Speech Control: Britain's China Temptation

A very interesting Yinfi video from a couple of weeks ago. From the video description -

Surveillance is never the disease. It’s the symptom. 

The real illness is older and quieter: the moment a society stops believing it can answer bad speech with better speech, and starts handing that job to the state. China gave in to that temptation decades ago. Britain is only beginning to feel the pull.

Headline and Video

Labour 'turning a blind eye' to Traveller encampments and 'letting communities down'

Labour is accused of "turning a blind eye" to Traveller encampments by ending a requirement for councils to count the number of caravans twice a year. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said the Government is "concealing the truth and masking the true scale of the challenge local residents and the police face". The former policing minister claimed Labour is pursuing a "soft-touch approach" which is "letting communities down".

UK 52 Kyrgyzstan 52

Global Internet Freedom Rankings: Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan Far Ahead of Eurasian Neighbors

The 2026 Global Internet Freedom Rankings, published this week by the research agency Cloudwards, have revealed that the five countries of Central Asia have significantly less internet censorship than all of their Eurasian neighbors. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan’s online environments emerge as particularly encouraging cases...

The only Eurasian country to rival Tajikistan is its northern neighbor Kyrgyzstan, which has the second freest internet in Central Asia, scoring 52 in Cloudwards’ ranking. For comparison, 52 is also the overall score given to the United Kingdom and Brazil...

The authors of the Cloudwards report, British editors Kit Copson and Sandra Pattison, commented: “The reasons behind online censorship range from protecting people targeted by hate speech to quelling political dissent. In especially restrictive locations, censorship and internet monitoring are tools commonly to control narratives.”

They added: “The consequences for breaching government-imposed censorship laws depend on the country. They could include fines or even arrest or imprisonment for those in highly restrictive locations.”

Can't read too much into these things, but a UK score of 52 seems to be the lowest European score. Expect it to be lower still next year. Zimbabwe is 48, so let's hope we don't fall that far.

All bets are off though.

To ensure that news is reported accurately

Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ to be regulated by Ofcom in UK

Streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ will be required to follow similar Ofcom rules to traditional broadcasters under new legislation being implemented.

The UK’s biggest video-on-demand services, those with more than 500,000 UK users, will be brought under “enhanced regulation” by the watchdog...

The regulations include an exemption for VoD services provided by the BBC, such as BBC iPlayer, as these services will continue to be regulated under the Broadcasting Code via the BBC Framework Agreement for the time being...

The new legislation aims to ensure that news is reported accurately and impartially and audiences are protected against “harmful or offensive” material.

No doubt this will be the level of accuracy expected for news stories about climate change, sustainable energy, wind farms, solar farms, EVs, heat pumps, recycling, pollution, weather statistics, flooding, immigration, housing, crime, education, health, the NHS and claims made daily by prominent politicians.

 

Empty Suit Demands Apology

Keir Starmer slams Jim Ratcliffe for saying UK has been 'colonised' by immigrants

Keir Starmer has demanded Sir Jim Ratcliffe apologise for saying "the UK has been colonised by immigrants".

The Prime Minister hit back on Wednesday night by calling the Manchester United co-owner's comments "offensive and wrong".

In a post on X, Sir Keir added: "Britain is a proud, tolerant and diverse country. Jim Ratcliffe should apologise."


Oh dear, Keir Starmer doesn't like free speech. If he could, he would probably do away with it even more quickly than he is already.

But we knew that.

Sharing content shock horror

Chris Gattringer has an interesting Brussels Signal piece on another example of the open advocacy of media censorship in Germany. Well worth reading within the context of the UK government's apparent wish to stamp out X.


German State PM under fire for demanding crackdown on news sites and social media

Daniel Günther, the Conservative Prime Minster of the German State of Schleswig-Holstein, has come under fire for publicly embracing censorship of critical news sites and social media...

On January 7, Günther, a prominent politician with the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, had joined the talk show Markus Lanz on State broadcasting station ZDF, originally to talk about the danger of a US annexation of Greenland...

Günther said. “Whenever our coalition [of CDU and Social Democrats] got into difficulties, this always had to with the fact that politics is being influenced by how certain media are trying to push their own political agenda.”

Asked by the moderator who exactly he was referring to, Günther mentioned Nius, an online news portal founded in 2022 which is popular with German conservatives and right-wingers.

Günther was outraged that people in his own party were “reading such portals and sharing their content in WhatsApp groups”.

Two Headlines

German media faces political censorship under EU-driven legislation

German newsrooms and tech companies may soon face searches and material seizures without a judicial warrant under a new draft law approved by the federal cabinet.

The news has raised alarm over an EU-driven expansion of state oversight of the media in Germany...

The draft law seeks to transpose EU rules on political advertising into German national law in what has been called a strict and intrusive form.

Legal experts warn it poses a serious threat to freedom of expression, largely because it relies on EU regulations which define “political advertising” broadly and vaguely.

Starmer prepares Brexit 'reset' bill to align UK with EU law

Sir Keir Starmer is preparing a bill which would hand ministers powers to bring the UK into alignment with EU law, as part of an attempt to reduce paperwork and boost growth in Britain.

The bill, which will be brought forward this year as part of the government’s Brexit reset, would give ministers overarching powers to bring the UK in line with EU law in certain areas, such as food standards, animal welfare and pesticide use – a process known as dynamic alignment.

Wikipedia's Days Are Numbered

Anyone paying attention will already know about problems with using Wikipedia as a source of information, but this video gives a useful take on it. Also a comparison with version 0.1 of Grokipedia, which can be found here.  

More Blockers

Carl Deconinck has an interesting Brussels Signal piece on a Berlin court ruling about the blocking of LinkedIn posts and associated accounts.

LinkedIn given green light to delete accurate content

A Berlin court has ruled that LinkedIn was right to block and suspend accounts that posted about Covid-19, despite the posts being correct.

It did so on the grounds that their content contradicted guidance from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The court based its ruling on the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Union’s regulation that creates a framework for online platforms to be more accountable, transparent and safer for users, German magazine Cicero reported yesterday.

A useful confirmation that 'safer' in this context also means politically safer for EU bureaucrats. By implication, safer for online platforms too.

Protections needed

Protections needed to stop people believing chatbots are friends – expert

A media expert has warned that new protections are needed for artificial intelligence (AI) services because users can be tricked into believing chatbots are their friends.

Alexander Laffer, a lecturer in media and communications at the University of Winchester, said there needs to be responsible development of AI as systems have been created to respond to the capacity of humans for empathy.

He warned that chatbots should be designed to “augment” social interactions but not replace them following cases where people have become too “fond or reliant” on their AI companions, leaving them open to manipulation.


Protections needed? Blimey, how often do we have to repeat the ancient question posed by Juvenal –

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? also applies to experts.

Government is not our friend either, neither are ambitious politicians and neither are numerous experts. This feels like yet another move in the censorship game.

An interesting aspect of AI is that Those Who Know Best appear to be worried that AI promises to be far too powerful for plebs.

An international laughing stock

Andrew Tettenborn has a useful CAPX piece on the absurdly sinister Online Safety Act.


Ofcom is turning the UK into an international laughing stock

• Ofcom has fined US-based 4Chan £20,000 for breaching the absurd Online Safety Act
• The UK is coming across as a would-be bully that wants to control the internet
• When our allies tell us that we have given up on free speech, we should listen to them

We know that the Online Safety Act (OSA) is a disaster. The group it is billed as protecting, children and young people, is not only rebellious: it is precisely the class most adept at using VPNs and other devices to circumvent it. And this is even before you get to the unintended consequences. The more we try to regulate the semi-respectable internet sites out there, the more we push thrill-seeking young people to the darkest and most frightening corners of cyberspace, where they can suffer serious harm. Furthermore, the greater the pressure on the young to sign up to dodgy free VPNs, the greater the likelihood of their later suffering trolling and identity theft. Some protection.


The whole piece is well worth reading, if only as a reminder to watch how this sinister mess evolves and comment on it while we can. As for the laughing stock aspect, we were there already, this is more confirmation than revelation.


This year, Ofcom, which administers the OSA, wrote formally to American online forums Gab, Kiwifarms and 4Chan, demanding that they agree to obey UK law and file vast amounts of OSA-required compliance paperwork with Ofcom to prove it. Since none of these sites have any presence or assets in the UK (although they are popular here), they gently reminded Ofcom of the existence of the First Amendment, and less gently told it to go knit. We don’t know what happened to Gab or Kiwifarms: but Ofcom has now, apparently with a straight face, fined 4Chan £20,000 and threatened further daily fines until it complies. Understandably 4Chan is unamused. It has said that it won’t, and that there’s nothing Ofcom can do. And of course it is right: as its Connecticut lawyers said with nice understatement in their response to Ofcom, ‘American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an email’.

Credible reports

Politics latest: US State Department highlights 'significant human rights issues' in the UK

A new US State Department report identifies "significant human rights issues" in the UK, pointing to "credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression" as a key example.

That's because we have a human rights lawyer as Prime Minister. Huge irony, but never mind Sir Keir, face up to the deficiencies of your former profession like a man.

No?

More puling, pusillanimous evasion it is then.

The bitter fruits of managerialism

Mani Basharzad has a useful CAPX piece on the Online Safety Act and the destructively futile political philosophy behind it.


The Online Safety Act stands against Britain’s liberal tradition

• We live in the age of managerialism, and the Online Safety Act is one of its bitter fruits
• A law intended to protect children has ended up exposing many of them to a broader, darker internet
• This growing obsession with correcting people is not the solution – it’s the problem

Marx was wrong, Burnham was right: capitalism wasn’t replaced by communism, but by managerialism. In ‘The Managerial Revolution’ (1941), James Burnham wrote that the bourgeoisie weren’t sinking into the proletariat – they were being replaced by ‘administrators, technicians, managers’. If, like me, you love Edmund Burke, this might remind you of his mournful line: ‘The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded’. We live in the age of managerialism – and the Online Safety Act is one of its bitter fruits.

Familiar because the trend is familiar, but the whole piece is well worth reading while we still can. It may be an exaggeration to put while we still can, but we don't yet know if it is an exaggeration. There are no free speech fans in this government and nobody who seems to understand the vital corrective functions of free speech.


More broadly, the Online Safety Act stands against our liberal tradition – the one that runs from John Stuart Mill to Frank Knight. For Mill, free speech is a process of discovery; for Knight, democracy is ‘government by discussion’. In both views, progress happens through debate and dissent – not by bureaucrats deciding what we are allowed to say.

This growing obsession with correcting people is not the solution. It’s the problem.

The malign reach of the EU

John Rosenthal has a very interesting free speech piece in the Claremont Review of Books.

Make Speech Free Again

How the U.S. can defeat E.U. censorship.

On January 20, 2025, the first day of his second presidential term, Donald Trump signed an executive order: “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” The bad old days of the “censorship-industrial complex,” allegedly responsible for suppressing online speech under President Joe Biden, were over.

Except they weren’t. The driving force behind online censorship had never been the U.S. government, which meant that freedom of speech could not be restored by the stroke of a president’s pen. Rather, the European Union has wielded its Digital Services Act (DSA) to restrict the speech not just of Europeans but especially of Americans and other English-speakers. The E.U. has not violated the free-speech rights of Americans, since it has no obligations under the U.S. Constitution. But it has vitiated those rights, essentially nullifying the First Amendment in cyberspace.

The whole piece is quite long but well worth reading for the detail it provides about the widespread effects of EU censorship. Here in the UK, we did not escape that via Brexit.

Some supporters of President Trump might find this hard to believe. After all, the president’s most prominent ally and advisor is Elon Musk, whose purchase of Twitter in 2022 was said to be motivated by a desire to restore free speech to the platform. But Musk has always insisted that “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach,” and there’s the rub. Using platform algorithms to restrict reach artificially is a form of censorship, one that is not only compatible with the DSA but even encouraged by the E.U.

Cover it up

Keir Starmer urged not to 'cover it up' as bombshell new migrant crime figures released

Keir Starmer must choose between publishing migrant crime data or instigating "yet another shameful cover up", Robert Jenrick has declared.

The Shadow Justice Secretary warned Afghans and Eritreans are 20 times more likely to be convicted of sex offences, while Albanians are 153 times more likely to be convicted of drug offences...

Research by the Centre for Migration Control revealed there were 104,000 foreign national convictions between 2021 and 2023.


We could ask an interesting question here - does Starmer have the power to hide the crime figures in a digital age?

Organisations such as Centre for Migration Control seem to acquire enough data to highlight the severity of the issue and apart from that, anyone paying attention has known for years that there are significant correlations in crime statistics, including national correlations.

As we already know, Starmer's instinctive approach appears to be censorship, but at the moment this mainly works on those strange souls willing to be censored. Everyone else knows well enough what is going on.

Chuckle

Trump sends free-speech team to interview UK activists

Donald Trump sent US officials to meet British pro-life activists over concerns their freedom of speech has been threatened, The Telegraph can reveal.

A five-person team from the US state department spent days in the country and interviewed campaigners to feed back to the White House.

They met with five activists who had been arrested for silently protesting outside abortion clinics across Britain.

Well that's cheered me up, Trump's welcome reminder of the difference between cheerful chutzpah and the furtive, repressive scheming we have to endure. 

There is also a chuckle or two to be gleaned from the comments, especially as Keir Starmer doesn't yet have a free-speech team to send the other way. Maybe he's working on it and plans to send Angela or Rachel or David or... 

Don't mention... anything

Freddie Attenborough has a useful Critic piece on Clause 20 of the Employment Rights Bill, the infamous "banter bouncers" Bill.

Stop Labour’s “banter bouncers” before it’s too late

Clause 20 of the Employment Rights Bill would turn everyday conversation into a legal minefield

Across-party group of free speech-defending peers will take to the floor of the House of Lords tonight to fight back against Clause 20 — a draconian proposal that would make employers liable for “offensive” speech overheard by their staff.

Among those leading the charge are Lord Young of Acton, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union (FSU), Baroness Fox of Buckley, Baroness Deech, Lord Strathcarron, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven and Baroness Meyer.

If passed, Clause 20 would make employers liable if an employee so much as overhears a joke, comment or political opinion from a member of the public and decides to take offence. That includes remarks not directed at them, or even at anyone in particular. A single overheard comment in the “course of employment” could trigger legal risk unless the employer can prove they took “all reasonable steps” to prevent it.

Familiar perhaps, but the whole piece is well worth reading as another reminder of how extreme this government has shown itself to be. No civilised person would propose or support this move.


The implications of letting Clause 20 through unamended are as farcical as they are far-reaching.

Employers may feel obliged to roll out intrusive codes of conduct for customers, impose speech restrictions on performers, or even automate public-facing roles. Pubs might install “banter bouncers” to eavesdrop on conversations, while emergency services could soon be conducting risk assessments before sending help, in case a distressed caller says something offensive.

Banners

New report shows it’s largely officials and organizations demanding books be banned - not parents

A new report reveals the vast majority of those demanding book bans are organizations or officials — not individual parents.

Seventy-two percent of demands to censor books in schools have come from organizations that include elected officials, board members and administrators, according to the American Library Association.

Parents only accounted for 16 percent of book ban demands, while individual library users made up five percent.

Just don't mention Musk

Nasa’s stranded astronauts welcome newly arrived replacements to International Space Station

Just over a day after blasting off, a SpaceX crew capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, delivering the replacements for NASA’s two stuck astronauts.

The four newcomers — representing the U.S., Japan and Russia — will spend the next few days learning the station’s ins and outs from Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Then the two will strap into their own SpaceX capsule later this week to close out an unexpected extended mission that began last June.


times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

ChatGPT On Bias

Our son recently sent me this text about one of his exchanges with AI system ChatGPT.

-----------------------------------------------

I was asking ChatGPT to create a news round up for all right wing parties around the world. It made quite a good news summary. But couldn't help notice it called any party that's right 'far right' over and over and over. So I challenged it to analyse itself on how it's been misled. It was quite honest. This is what ChatGPT came back with -


Conclusion: How I've Been Misled

I unconsciously adopted the mainstream media's labeling of far-right without questioning if the same standard was applied to far-left.

I relied on sources that lean establishment-left, which have a vested interest in discrediting nationalist, populist, or conservative movements.

The fear-based framing of right-wing politics as inherently dangerous influenced the way I summarized the news.

Big Tech algorithms filter available information in a way that reinforces left-leaning narratives.