Shutters start to come down on internet freedoms

We are now, as an advanced culture, moving into a phase of the most pernicious and regressive restrictions on free speech since we fought battles in the 1960s and 1970s to establish those freedoms. Oh I know that's been the cry ever since when, mostly from those with extremes of views that no-one missed very much. 'Spiked', which hides under our spoof Guardian offers, has long advocated a pure freedom that would allow anyone from kiddie fiddlers to murderous Islamists to post anything, but most of us want some restrictions. And that's the problem. First, we're a European nation but there's no homogeneity in the law - 

In most of Europe, defamation is a criminal offence, and in the dark-red nations it's an offence for which citizens can be imprisoned. The UK, Ireland and Norway (in the fringe blue nations defamation tends to be dealt with by a midnight visit from men with guns) are alone in upholding the freedom to risk only one's wealth from defaming someone. However, as we've seen, the Online Harms (how loathsome is that title!) White Paper proposes making a number of non-criminal statements into statements to be censored, under the pretence of protecting children but clearly aimed at protecting politicians and wealthy figures in public life.

In France, the release of a video made by M Macron's chum Benjamin Griveaux of an act of masturbation has angered the énarque elites; it should be the right of all French politicians to send Onanistic videos to vulnerable young women. Or maybe to their grandmothers. What has annoyed them in particular is the extent of internet anonymity that allowed the spread of the material; they want to include measures to identify wanking-video re-posters in a proposed raft of anti hate-speech legislation currently going through parliament. However, as Politico EU has reported, the draft French legislation is already in trouble with the EU, who consider it incompatible with EU law.

In Germany, legislators are set to pass laws requiring internet companies to report offending posts to the police. As the FT reports

Under the planned new law, which is the toughest of its kind in the world, social media platforms will not only have to delete certain kinds of hate speech but also flag the content to the Office of the Federal Criminal Police (BKA). Posts that companies will be required to report include those indicating preparations for a terrorist attack and the “formation of criminal and terrorist groups”, as well as those featuring instances of racial incitement and the distribution of child pornography. The networks would also have to give the BKA “the last IP address and port number most recently assigned to the user profile”.

However, given that defamation is also an imprisonable offence in German law, it is easy to imagine a tweak or two to include insults aimed at politicians and public officials - the law stands as

However, one major issue remains. The national location of servers on which the offending material is posted. Facebook, Google and Twitter are already rolling out systems architectures that avoid a physical EU data presence. The effects of GDPR and swingeing fines to date have already made them cautious.

If US servers (and, less likely, UK servers - our civil servants love the German defamation laws) are immune to the new rafts of Euro Censorship legislation, what option does that leave for French and German governments except to restrict access to social media in the same way that China does? Are Euro versions of Weibo, WeChat and YouKu the future?

Corbyn not the only politician who wants to control the media

Corbyn is endowed with a quality that one can describe as either brave honesty or naive stupidity. In coming clean with his desire to see the State establish control not only of mainstream broadcast and print media but also social media he is only saying what many of the political class both left and right only dream about. 

Corbyn's Big Idea is a nationalised British Digital Corporation, to ration our bandwidth and licence and monitor bloggers and authors of private websites, to broadcast State News, with its own PeoplesPedia to replace Wiki, and a British National search engine, that can filter out all those inconvenient references to Fabians advocating the gassing of the poor or the mentally ill, or saint Nye Bevan's gulag apologies when Stalin was slaughtering millions in the Holodomor. Somewhere in Corbyn's twisted reasoning, I'm sure, the entire internet is the work of 'Zionists' and must be purged to provide a home for Socialist purity. 

Finding a government or opposition front bencher who speaks for freedom of thought, speech and expression is as rare as finding teeth in a hen. If you're a politician, generally you loathe and fear not only the press but these days the ease with which anyone can post an opinion and even the proles get the same 280 characters as a cabinet minister. The dags and liggers of the old, dead politics equate universal media access with the rise of populism; not only are the wrong sort of people using democracy, they aver, but ordinary people are discussing things without our moderation!  

Well, the genie is out of the bottle and won't be recorked. They may look to China's grip on the internet all they like - it's too late for the West. About four hundred year too late. You see, Lilburne, Winstanley, the Levellers and many others already laid their necks on the block to secure such rights - and we will not see Parliament erode them. 

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Hat-tip to [REDACTED]

NB No comments that violate the Censorship Order please.

Update
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GDPR gets its revenge. Blogger can be set to email all new comments automatically - but since yesterday, no comments. I have to check blogger manually. Of course, under GDPR I actually need to consent to receive emails from my own blog to my own email addy ... this one has slipped under Google's radar, but with fines of up to 4% of t/o for such breaches no wonder they've just turned ALL blogger comment notifications off until they come up with a fix.

There should be no online Safe Space for the political class

I suspect it is true that an individual's motivation to stand as an MP is a mixture of a desire to do good and make the world a better place and a desire for personal aggrandisement. The balance between these two drivers will be different for each MP. They are not necessarily contrary, nor incompatible. I have never had any desire to enter Parliament (except to visit its infamous bars) because I have neither the front nor the requisite talent for dissembling and neither a hunger for fame, power or wealth nor a skin like a rhino. I do though have a desire to do good and to make the world a better place, and that is why I write. We all do what we can.

Of one thing I am absolutely certain, and it is that no MP should end their life being butchered in their surgery car park, like the late Jo Cox, and no MP should go in fear of such violence and threat. We must rightly protect our MPs from crazed killers, terrorists, death threats and the vilest intimidation. We must also protect them from vexatious prosecution, civil or criminal, for what they say in Parliament - and for this we have Parliamentary privilege. Thus empowered, thus protected, they can go about their business, which is our business. 

However, every MP now sitting knew fully well that with their ambition would come both restrictions on how they can behave in their personal lives, and political abuse. Not one sitting MP was so naive as to believe they would be immune from vituperation, anger, frustration, contumacy, criticism, argument, dislike and insult. At one time this came only from journalists writing in newspapers and periodicals, and from crowds at public meetings. Now it comes also via social media. Well, that's a challenge, but not novel or different enough to require a new degree of protection for MPs. We can't create a safe space for the political class without also enacting censorship of valid commentary and opinion, however crude, however illiterate. 

Nor can blogs such as this be fora for prolix balanced consideration. One has a reader's attention for perhaps a minute, often less, and must be both succinct and direct, employ hyperbole and emotion, to opine clearly and memorably on any issue. I've tried equivocal posts, perfectly balanced posts, kinder gentler posts and they don't work. People don't read them and they don't attract comments. 

I wrote above that I don't have a hide like a rhino, and that's why I use a pseudonym. This way I can fully preserve free speech here in my little kingdom and anyone may comment just about anything without wounding the real me. MPs have no such padding. We must ensure that their legal protection from criminal intimidation, and their safety from physical violence, is as absolute as we can make it. But we must preserve also our right to call them fatuous, vacuous talentless sheep without the imagination to run a whelk stall, should we so wish.