Should we be above cancelling the cancellers?

I’ve been mulling over Marco Rubio’s latest salvo in the Trump administration’s assault on the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The US Secretary of State has announced he’ll impose visa bans on foreign nationals judged to be censoring US citizens or US tech companies. And according to one news report, the ban will apply to their family members too.

So who might be on this blacklist? Rubio hasn’t named names, but I can think of a few candidates. Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)would be hard-pressed to deny his pro-censorship lobby group targets US citizens and US tech companies, because ‘Centre’ is spelt C-E-N-T-E-R, though the company was set up in the UK. To underline this, the Disinformation Chronicle published what purported to be a leaked internal CCDH document last year declaring that its strategic priority was to ‘kill Musk’s Twitter’. Ahmed, a British citizen, lives in Washington DC. Awkward.

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What about Morgan McSweeney? Sir Keir’s chief of staff was the founder of the CCDH and only resigned in April 2020 after the organisation had launched a campaign against the spread of ‘online misinformation’ about Covid-19. Prior to that, it published a ‘Don’t Feed the Trolls’ report, endorsed by Gary Lineker. (Isn’t he a troll?) It recommended reporting ‘trolls’ to the social media companies that publish their posts, which sounds awfully like encouraging censorship, bearing in mind the CCDH’s definition of a ‘troll’ is pretty broad.

‘They don’t want to “win” or “lose” an argument; they just want their ideas to be heard by as many potential converts as possible,’ said the report. And what might these dangerous ideas be? Last year, the CCDH published some research identifying ‘climate deniers’ as purveyors of online hate and ‘disinformation’ – precisely the ‘trolls’ social media platforms should ban.