At Ofcom's Pleasure

"The likes are going out all over social media."

Who would have guessed that, by the time woke was put away, it wouldn’t even matter any more. Women are declared to be biologically defined, but Bitchute and Gab are gone from our land. You get to say that a woman has a vagina but you don’t get to protest your race being systematically destroyed.

I have said for several years now that I believe we passed “peak censorship” around 2022. I probably did make the caveat that I specifically meant censorship by social media platforms, and that the threat remained of governments taking over this role. If I didn’t, I certainly should have because, at least in Britain, this has now come to pass.

(It has to be noted that this coincides with the hacking of 4chan and the financial strong-arming of Odysee. These events might be connected in a general effort to stamp out “alt-tech”, but then again, the legislation in Britain goes back a long way.)

I don’t know why the social media platforms lost interest in deplatforming people. They still do it, of course, but much less than in 2018-2022. Their approach seemed to change after covid, perhaps as a result of their over-zealousness during that phase. Recently even Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook spoke out against censorship, and his platform was perhaps the worst for it. Of course I don’t think he was speaking in good faith, but then why did he say it? Clearly something compelled him to. Maybe Trump’s return to power and Musk’s reinvention of Twitter made social media companies think it just wasn’t tenable for them to continue behaving as they had. Moreover, it actually hadn’t worked; after all their censoring, deboosting, debanking and deplatforming, there are far more people questioning World War II today than in 2015. (Even I wasn’t questioning it then!)

It had been advantageous for governments to let the corporations do the censoring, because “it’s a private company, it can do what it wants” (that old refrain…) and it saved the governments from looking heavy-handed. (Indeed, it would be heavy-handed for them to intervene!) But, with the corporations now stepping away from their moral duty to keep everyone “safe”, the governments have to do something.

They have been talking about it for years. Indeed, I remember Zuckerberg asking governments to write censorship laws so that Facebook wouldn’t be blamed for doing it “unofficially”. Now, with the much more febrile environment in every Western country compared to 2015, the governments fostering this environment have no choice but to act. They simply can’t let their citizens speak freely - not now.