Twitter

In this week’s magazine I look at the threats posed by the so-called Online Safety Bill now making its way through the House of Commons. It gives sweeping censorship powers by creating a new category of speech that must be censored: ‘legal but harmful’. The government will ask social media companies to do the censoring – and threaten them if they do not. The idea is for the UK to fine them up to 10 per cent of global revenue (ie: billions) if they publish ‘harmful’ content – but harmful is not really defined. So censorship potential is wide open. Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary, has suggested that the jokes of the

If you care about free speech, the just-published report of the Joint Committee on the Online Safety Bill – a cross-party parliamentary committee composed of six MPs and six peers – is a mixed bag. This is the Bill which began life as a White Paper under Theresa May. Its aim? To make the UK the safest place in the world to go online. It will achieve this by subjecting social media platforms and internet search engines to state regulation, empowering Ofcom to impose swingeing fines on companies that fail to observe a new ‘duty of care’. Let’s start with the good news. The Joint Committee recommends that the current

The world’s oldest democratic party has had a few problems with technology in recent years. Famously it was the 2018 Tory conference which saw a security breach where the official party app allowed anyone to access the private phone numbers of members of the Cabinet – or in the case of Boris Johnson change his profile picture to that of a pig. Once again, tech issues are plaguing Tory conference, with three of the world’s most popular apps – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – all being offline since 4:30 p.m. today. The last of these is the favoured platform for disloyal backbenchers and scheming hacks to conspire mischievously to make life harder for long-suffering Tory

It didn’t take long for the open-borders brigade to try and politicise the magnificent feat of British teenager Emma Raducanu in winning the US Open women’s singles. Rather than just revelling in the general outbreak of joy in the country, or praising the astonishing maturity of Emma’s performance, the usual blue-tick suspects piled onto Twitter within minutes of her victory to argue, or imply, that the fact Emma was born in another country (she moved here from Canada aged two) proved that immigration in all its guises is always a good thing. Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera stated the case plainly: ‘Half Romanian, half Chinese. Born in Canada, brought up in

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was swift, but this victory wasn’t won overnight. For years, the Taliban has been waging a softer fight: one on social media. Since it was removed from power, the Taliban has dedicated enormous resources to developing its presence online.  As it successfully recaptured Afghanistan, the propaganda opportunities which it put to use on Twitter as the eyes of the world watched suggested these efforts have paid off. Images and videos of Taliban forces easily gaining ground and advancing into Afghanistan’s cities – picking up military hardware left by the Americans along the way – spread like wildfire online. Islamists around the world were delighted.  In the years since it

A Conservative government that boasts it is a defender of free speech against the attacks of ‘the woke’ is about to impose the severest censorship this country has seen in peacetime since parliament abolished press controls in the 1690s. In an extraordinary power grab – which is all the more extraordinary for the absence of opposition – ministers want to silence views that carry no criminal penalty. This is more than a much-needed crackdown on racial attacks on black footballers or incitements to violent crime or any other crime; it is an unmerited attack on free speech. The government’s draft Online Safety bill imposes a ‘duty of care’ on internet companies to remove content that

All it took for the Twitter mob to descend on me was a retweet from Michael Gove. Message after message called for a resignation. Often it wasn’t entirely clear who the target was: me, the leader of a medium-sized youth charity, or him, the second best known member of the Cabinet. What on earth was in this few short sentences that had unlocked the world’s bile and aggression? Gove had committed the cardinal sin of recommending a book I have written. Ironically enough, it is a book on why our societies have become so divided and how we fix them. It is blindingly obvious to most of us why our societies have become