The Southport Inquiry’s Sinister Censorship Agenda

The Southport Inquiry, into the horrific murders committed by Axel Rudakubana in July 2024, is nearing the end of its first phase. Since early July it has heard day after day of evidence from victims and their families as well as representatives of the police, Lancashire County Council, knife sellers, social workers, mental-health professionals and the Youth Justice Board. Throughout, the inquiry has sought to discover how and why Rudakubana came to murder those girls in Southport – and how he was allowed to. The process has sought to discover where public bodies could and should have acted differently, and whether it might have been possible to avoid the horror and death of July 2024.

Against this backdrop, the final week included a peculiar interlude. For over three hours on Tuesday, counsel for the inquiry and for the victims quizzed Deanna Romina Khananisho, the Head of Global Affairs at X, who describes herself as a “free speech warrior”. You might wonder why X has any relevance to the inquiry. No other social network’s representatives have been called to give evidence. The pretext seemed to be that shortly before the attack, Rudakubana had used X to watch a video showing a knife attack on an Australian Bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel, at a church service in Sydney a few months earlier.

Even so, the questioning went much wider than that. Topics covered included X’s content moderation policies, how it determines users’ ages, whether the organisation had done any ‘soul-searching’, the tone with which it wrote to the Home Secretary and how brilliant the Online Safety Act is.

I’m not joking about the last part. Despite the Online Safety Act (OSA) not being in effect when Rudakubana committed his horrific crimes, Nicholas Moss, Senior Counsel for the inquiry (and therefore effectively representing the wider British regime), spent quite a bit of time trying to get Khananisho to agree that the OSA is tremendous. At one point he asked her if she agreed that because it was setting such an example, X should roll out its brilliant age verification rules globally, and whether it would. Khananisho responded with far more politeness than the bizarre suggestion warranted.

Age verification was covered in significant detail, both by counsel for the inquiry and counsel for the victims’ families. Why the victims’ families have developed such an interest in the minutiae of age verification, and even the question of whether VPNs should be banned, is an interesting question. One could be forgiven for wondering whether specialist police officers or civil servants from the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit have been advising them.

In any event, the inquiry counsel seemed unable to grasp the concept of tradeoffs. A system which might allow a single child to watch adult content was wrong, ran the argument. If X wasn’t doing everything in its power to prevent that, that meant it was irresponsible. Arguments from Khananisho that friction and ID requirements themselves are blocks to free speech were given short shrift.

The exchange about the Sydney video was particularly odd. Nicholas Moss, senior counsel to the inquiry, kept claiming that the footage was “graphic”. This mattered because particularly graphic content might be considered for removal under X’s terms of service.

Khananisho, quite reasonably, explained that because it was footage from a livestream taken from some distance away, it was impossible to even see that the attacker was holding a knife, so it didn’t count as graphic.

Ah, Moss replied, seemingly delighted with himself, but we know that it was “violent”, don’t we? He seemed to be suggesting that footage which is not materially graphic can become so through some process of transubstantiation, which takes place once we receive certain extra information about it. Khananisho seemed as perplexed by this line of argument as I am.

Moss went on to imply that Rudakubana might have been inspired to commit these murders by having watched this video on X. He asked Khananisho to speculate as to what the killer might have thought as she watched it. She refused, pointing out that it was an impossible request.

The free speech warrior then gave a fiery response in which she explained that to her the video was a symbol of hope and Christian forgiveness. For Khananisho had watched the stream live, and saw the Bishop, moments after being attacked, move to pray for his attacker. Context matters, Khananisho insisted. Moss seemed baffled by this argument.

At other times, Moss ceased asking questions at all, in favour of lecturing Khananisho on social responsibility. The X exec remained admirably composed throughout.

It was hours into this theatre that we discovered what I suspect is the real reason X was summoned, and other social networks were not. After the Southport attacks, the Home Secretary had written to all of them, asking them to take the Sydney church video down, despite it not being illegal in the UK.

Moss showed the responses. While Meta, TikTok and others had written letters which expressed what Moss seemed to feel were appropriate levels of contrition and with sufficient kind words for the victims, in X’s letter, “nothing was said about the victims or the horrifying nature of the attack or sorrow in relation to it. Was there a reason for that?”, he asked. X had said that it would comply with the law, and that therefore the content would remain accessible in the UK, as it was entirely lawful content.

This seemed to be the real issue. This pesky social media network didn’t allow itself to be bullied into doing what the Home Secretary wanted, and so the regime had to punish it with this attempt at humiliation. Of course, X removing this video could not have done anything to prevent an attack that had already happened.

It was a bizarre session, which revealed the vast cultural gulf between the British state and the real world. It also revealed the state’s determination to shift blame. Much easier to point the finger at social media, or a particular video, than to recognise the years of failure to control, arrest or stop Axel Rudakubana were the real failure behind this attack, as I discussed with Laurie Wastell on last week’s edition of the Sceptic. We also saw a frankly sinister willingness to use the worst kind of tragedy to advance an internet censorship agenda. These people truly have no shame.

David Shipley has sold fork lift trucks, worked in corporate finance, produced a film and served a prison sentence for committing fraud. He now campaigns for prison reform and works as a prison inspector. You can find his website here.