Tag: united kingdom

This Is the End of Free Speech Online

The internet has changed radically in the past decade or so. Where social-media giants once boasted about being ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’, in recent years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms have become increasingly censorious, cracking down on dissenting views and offensive speech. Big Tech has relished this role as the unofficial arbiter of acceptable thought. But while the likes of Facebook may have severely wounded free speech online, it could be the UK government that deals the killer blow.

This week the long-awaited Online Safety Bill was published, which aims to make the UK the ‘safest place to be online in the world’ – in other words, the country with the most strictly regulated and censored internet of any liberal democracy. This mammoth piece of legislation was five years in the making, and those five years show. The bill is vast in scope, and terrifying in its implications for free speech.

Most significant is the ‘duty of care’ the bill imposes on social-media firms. Tech platforms will be legally required to prevent users from seeing both illegal content and ‘legal but harmful content’.

What actually constitutes ‘harmful content’ has yet to be revealed. If the Online Harms White Paper (published in 2020) is any guide, then this is likely to include content which might cause psychological harm, disinformation and trolling or harassment. Of course, all of these ‘harms’ are subjective. ‘Trolling’ can extend from playful banter to persistent harassment. Which views tech firms consider to be ‘disinformation’ has less to do with lies and truth than political expediency.

Once this list of harms is approved by parliament, the culture secretary will have the power to add more categories of harm, and firms will be required to report new ‘emerging harms’ to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. So we should expect the bill’s censorious remit to expand over time.

Firms which fail to comply with the new duty-of-care requirements, or are obstructive or provide false information to Ofcom, can be fined up to 10 per cent of their annual worldwide revenue, and platform executives can be sentenced to up to two years in jail. These severe penalties have allowed UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries to claim that she is taking on Big Tech, and that she is holding Silicon Valley firms ‘accountable’. But it is not Big Tech firms that suffer when free speech is curtailed online. Indeed, they have already demonstrated their indifference to free speech.

After all, it is not Facebook, Twitter or Google that produce the ‘harmful’ content the government wants to eliminate. It is us, the users of social media, the deplorable, unruly citizens, who are saying things that our political masters would rather we did not say. It is our ability to express ourselves that will be curtailed by this legislation, not theirs. And this is why this bill is so troubling.

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UK Online Safety Bill, that will censor some “legal but harmful” content, presented to Parliament

The Online Safety Bill, the most far-reaching online censorship law to ever be proposed in the UK, has been presented to Parliament.

UK Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State Nadine Dorries, said her aim with the bill was to “make the internet, in the UK, the safest place in the world for children and vulnerable young people to go online.”

However, as with many bills that are positioned as a way to keep children safe, this Online Safety Bill contains sweeping speech restrictions that will affect all UK internet users.

The bill requires Big Tech companies to take action against “priority legal but harmful” content which will be decided by the government. The DCMS Secretary of State has the power to add more categories of priority legal but harmful content via secondary legislation in the future.

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British MP Calls Scale of COVID-19 Vaccine Damage a ‘Nightmare’

A veteran MP believes that tens of thousands have been severely adversely affected by COVID-19 vaccines in the UK and is calling on the government for more support.

“The public is going to catch on in the end,” Sir Christopher Chope told The Epoch Times.

“All the harms that have been caused and the fact that there are a whole lot of people out there who did the right thing and now, contrary to their expectation, are not receiving the help from the government that they believed they were to receive. That’s where I am in this,” he said.

The Conservative MP believes that tens of thousands have been adversely affected by vaccines. He said that the debate is not about all those who have benefited from vaccination, he firmly believes in them. But it’s about those who were vaccinated but then, as a result, suffered death, serious injury, or other life-changing adverse consequences.

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Whilst you’ve been distracted by Russia’s Invasion, the UK Gov. released a Report confirming the Fully Vaccinated now account for 9 in every 10 Covid-19 Deaths in England

The latest data published by the UK Health Security Agency confirms deaths are rising dramatically among the triple vaccinated population whilst declining steadily among the not-vaccinated population in England.

With the most recent figures showing the fully vaccinated accounted for 9 in every 10 Covid-19 deaths over the past month; and the triple vaccinated accounted for 4 in every 5 of them.

These are dark days for the citizens of Ukraine, but if you were to watch mainstream news or read a mainstream newspaper you could be forgiven for thinking the plight of the Ukrainians is currently the only event taking place in the world.

The Russian invasion is being aired in an endless 24/7 loop via BBC News and Sky News, with not a word about Covid-19 to be heard, despite airing nothing but propaganda and lies on the pandemic for the past two years.

It’s times like these that you ought to watch what bad news is being quietly published in the background in the hope that it won’t receive much attention, because there’s nothing better than an international crisis to distract the public from what’s going on at home.

With that being said, let’s take a look at what the UK Government have “quietly” published in the past week in regards to the Covid-19 situation in England.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) publish a weekly Covid-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report, the most recent of which was published Thursday 24th Feb 22, and it can be viewed here.

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Diversity Training Tells Teachers That Kids Aren’t ‘Racially Innocent’

A number of teachers in the UK have been told that children as young as seven years old are not ‘racially innocent’ during mandatory diversity training.

During classes described as “Racial Literacy 101” sessions, a number of UK-based teachers have been told that kids as young as seven should not be thought of as “racially innocent”.

Brighton and Hove City Council — which has since been accused of “indoctrinating” children —  has said that the classes are “required for all staff” in schools.

According to an exposé by The Telegraph, 300 teachers have undertaken the training so far, which will supposedly inform “specific racial literacy-focused lessons” for school kids.

In documents seen by the publication, the course includes reference to “covert white supremacy” — which is partially defined during the course as denying white privilege — and also claims that young children are often seen as “racially innocent” despite supposed “ample evidence” showing that this is not the case.

“Between the ages of three and five, children learn to attach value to skin colour; white at the top of the hierarchy and black at the bottom,” The Telegraph reports one of the course documents as claiming.

The UK paper also reports that the consultant giving the session described Christianity as influencing the slave trade, and that they claimed that society obsesses over the muscle size of black sportsmen, but not those of their white rivals.

Also noted is that the city council is advertising a “race adviser” job with an advertised salary of £50,000 to £55,000 pro rata for two and a half days a week.

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Two Men Arrested in UK Over Texas Synagogue Hostage Situation

Two men have been arrested in the UK in relation to the recent hostage attack on a Synagogue in Texas.

UK police have announced the arrest of two men in relation to the hostage attack on the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas.

Malik Faisal Akram — the UK national responsible for the attack — was shot dead after an 11-hour standoff after taking a number of hostages.

It has subsequently been revealed that Akram was previously known to UK Intelligence,  but was not deemed a threat to the public after an assessment in 2020.

As part of the UK’s ongoing investigation into the incident, The Telegraph has reported that a number of arrests have been made in Britain.

“Officers from Counter-Terror Policing (CTP) North West continue to support US authorities with their investigation into the events in Texas,” the publication reports the Greater Manchester Police as saying.

“As a result of this ongoing investigation, two men have been arrested this morning in Birmingham and Manchester,” the statement continues. “They remain in custody for questioning.”

The UK paper also notes that two teenagers who were also arrested after the attack have since been released without charge.

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UK government hires ad agency to convince the public they don’t need privacy

The UK is stepping up its “war on encryption,” reports are saying, and like in any good old war, propaganda comes first to “prepare the ground.” And a new campaign is expected to launch as early as this month.

In this case, they call it publicity, with the Home Office being behind the effort whose goal is to sway public opinion in favor of undermining the privacy of the very members of that public – using their own money from public funds, to the tune of over half a million pounds.

Meanwhile the “hired gun” is ad agency M&C Saatchi. The Rolling Stone said it had a chance to review documents thanks to a Freedom of Information request, and that what it discovered were “some shockingly manipulative tactics.”

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Retired BBC producer caught with over 800 child abuse images spared jail time due to ‘poor health’

76-year-old Victor Melleney, a retired BBC producer, was caught with 832 indecent images of children stored on a range of devices.

Melleney, who worked on top shows such as Question Time and Panorama, was spared jail time Friday after a judge decided a prison sentence would be “particularly challenging” for the septuagenarian in “poor health.”

Melleney admitted he is addicted to legal pornography, but maintained he had no interest in indecent images of children, the Kingston Crown Court heard.

According to the Daily Mail, when Melleney was arrested in 2018 at his west London home, National Crime Agency officers found 612 of the 832 images on a hard drive, but he insisted he had no idea how the illegal material got there.

The officers also found illegal stun guns at the time belonging to Melleney, and he admitted to four charges of possession of prohibited weapons for discharge of noxious gas, namely three Tasers and CS gas spray, at an earlier hearing.

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UK Government Greases Skids For Fleets of Surveillance Drones Over Cities

In what appears to be a cynical PR stunt, the UK government is considering plans to allow women who feel threatened on the street to call upon surveillance drones that would arrive in minutes and shine a bright light on any potential attacker.

What could possibly go wrong?

“Women in fear of an attack will be able to use a phone app to summon a drone, which could arrive within minutes armed with a powerful spotlight and thermal cameras to frighten off any potential assailant,” reports the Telegraph.

Trials will take place on campus at Nottingham University at a cost of £500,000 during which the tech will be used to “protect students and staff.”

The scheme will be submitted to the UK government’s Innovate research program, and could eventually see helicopters being replaced by drones as a front line tool of law enforcement.

“It is a high capability drone that costs just £100 an hour but can do 80 percent of what a police helicopter can do,” said Richard Gill, the founder of Drone Defence. “It cannot do high speed pursuits but it can do the other tasks such as searching for people and ground surveillance.”

Gill noted that 25 drones could do the job of one police helicopter in London for the same price, with the drones being housed at five base locations across the city.

The idea of countless government drones whizzing around a city keeping tabs on people is garishly dystopian.

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