Half Cocked Commons and Cancel Culture
Parliament isn’t working as it should and the sooner we get back to some sort of normal the better. Meanwhile we have to largely take part virtually, a sterile experience that I hope we will see the back of just as soon as vaccination numbers allow. I have been pressing ministers on what level of vaccination it thinks would be sufficient to ease restrictions. Once the truly vulnerable have been jabbed there can be little justification for keeping society bottled up.
At this time with liberty under pressure, we should be very wary of those who would curtail freedom of speech. There have been a couple of troubling examples recently.
First, YouTube’s decision to suspend the radio channel TalkRadio. Its offense was criticism of lockdowns. YouTube’s programmers apparently decided that respected scientists, such as Professor Carl Heneghan, should not be allowed to speak out against “Covid-19 content that explicitly contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization.” Possibly when reminded that WHO itself has questioned the desirability of lockdowns, YouTube recanted but the damage was done.
The second, now infamous, episode was the ‘cancelling’ of President Donald Trump, not only from social media sites Twitter and Facebook, but from Apple and Google who removed the platform ‘Parler’ from their services altogether.
Scenes from Washington have been appalling in the dying days of the Trump presidency - the sort of thing you expect in a banana republic, not the US. I for one can’t possibly respect a man who has done so much to diminish his office, the standing of the US and political discourse in general.
So, this is by no means a defence of Trump and I did vote for lockdown in the Commons. However, I am deeply worried about the high priests of social media who seem so ready to restrict freedom of speech and mute voices other than those subscribing to their own world view.
These social media moguls have shown themselves to be what we might see as a new clerisy. Can it be right that half a dozen Californian billionaires, so far removed from and completely unaccountable to the rest of society, should decide what can be said and heard?
Some might say that they operate private companies; they can censor what they like. The problem is, the US Supreme Court has previously ruled that cyberspace represents a public forum. Thus Trump was not allowed to block people from his account because it breached the US First Amendment.
Talk of media being free or independent generally implies independent of government. But the censorship recently applied to President Trump shows that independence is a quality that needs to be qualified. Are we really extolling the independence of a tiny cabal of eye-wateringly rich Americans against whose name nobody has ever scratched a cross? Say what you like about the wretched Donald Trump but at least he was voted into office. That’s not true of an increasingly worrying tech clerisy that appears to be in the ascendancy across the globe.