The soft censorship of the Online Safety Bill

The arrest of a reporter who held up a poster during a Russian news broadcast criticising the war in Ukraine reminds us how dictatorships operate. One of Vladimir Putin’s first acts on the home front, after sending his tanks over the Ukrainian border, was to pass a law specifying jail terms of up to 15 years for anyone who dares to disseminate ‘fake news’ – i.e. anything which contradicts his government’s lies – about the Russian war effort.

Britain is a very long way from that kind of suppression of speech. If a publication wishes to condemn Boris Johnson for his handling of the Ukraine war, Covid or for anything else, its writers and editors will not be ‘disappeared’. But the stories themselves might be. A speech by David Davis questioning government plans for vaccine passports was taken down from YouTube – but online censorship is usually more subtle. Dissenting voices can be made harder to find online, or advertising removed from the videos.

The Spectator now encounters these censorship bots on a regular basis. If we publish academics who question the rigour of the science behind the government’s mask policy, Facebook can stick a ‘false information’ label on it – with no obligation to identify a single false fact. Lionel Shriver incurred the wrath of YouTube censors by reading a version of her column online. The Socialist Workers Party had its Facebook page removed entirely. Arguments that go against the grain are identified and then gently buried or wrongly labelled as fake news. This ought to appall the government. Instead, it wants to put itself in charge of the process.

At first, Silicon Valley’s pioneers put themselves forward as proud defenders of free speech: Twitter even described itself as ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’.