Officials push tech giants to censor content, sidestepping concerns over press freedom and evidence preservation.
DIDI RANKOVIC
The UK’s government continues to use last year’s Southport killings which led to widespread protests to promote online censorship, as a supposed panacea for the society’s ills.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology Peter Kyle recently wrote to X, Meta, TikTok, Google (and YouTube) to ask that they remove “violent material” that the killer of three children, Axel Rudakubana, was able to access before committing the crime.
Investigators in this case said that among that material was an academic study of a training manual used by al-Qaeda members, and a video of the attack in Australia on Bishop Mari Emmanuel.
Cooper and Kyle told tech companies that “possession” of the material is illegal according to the UK’s anti-terrorism legislation, but that it was “easily accessible” to Rudakubana and continues to be to others.
The two officials also told these companies that their responsibility to remove this content is “moral.”
The same argument could be heard from UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves who told the BBC that even though the censorship law – Online Safety Act – that would force the removal will be in effect as of March – “There’s nothing stopping the companies taking down that material now. They’ve got a moral responsibility to do so.”
None of these officials, however, addressed the issue of the perils of removing videos showing violent content that is newsworthy or could be used as evidence of, for example, police overstepping their authority, failing to properly respond during violent events, but also to exonerate them from false accusations (as in the recent case of the Manchester airport incident.)
Beeban Kidron, known as a supporter of censorship and online age verification and a member of the House of Lords, also spoke for the BBC to complain that the previous, Tory government had blocked Online Safety Act’s “duty of care” censorship provision, and chastised the current, Labour cabinet of “not coming through on the promises they made in opposition.”
Kidron, however, failed to mention that the previous government was, regardless of the instance she referred to, very much in favor of stepping up online censorship.
Another House of Lords member, Claire Fox, reacted to the trend to pressure platforms to delete “extreme content” or “risk a second Southport” in a few choice words posted on X:
“There isn’t one bloody problem – political, cultural, economic, social – that this Labour government doesn’t think the answer is to shut down debate. Their dull, technocratic mantra – on repeat – is always ‘you can’t say that’. They really are censorious, ghoulish scoundrels. Contemptible.”
SOURCE: Reclaim the Net
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