British Prime Minister Theresa May wasted no time after yesterday’s London Bridge terror attack in announcing that she will be pushing a new series of international agreements aimed at global regulation of speech on the Internet, claiming that extremists have been using “safe spaces online” in their terror attacks.
While this is being couched today as a reaction to the London attack, the reality is that this is a long-standing goal of Britain’s Tory government, with the Conservative Party’s current manifesto vowing efforts to force Internet providers to participate in “counter-extremism” efforts that would tightly regulate speech.
The manifesto’s plan goes well beyond just terrorism, looking to regulate speech broadly defined by the ruling party as “harmful,” and also to severely curtail the access of pornographic materials on the Internet. The pornography angle is, obviously, not being mentioned in connection to the London attack.
London-based privacy and free speech advocacy group the Open Rights Group was quick to criticize May’s effort, and Professor Peter Neumann, the director for the Centre for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, mocked the effort as “politically convenient but intellectually lazy.”
Either way, it has the major social media companies promising to “do more,” by which they mean more strictly censoring their user base. Most of these companies have hoped such efforts would forestall global government action to censor the Internet outright, though it seems that the bar for acceptable content on the Internet continues to slide further the more they try to self-regulate.
Pornography is not speech.
Dipshit
Then neither are political cartoons.
wrong.
They aren’t concerned about pornography because many of those government parasites view Internet porn themselves. They are also not as concerned about terrorism as they are with their real reasons for Internet regulation and intrusion (and non-Internet speech regulation), and that concern is the SJW stuff. They are on the lookout for who might be expressing “hate” speech, “racist, sexist, homophobe,” etc. That’s the real reason for the British police state.
Don’t forget ‘Islamophobe’.
The goal in a capitalist democracy or a police state is the same, to force the people into glorifying and enriching the ruling elite.
Now we all have to suffer because one group of people can’t play nicely in the sandbox. The Israelis are the only ones who know what and how to deal with this problem.
Israelis know only how to generate blowback,
the rotted fruit of being self-righteous.
I agree with you on that. But I meant their security practices. They are targeted, not broad spectrum.
The narrow balance in the coming British election includes a middle ground both sides fight for that is very sensitive to censorship of its own use of the internet.
May is openly playing to one set of fears about terrorism, and quietly serving others such as concerning porn, but she is playing with fire when she meddles with people’s internet access. There are good reasons the efforts at censorship have not gone anywhere yet, and those reasons include a lot of voters she will need right now.
It is high time England takes control of there religious nuts like France is doing to their nuts .Muslim terrorists will be questioned plenty before their crime and Christians will be prohibited from antagonizing people by inviting them to Church By giving them longer prison sentences . Why not prison sentences for Muslims for trying to promote Islam .too ?
It is actually time for the world to realize that we have these Terrorist because the US keeps funding their Parent organisations for regime change. Al Qaeda and the Taliban came into existence because the US funded regime change in Afghanistan in the late 70s, more recently ISIS came into existence because the US funded regime change against the Syrians using Al Qaeda with a quick name change to Al Nusra Front to fool those at home, and they spawned ISIS! Time to actually really call out the US as the worlds biggest state sponsor of terrorism! directly responsible for the Muslim refugee problem that they started in both Syria and Libya! Also directly responsible for the terrorist attacks in France and Britain!
France and the UK are also trading war materials for Middle-East oil, the root cause of terrorism actually. Yes Empire USA leads the way, but only because others are so eager to follow.
In the beginning there was early Christians who obeyed the command, “Do not use force to overcome evil. If they strike you on the right cheek turn to them the other.” But, then came the Christian Crusades with their war’s of plunder.
Then came the Muslim religion with the command to use force only in self-defense. Comes now war-hawks in both religions to think that force can overcome evil, not realizing that God is a pacifist and that force is the absolute worse kind of evil.
Severely curtail access to pr0n?
hehe yeaaaah..this bill/effort isn’t going anywhere.
As always in cases like this, the Brit authorities admitted that they were already keeping track of this dude. They don’t need more information or more restriction, they need more common sense and more readiness to deport and jail bad dudes after they’re known to be bad.
As of today….. Theresa…who…?????