2022-05-26
Toby Young (General Secretary of the Free Speech Union) takes a critical view of the On-Line Safety Bill in this Daily Sceptic report.
" ... it’s a gold-embossed invitation to woke activists to censor the speech of their political opponents in the name of protecting vulnerable people from ‘harm’. Why a Conservative Government with an 80-seat majority is handing this weapon to its enemies is a mystery"
No mystery Toby - the Tory leadership themselves have been swallowed by the blob and are now an inseparable part of it.
"What does the Government mean by ‘harmful’? The only definition the Bill offers is in clause 150, where it sets out the details of a new Harmful Communications Offence, punishable by up to two years in jail: ‘harm’ means psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress"
I wonder what the legal definition of 'serious' is?
"That’s a powerful incentive for social media companies to remove anything remotely contentious ... "
... and perchance a powerful incentive for those who disapprove of social media companies to flood their pages with 'remotely contentious' stuff in the hope that they will miss some of it and indeed get so fined.
Not that this site would ever approve of activity subversive of the truth or offensive to the reasonable person, but we do support free legal speech and we do deprecate censorship of legal speech, even on social media.
After all, to do otherwise is to support a censors' free-for-all.
Some might reasonably suggest that the balance might be redressed by introducing equivalent fines for the suppression of speech which is not harmful, thus ensuring that the social media companies could be held to account for censoring inappropriately. Of course the problem with that is that it is totally impracticable for us all to take claims for redress for censorship of our daily social posting activities through the courts.
The whole act should be binned as imposing totally unreasonable burdens upon all stakeholders in the social media business. After all, the social media companies already censor anything they object to, they don't need any encouragement.
If binning the act is unacceptable, then the onus should be simply reversed to impose fines only for the censorship of legal speech - their defence would be to show that the speech was indeed illegal. The "harm" caused to society by the suppression of legal free speech would then be properly protected and all parties should be happy ...
