The Government’s control over information available to the public is tightening. The rise of censorship and narrative control for our “safety” is one of the most disturbing trends to emerge in modern politics – and unless there is a course correction, it risks becoming a permanent feature of public life.
The Government is now reportedly planning to “crackdown” on private media companies and promote BBC News, ITV and Channel 4 news content across social media. Hand-picking broadcasters to be artificially boosted for public viewership smacks of manipulation over what the public can read, watch, and ultimately think.
And this is just the latest in an onslaught of online information control plans. Recently, the Government quietly introduced new powers for Ofcom to “crackdown” on social media companies during a crisis. Responding to incidents like disorder outside migrant hotels and the Belfast riots, the powers will force foreign tech companies to police Briton’s speech online even more rigorously than usual.
Companies will also have to open a direct channel to law enforcement, lending weight to concerns that the Government increasingly sees big tech as an extension of the state. Police forces will be invited to direct the companies to censorship action – despite the fact that many recent “crises” in our country arise from the public losing trust in the police, whether in the case of Sarah Everard or Henry Nowak.
Ofcom has admitted that these powers will push platforms to develop a crisis response that “prioritises speech of moderation over accuracy” resulting in “false positives” – that is, lawful speech being wrongly removed. Ofcom accepts that, given the nature of crises, such wrongly censored speech will include “the most highly protected forms of expression” spanning religion, political speech, and journalism and will “adversely impact users’ rights” to free speech – but maintains it is simply better to prioritise safety.
Herein lies the problem. Over the past decade in Britain, censorship has been shedding its stigma. On the altar of safety, it has developed from one of the dark arts people in power could only get away with behind doors, to official policy.
Digital censorship peaked during the Covid pandemic. The failure of the Covid Inquiry to hold the government to account for its sinister mass monitoring of public speech means this was not a mistake to be learnt from. It was an exercise to be repeated. Not only has the inquiry effectively scrubbed the extraordinary overreach of this surveillance operation from the official record, its findings encourage ever-greater counter-misinformation efforts.
In response to an official “Rule 9” request for evidence from the inquiry, I submitted a dossier of irrefutable evidence of the daily monitoring and censorship of dissenting parliamentarians, journalists, world-leading scientists, and ordinary Britons. These were critics who were maligned as spreaders of “misinformation” despite expressing lawful, and as it would transpire, entirely accurate concerns spanning preparedness, lockdowns, school closures, vaccine policies, Covid passports and other social restrictions.
The Covid Inquiry totally ignored the evidence I supplied and concluded “there was, in principle, nothing unlawful or inappropriate in the government monitoring publicly available social media to identify potential trends in disinformation or misinformation and flagging (content) to social media companies”.
Really? There was nothing “inappropriate” in turning the British Army inwards to monitor the lawful speech of the domestic population? Nothing inappropriate in logging posts by Sir David Davis MP in government “disinformation” reports intended for foreign hostile threats, to record that he was being “highly critical of the government”? Nothing inappropriate about spending public money recording the activities of Oxford University’s Prof Carl Heneghan, whose Twitter profile was suspended, simply for pointing out certain social restrictions had no scientific basis? The inquiry was told how the government even had to issue a formal apology to journalist Julie Hartley-Brewer after it transpired they had wrongly branded her a “vaccine sceptic” in a secret report sent to 64 officials across the UK as well as US counter-terror officials. How can any of this be remotely “appropriate”?
The inquiry not only ignored the evidence of wrongdoing by the counter-misinformation units – it praised them, and then buried the evidence. It made no reference to the evidence I submitted in its report and failed to publish it. The inquiry claimed this was an “administrative oversight” and explained it prioritises the publication of documents it referenced in the report. What a curious approach from a supposedly neutral inquiry. Imagine if judges could scrub bundles of evidence to only keep exhibits that support the prosecution and not the defence?
The truth is that counter-misinformation powers provide the establishment the perfect premise on which to insulate itself from the forces of dissent. They fit perfectly with the technocratic view that public opinion is a question of information management rather than of democratic freedom. And so, as long as this status quo prevails, no amount of evidence of overreach or abuse will make the Government row back from censorship powers – quite the opposite.
The Government’s raft of online “safety” policies stand to make the UK’s internet one of the most controlled in the democratic world. We will have to win the principled argument that citizens in a democracy have the right to hear, debate and judge for ourselves. We will have to win the battle between liberty and technocracy.
– Silkie Carlo
The Telegraph – The Government has grown too comfortable with censorship