Further Reading

Wednesday, 24 June 2020

Now the Left turns on Labour Right-dominated Icke-deleting censorship group Digital Hate, its Labour activist ‘CEO’ Imran Ahmed and founder Morgan McSweeney – ‘Be careful what you cheer for because they’ll come for us next’. Oh yes – that’s how elite censorship works: Cheer the censoring of others till it’s your turn

[David Icke]: Google’s censure of right-wing outlets over repulsive racist content was pushed by the UK’s Center for Countering Digital Hate, an outfit with strong ties to the Labour right. As awful as outlets like the Federalist are, do we really want Blairites who claim Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite to decide what is and is not acceptable to publish?

Censorship is a dangerous game. No one with liberal or left sympathies wants to give hate and bigotry a platform. But dealing in terms so malleable and easily contorted means that attempts to simply banish unpleasant things from our discourse by decree often means letting people with vastly different ideas of what those words mean decide what should and shouldn’t be allowed to say.

A recent case illustrates this conundrum. Google’s decision to demonetize libertarian website Zero Hedge, and put the right-wing Federalist on notice over offensive content in their respective comments sections received a lot of attention last week. The Right was unsurprisingly furious, seeing in the move yet more confirmation of their vastly overblown theory of an anti-conservative bias among social media companies. Yet the move also saw well-reasoned pushback from the Left. After all, the Federalist may publish some appalling dreck, but do we really want unaccountable tech giants threatening media outlets over content they deem unacceptable, particularly when it’s in their comments sections of all things?....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...