Close Menu
Market Data Newsletter
Monday, September 28
Global Free Speech

A social video about Reform’s policy on immigration centres. Image: www.instagram.com/zia.yusuf/ We did warn that the Online Safety Act would chill free speech and vehemently opposed the legislation for that reason. We said the remit of the act was too wide and that perfectly legitimate legal points of view would be shut down under its provisions. And we are beginning to see that happening and beginning to see also how it will be used politically, by all sides. GB News on the right and The Canary on the left have both blogged about the case of Zia Yusuf the Reform spokesman on home affairs who had two recent TikTok videos taken down from the platform. GB News in outrage, and The Canary saying the platform was quite right to do so because Reform policies amount to  “hateful behaviour”. It all started when Yusuf told his X followers that a video of him saying that Reform would put migration centres in Green-voting areas – and which Yusuf claims had millions of views on other social media channels – had been taken down by TikTok which cited the Online Safety Act for their decision. Then a second video was removed – also by TikTok a couple of days ago. Here Yusuf was saying some unpleasant, but not illegal things, about migration ie that Reform would deport everyone who is in the country illegally including foreign nationals committing crimes and those not paying their way. TikTok  said it had acted on a complaint by a user. In this case, the platform first cited the Online Safety Act and then said that the video contained “hate speech and hateful behaviour”. Yusuf was also furious that TikTok threatened to remove him from the platform altogether if he committed further “offences”, blasting the Conservatives for pretending to pass legislation to protect children, when in fact the law was “silencing voices the open-borders political establishment don’t like”. Enter Nadine Dorries, the erstwhile Conservative Culture minister, today a Reform champion and Daily Mail columnist who steered the legislation through parliament and now says it has to be consigned “to the dustbin where it now belongs” because it is silencing her colleagues. Yusuf’s video, by the way, has now been restored. None of this would have happened without the Online Safety Act – and this is exactly how we warned the legislation would be used – to shut down legitimate debate. Unless speech is aired in a public forum, it cannot be challenged. And the implications go wider. What about other types of speech in the future, on the left say? Will these videos too be challenged by the TikTok community for being “hateful” or “causing public disorder”? Will there by a tit-for-tat war now with political players on all sides trying to shut down the speech of their opponents, because that’s what the Online Safety legislation is enabling. Maybe that’s what the Chinese-owned company TikTok wants – believing as the Chinese Communist Party does that liberal democracies cause chaos –   but perhaps that’s a conspiracy theory too far. The spat has certainly fuelled the suspicions of many Reform voters that there is liberal establishment trying to shut down ideas they don’t like. And we agree, that’s exactly what it looks like. Free expression means nothing if it is not for all. READ MORE

News RoomBy No Comments3 Mins Read6 Views
A social video about Reform’s policy on immigration centres. Image: www.instagram.com/zia.yusuf/ We did warn that the Online Safety Act would chill free speech and vehemently opposed the legislation for that reason. We said the remit of the act was too wide and that perfectly legitimate legal points of view would be shut down under its provisions. And we are beginning to see that happening and beginning to see also how it will be used politically, by all sides. GB News on the right and The Canary on the left have both blogged about the case of Zia Yusuf the Reform spokesman on home affairs who had two recent TikTok videos taken down from the platform. GB News in outrage, and The Canary saying the platform was quite right to do so because Reform policies amount to  “hateful behaviour”. It all started when Yusuf told his X followers that a video of him saying that Reform would put migration centres in Green-voting areas – and which Yusuf claims had millions of views on other social media channels – had been taken down by TikTok which cited the Online Safety Act for their decision. Then a second video was removed – also by TikTok a couple of days ago. Here Yusuf was saying some unpleasant, but not illegal things, about migration ie that Reform would deport everyone who is in the country illegally including foreign nationals committing crimes and those not paying their way. TikTok  said it had acted on a complaint by a user. In this case, the platform first cited the Online Safety Act and then said that the video contained “hate speech and hateful behaviour”. Yusuf was also furious that TikTok threatened to remove him from the platform altogether if he committed further “offences”, blasting the Conservatives for pretending to pass legislation to protect children, when in fact the law was “silencing voices the open-borders political establishment don’t like”. Enter Nadine Dorries, the erstwhile Conservative Culture minister, today a Reform champion and Daily Mail columnist who steered the legislation through parliament and now says it has to be consigned “to the dustbin where it now belongs” because it is silencing her colleagues. Yusuf’s video, by the way, has now been restored. None of this would have happened without the Online Safety Act – and this is exactly how we warned the legislation would be used – to shut down legitimate debate. Unless speech is aired in a public forum, it cannot be challenged. And the implications go wider. What about other types of speech in the future, on the left say? Will these videos too be challenged by the TikTok community for being “hateful” or “causing public disorder”? Will there by a tit-for-tat war now with political players on all sides trying to shut down the speech of their opponents, because that’s what the Online Safety legislation is enabling. Maybe that’s what the Chinese-owned company TikTok wants – believing as the Chinese Communist Party does that liberal democracies cause chaos –   but perhaps that’s a conspiracy theory too far. The spat has certainly fuelled the suspicions of many Reform voters that there is liberal establishment trying to shut down ideas they don’t like. And we agree, that’s exactly what it looks like. Free expression means nothing if it is not for all. READ MORE

Listen to the article

0:00
0:00

We did warn that the Online Safety Act would chill free speech and vehemently opposed the legislation for that reason. We said the remit of the act was too wide and that perfectly legitimate legal points of view would be shut down under its provisions.

And we are beginning to see that happening and beginning to see also how it will be used politically, by all sides.

GB News on the right and The Canary on the left have both blogged about the case of Zia Yusuf the Reform spokesman on home affairs who had two recent TikTok videos taken down from the platform. GB News in outrage, and The Canary saying the platform was quite right to do so because Reform policies amount to  “hateful behaviour”.

It all started when Yusuf told his X followers that a video of him saying that Reform would put migration centres in Green-voting areas – and which Yusuf claims had millions of views on other social media channels – had been taken down by TikTok which cited the Online Safety Act for their decision.

Then a second video was removed – also by TikTok a couple of days ago. Here Yusuf was saying some unpleasant, but not illegal things, about migration ie that Reform would deport everyone who is in the country illegally including foreign nationals committing crimes and those not paying their way. TikTok  said it had acted on a complaint by a user. In this case, the platform first cited the Online Safety Act and then said that the video contained “hate speech and hateful behaviour”.

Yusuf was also furious that TikTok threatened to remove him from the platform altogether if he committed further “offences”, blasting the Conservatives for pretending to pass legislation to protect children, when in fact the law was “silencing voices the open-borders political establishment don’t like”.

Enter Nadine Dorries, the erstwhile Conservative Culture minister, today a Reform champion and Daily Mail columnist who steered the legislation through parliament and now says it has to be consigned “to the dustbin where it now belongs” because it is silencing her colleagues. Yusuf’s video, by the way, has now been restored.

None of this would have happened without the Online Safety Act – and this is exactly how we warned the legislation would be used – to shut down legitimate debate. Unless speech is aired in a public forum, it cannot be challenged.

And the implications go wider. What about other types of speech in the future, on the left say? Will these videos too be challenged by the TikTok community for being “hateful” or “causing public disorder”? Will there by a tit-for-tat war now with political players on all sides trying to shut down the speech of their opponents, because that’s what the Online Safety legislation is enabling. Maybe that’s what the Chinese-owned company TikTok wants – believing as the Chinese Communist Party does that liberal democracies cause chaos –   but perhaps that’s a conspiracy theory too far. The spat has certainly fuelled the suspicions of many Reform voters that there is liberal establishment trying to shut down ideas they don’t like. And we agree, that’s exactly what it looks like. Free expression means nothing if it is not for all.

Read the full article here

Fact Checker

Verify the accuracy of this article using AI-powered analysis and real-time sources.

Share.

The FSNN News Room is the voice of our in-house journalists, editors, and researchers. We deliver timely, unbiased reporting at the crossroads of finance, cryptocurrency, and global politics, providing clear, fact-driven analysis free from agendas.

Related Articles

Global Free Speech

The BBC clearly sees the value of television series That Mitchell and Webb Look. Marking the 20th anniversary of its original screening, the Beeb has re-released the series on iPlayer. But – and there is very often a “but” with these things – they’ve removed around 11 sketches from the BAFTA award-winning show. The official word is that these sketches don’t “work today”, which is polite speak for “they may cause offence”. The episodes singled out include scenes featuring a battle reenactment with characters in blackface, a contestant on a show wearing a burka and a lost tribe” in a garden centre. These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them; but 20 years on, this distinction seems to have been lost along the way. I’m a bit uncomfortable about this. I find it infantilising, to say the least. Can’t we trust audiences to make up their own minds, to switch off if they find the sketches in question unpalatable? Does the BBC think that we are just passive consumers, unable to disaggregate the mocking of racism from racism itself? These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them This act of censorship is distorting – of the shows, whose narratives and rhythms were built to include these sketches, and more broadly too. Conversations we were having 20 years ago have been erased, as if to suggest that they never happened. But they did! And with this erasure, the opportunity for thoughtful engagement and learning from our past is gone. “Let’s just pretend we were all lovely 20 years ago. It’s better that way” seems to be the message. Speaking as a minority myself, I find that knowing the nasty stuff that people said before – and indeed, still say today – is much more useful than pretending it never happened. This approach, I think, is also inconsistent. What it reveals is a cherry-picking (intended or not) of the groups that we can mock, and those that we can’t. Let’s face it, gender stereotypes are rarely deemed to have aged beyond the pale – if that were the case, we would have to wave goodbye to half the television made before the mid-2010s. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists, namely that what they’re creating today may hold less value tomorrow. Or, even worse, that future audiences may deem them bigots – that Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of any creative paying attention to the discourse of the moment. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists The BBC’s decision reaffirms a broader trend. In 2020, Little Britain was removed from the iPlayer platform for similar reasons. It has since been reinstated – minus some sketches. Meanwhile, the UK’s arts space more broadly is seeing a retreat to the land of “safe”, as Index recently revealed in a year-long investigation into self-censorship in UK theatre. The BBC, it must be said, does remarkable stuff. The ongoing podcast investigation into the disappearance of US journalist Austin Tice is just one example. But this does not mean, however, that they don’t sometimes get it wrong. Chopping at That Mitchell and Webb Look is one example. Sure, the removal of the material isn’t the life-or-death story that Index often works on. Sure, Mitchell and Webb aren’t the faces of persecuted artists – they have huge platforms and agreed to the changes themselves. Still, one can’t help but think that the decision came from a place of conservatism, perhaps even fear. This is weak and dispiriting, indeed the very opposite of what enables creativity in the arts. We shouldn’t be encouraging this cultural timidity. Rather, we should harness culture and creativity as the starting points of a conversation about our here and now. That’s what the arts are for, after all. READ MORE

Add A Comment

Comments are closed.