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.

The obstacle for governments was always that “it looks bad” for a state to have an apparatus in place to systematically muzzle its population. This does matter to some extent. It’s one thing for YouTube (“a private company”) to have “a policy” that means Sargon of Akkad’s channel gets demonetised. It’s another thing for the British state to have a law that makes it illegal for Carl Benjamin to make a living as Sargon of Akkad, or even makes it illegal for any platform to host content made by him. This would be digital unpersoning, and it really would look bad.

The British Government’s solution is to emulate the online platforms in a way, by creating an “independent” censorship apparatus that has a cauldron of “policies” - not laws! Just “policies” - which it enforces upon the platforms. Much as the EU’s directives “gently” become law in each of its member states, not dictats but directives, not alien but assimilated, Ofcom’s policies must be internalised by the platforms under its purview. And the writing (and real meaning) of those policies is the business purely of Ofcom, which is theoretically independent from the government. It is certainly independent from the electorate.

The British Government thus has a means to unperson its citizens with impunity while escaping the allegation of being heavy-handed or even doctrinaire (this is about “safety”, not ideology). No wonder it sees the Online Safety Act, which enables all of this, as a sacred cow.

After being empowered by the Act to sanction online platforms, Ofcom immediately got to work. They first went for the low-hanging fruit, the platforms that have “a certain reputation”: Bitchute and Gab.

Whether Ofcom predicted this or not, these two platforms showed them the modus operandi they should use: threaten infinite lawfare until the platform eventually concludes it could save itself the mother of all headaches by simply pulling out of Britain. This means no banning is necessary, and no lawfare is necessary, just the threat of gargantuan amounts of it that would be exhausting, demoralising and financially ruinous. This also has the benefit (for Ofcom) that they can claim they didn’t actually do anything, the platform withdrew of its own accord, Ofcom were merely trying to be reasonable, etc. The platform, not Ofcom, looks like the villain, the one with a guilty conscience. That is certainly how the Guardian will document the event: the platform’s withdrawal from Britain would be seen as proof that it harboured hate speech, and that it knew it did, and was just trying to get away with this vile profiteering for as long as possible… until the British state nobly forced it to own up.

In the case of Gab, Ofcom achieved this by demanding that it surrender the details of British users of the platform (so that they could be pursued by other organs of the British state). Doing so would violate Gab’s principles of anonymity, freedom of speech, etc. When it refused, Ofcom threatened to go after its service providers. Gab was forced to either abandon its principles, or abandon Britain.

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Britain’s loss of Bitchute and Gab might strike a lot of content creators as irrelevant, since they still have YouTube or Twitter. The question is which other platforms, if any, will be next? I think Ofcom’s ideal order would be:

1. Odysee

2. Rumble

3. Substack

4. Telegram

5. X (Twitter)

With the exception of Odysee, which I think doesn’t stand a chance and will easily be vanquished, each of these platforms presents its own obstacles for Ofcom. Rumble is popular with some “big” creators - but are they big enough? Almost certainly not. Substack’s reputation has not been sullied enough for it to seem like a justified target - but as a platform it’s still obscure enough that this might not be a problem. Conversely, Telegram is extremely popular - but its reputation has been sullied enough that this might not be a problem.

The most difficult platform will, of course, be X, because of Elon Musk’s prominence and financial might. I suspect that he will happily let these other platforms go to the wall before he raises any objection to what is going on. He wants X to be “the everything platform”, so these others are effectively rivals to it. With them absent from Britain, the country will be entirely dependent on X for any semblance of free speech - a captive market for him.

In any case, I don’t think Ofcom will try to either ban X or persuade it to withdraw from Britain. With platforms like this, which are “too big to fell”, more precise tactics will be used. I can imagine Ofcom launching a hundred tiny demands at once, each to deplatform a specific figure. X will then be in the position of having to deal with so many cases, knowing that another hundred will shortly follow and that the British government has infinite time and money to plough into oppressing its citizens. The options for X will be:

1. ignore Ofcom’s deplatform requests, and face exorbitant fines

2. immediately acquiesce to every single one (but perhaps heroically resist in the case of some high-profile gatekeepers such as Tommy Robinson)

3. withdraw from Britain like Bitchute and Gab

For an ambitious man like Elon Musk, the obvious choice will be #2. It is really a question of how much he cares about Britain and about principles, versus how much he cares about profit and “making progress”. On the one hand it would be humiliating for him to acquiesce to a tyrannical British government, but on the other, he could just say “well, those accounts really were pretty bad, after all…” and who would be left to argue? And what could they do when he simply ignored them?

As for how vulnerable we as public voices are to being “nominated” by Ofcom in this way, nobody should be complacent. No matter how careful we are, we will say something, or more likely we will have said something in the past, that “proves” we violate some Ofcom policy and therefore it’s just not worth the headache of standing up for us. Everyone is vulnerable to this, up to and including Owen Jones who, should the state ever feel a need to get rid of him, could be blacklisted as anti-Semitic. Even Nick Lowles, the epitome of a system lackey, has said things which got him deplatformed from the Oxford Union! Our incriminating statements will have been logged at the time, so Ofcom will not even need to seek them out. The “evidence” found, it will be a matter of sheer common sense that we be removed from the public space in Britain in the name of “safety”.

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Demonstrating that the left/right paradigm is, at least in its traditional conception, irrelevant in our age, the Online Safety Act which has turbo-charged Ofcom was not devised by the current tyrannical and humourless Keir Starmer Labour government, but by its predecessor, the supposedly limp and listless Conservative government. The Act passed into law in October 2023, in the middle of Rishi Sunak’s laughable premiership. Laughable, but who should laugh, when this is what his government was cooking up for us?

Despite his equally laughable insistence that Britain has freedom of speech, Keir Starmer certainly approves of the Act and of what Ofcom is doing. Perhaps, over the next four agonising years, he will look to increase its powers further. I can’t imagine him reining it in, though Trump could conceivably force him to. But I also expect Trump to lose interest in such global adventures when the chickens come home to roost in America. As of two days ago, when he underlined that he dislikes the British state’s taste for censorship, was he even aware of what is going on right now with Bitchute and Gab?

As for whether a future Reform government would abolish Ofcom, for reasons I needn’t repeat, I can’t see Nigel Farage doing anything of the kind.

The only politicians in Britain who understand the need for freedom of speech are busy finding ways to snatch obscurity from the jaws of prominence.

It goes without saying that the Online Safety Act is an un-British abomination, a tool to degrade the British people and to re-shape British culture in ways they would never want, and should be repealed. It goes without saying that Ofcom should be abolished. But Ofcom in itself is unimportant; it is merely the instrument of higher powers who desire that what it does be done.

In any case, I am past the point of saying such things, because nobody hears them. I know that legal defence takes years and is therefore hopeless without massive funding, and I learned back in 2018 that it is futile trying to motivate large content creators to seek such funding and begin organising. They will happily watch colleagues get deplatformed rather than “rock the boat”. Part of this is that we are content creators, not activists, so we are introverts who work alone and it is against our nature to “organise” and “get involved”. But another part of it is that everyone is self-interested. If a 5k account gets “nuked”, a 50k account will look away. If the 50k account then gets nuked, a 500k account won’t even hear about it. And of course, when the 500k account gets nuked, there will be nobody left to speak up for it. United, we could have stood, or at least stood a chance - but we never do.

And civil rights organisations, the professionals who are at home with activism and organising, are not interested in defending us. At a push they might stand up for Carl Benjamin, but never for the likes of “the vile vlogger”. As for journalists, I sometimes wonder whether they know that the things they’re supporting are evil or whether they genuinely believe it will be a better world. But, either way, every one of them knows what’s good for him.

I say again that the Achilles’ Heel of our struggle is the individualistic nature of White people. Even when our governments are openly organising to oppress us, we refuse to organise to defy them. “I’m all right, Jack” is the phrase that will see our movement into the grave.

Unless the White House really forces Britain to do it, Ofcom will not be abolished, because the mainstream parties approve of it and no party that doesn’t will be allowed anywhere near power. If allowed to continue in its current mode, Ofcom will take down the platforms it wants to, then tame the others by hook or by crook. The Internet in Britain will be a homogenised, redacted farce - a pathetic “TV version” of what people in more civilised countries have.

Whether I continue to have a career doing what I do is, really, Ofcom’s decision. In the medium term, I am not optimistic, and as in 2018 find myself worrying whether I will be able to pay the bills. But in the long term, I remain of the belief that we will get through all of this. It’s just going to be very painful.