2022-03-18
Big Brother Watch reminds us that the same Government that is denying reality by continuing to roll-out an experimental gene-editing therapy to our children (despite strong evidence suggestive of a link between the roll-out and increased deaths in that age group) is still obsessed by the need to make the internet safe from "legal but harmful" content.
It will do this by passing an On-line Safety Bill putting the onus on social media companies to censor the internet.
So the social media corporations who have already been deplatforming anybody who says things they don't like have now persuaded the government to force them to legally do much the same thing to all content they (or the government) may find unpalatable, all in the sacred name of our "safety" of course. The internet will thus become a risk-free zone (for the government and corporates).
" ... if other countries develop laws anything like this censor’s charter, internet freedom as we know it will be a thing of the past"
" ... giving state-backing to social media companies’ ... restrictive content policies where they relate to the Government’s 'priority harms' ... which ... are whatever the Secretary of State wants them to be"
" ...the real change under this new law is the invention of a complex new bureaucracy whereby things that are perfectly lawful to say offline will be strictly regulated online – for our own “safety”, of course"
Whatever happened to our robust traditions which encouraged freedom, and thus encouraged us to take what life offers in our stride, in the process becoming robust citizens capable of discerning the nonsense from the genuine?
The law has been developed over centuries to do just that, yet now the principle is cast aside in favour of "protecting us" from "harms". Harms to us, or harms to the corporations that (judging by their actions) are perhaps somehow driven by political imperatives?
Of course, we will pay for this bureaucracy through our taxes, and they will build upon this first step to centralise control over us by requiring social media companies to accept content only from regulated citizens with the appropriate UN-approved global digital identity . . . dressed up as a "human right" (everybody must have one)!
OK, I admit it, that last paragraph is only my speculation - so far.
