestapo thought police. The Bill needs to be stopped in its tracks, not just fiddled with as it will be the thin end of the wedge.
Toby, will you be attending the Better Way Conference in Bath on May 20-22?
I sure hope so.