THE UK ONLINE SAFETY ACT: AUTHORITARIAN AND DYSTOPIAN IN NATURE
The weaponisation of laws and the media, and we ought to start with the UK, and the highly controversial Online Safety Act. So, the Online Safety Act is legislation that gives the relevant Secretary of State the power to designate and suppress or record a wide range of online content that is “illegal” or “deemed harmful to children”.
The Act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be “harmful” to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites. Ideally, the act is also supposed to oblige large social media platforms NOT to remove, and to preserve access to, journalistic or “democratically important” content such as user comments on political parties and issues.
Then, the Act also requires platforms, including end-to-end encrypted messengers, to scan for child pornography, despite warnings from experts that it is not possible to implement such a scanning mechanism without undermining users’ privacy. To which the UK government has claimed that it does not intend to enforce this provision of the Act until it becomes “technically feasible” to do so. And then lastly, the Act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the “harmful” content they do not want to see… So this is a more idealistic presentation of what the Online Safety Act seeks to accomplish, and it is presented this way by the Labour-led UK government, so that anyone who opposes it can be dismissed as a child predator sympathiser and an enemy of progress. BUT, here’s what the Act fundamentally contributes, as far as trying to shift the jurisprudence in the UK is concerned.
The Online Safety Act hands sweeping and incredibly dangerous powers to the relevant secretary of state, allowing them to interfere directly with Ofcom’s operations including the authority to dictate the content of its so-called “codes of practice”. This thus represents a dangerous centralisation of power that compromises Ofcom’s supposed independence and opens the door to government control over online speech. And these powers, which can be exercised with minimal oversight and under vague emergency justifications, indicate a government with aspirations that are ultimately authoritarian and dystopian in nature.
THE ONLINE SAFETY ACT EXPOSES THE BIG-GOVERNMENT INCLINATIONS OF THE LABOUR PARTY
However, beyond the authoritarian and dystopian nature of the Online Safety Act, how the Labour-led government is going about with it, further exposes its big government inclinations. And the difference here is how the labour-led government is responding to the dissent resulting from the Act. More specifically, governments receive their operational mandate from the governed (at least that is how it should be). This means we measure a government’s political legitimacy and efficacy based on how well it enacts what the people demanded, as opposed to imposing its dictates on the people. This is why for instance, the UK government has an explicit obligation to implement Brexit because the majority of the country voted for it through the referendum, irrespective of what an incumbent government may think of Brexit.
HOWEVER, when the people of the UK signed a petition that has received over four hundred thousand signatures (as we speak) to repeal the “Online Safety Act”, the government’s response, in a nutshell, was “We hear you and know you’re upset, but think of the children” (which we’ll get to in a moment). But, this number of petition signatures is important because, in the UK, Parliament considers all petitions that get more than 100,000 signatures for a debate – and so clearly, many people want to see repeals of the Online Safety Act.
More broadly, this petition was created by Alex Baynham, and the aim of the petition is stated as being based on the belief that the scope of the Online Safety act is far broader and restrictive than is necessary in a free society. And that those signing it think that Parliament should repeal the act and work towards producing proportionate legislation rather than risking clamping down on civil society.
Well, on the 28th of July, the UK government responded – and they gave a categorically big government response. The government stated that (quote): “It is right that the regulatory regime for in-scope online services takes a proportionate approach, balancing the protection of users from online harm with the ability for low-risk services to operate effectively and provide benefits to users.” (end quote). In other words, the government concedes to the correctness of the mandate that citizens are demanding it fulfil in light of proportionality, and not infringing on freedoms in a free society.
BUT, then immediately after the government states in its response that (quote): “The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.” It continues to say “Proportionality is a core principle of the Act and is in-built into its duties. As regulator for the online safety regime, Ofcom must consider the size and risk level of different types and kinds of services when recommending steps providers can take to comply with requirements. Duties in the Communications Act 2003 require Ofcom to act with proportionality and target action only where it is needed.” In other words, the government concedes that proportionality is important not to infringe on rights in a free society, but insists that the expanded oversight powers through the Online Safety Act are necessary to protect this free society from itself.
But, this is nothing short of an aggravating and patronising response! If there is no enjoyment of free speech, then there is no free society period! Free speech is quite literally the yardstick, because it is the difference between constructive and open debate on matters of importance, and fearing to speak up. And if society is governed by a fear to speak up, then what they say is likely not a reflection of what they stand for but of what they think is acceptable to the incumbent government. Therefore, it can never be acceptable for a government to claim to protect a society by expanding its powers to govern speech – proportionately or disproportionately. Free speech is an inalienable freedom, that no government has the power to limit or take away because it is God-given… Well, Zia Yusuf says Reform UK (the party led by Nigel Farage) will repeal the Online Safety Act.
IRONICALLY, THE ONLINE SAFETY ACT INDIRECTLY PROTECTS PAEDOPHILES
Now, I alluded to the fact that the labour-led government keeps insisting that this act is about protecting the children – and so, let’s refute this, because it is not true. For instance, Sammy Woodhouse reported that as they try to share the horrific stories of child rape and the government cover-up, the UK’s Online Safety Act has done nothing but silence the victims. And this is due to the conduct of the very same government that claimed to launch a national inquiry, and whose leader said that speaking out about the abuse of children is “jumping on a far-right bandwagon.
Similarly, conservative UK journalist Smantha Smith went on TV to discuss Pakistani grooming gangs in her Labour-run hometown of Telford. The next day, officers banged on her door, wanting to shut her up for exposing them. And so, with the Online Safety Act now in force, no one is safe. Because if it happened to her, it can happen to anyone. But, the big irony I’d like to highlight here is that the UK government’s implementation of the Online Safety Act seems to protect paedophiles, and those inculcated in the grooming gangs – all while they claim that this is about protecting children. It simply is not true, and here is journalist Samantha Smith discussing her case.
REV DR CHRIS OYAKHILOME DSc. DSc. DD.: “SUE THEM; YOU WILL WIN”
Thankfully, many in the UK – much like those who started the petition we’ve just discussed – are not quiet, or merely accepting the status quo. Many are gearing up to challenge the state though the requisite avenues of formal legal recourse – including through suing the relevant parties! For instance, free speech lawyer Preston Byrne told GB News why he’s planning to sue Ofcom over the Online Safety Act.
MILITARY AND INTELLIGENCE ORGANISATIONS CREATED THE CENSORSHIP INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Now, while this discussion focuses on the UK’s Online Safety Act, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that this problem is not only global, but was often driven by a desire to ultimately apply restrictive provisions on Elon Musk’s X platform. And this is made apparent as information has also come to the fore regarding the historical and intensive involvement of military and intelligence organisations in the war on free speech! More specifically, a whistleblower last year provided us with a trove of documents proving that US and UK military & Intelligence employees and contractors adapted counter-terrorism tactics developed abroad, including censorship, debanking, and cross-platform bans – really rivalling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. Now, they describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defence and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Combined, they offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the “anti-disinformation” sector, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex. Now, the whistleblower’s documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organisations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques.
But, here’s where it gets even more interesting: the CTIL files reveal that US and UK military contractors developed and used advanced tactics — including demanding that social media platforms change their Terms of Service — to shape public opinion about Covid-19, and that getting content removed was just one strategy used by the Censorship Industrial Complex. The CTI League, which partnered with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), THEN aimed to implement something called “AMITT,” which stood for “Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques.” Kindly have a listen to Michael Shellenberger as he exposes a key figure involved in this operation, and her name is Renée Teresita and even the “partnerships” that were formed to create this censorship industrial complex.
THE CENSORSHIP INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX’S WAR ON X AND ELON MUSK
Well, so the Department of Homeland Security’s AMITT project was ultimately, therefore, a disinformation framework that included many offensive actions, including discrediting alternative media, using bots and sock puppets, pre-bunking, and pushing counter-messaging AND working to influence government policy. This emphatically tells us that politicians are (once again) not the primary actors behind the war on free speech!
In any case, the specific counters to so-called “disinformation” in AMITT and what became its successor framework, called DISARM, include many tactics that we have observed, such as: “name and shame people who disagree with the narrative of the government of the diabolical conglomerates behind certain agendas, like the vaccine holocaust”; simulating misinformation and disinformation campaigns, AND “using banking to cut off access”, which is something Europe is considering against Elon Musk! In addition, the DISARM framework has included creating policy that makes social media police disinformation”. This especially became notable with the opposition towards X – which has exposed that the war on X and Elon Musk itself has a broader history involving diabolical non-state actors – in particular the UN.
Paul Coleman points out a terrible irony there towards the end, which is that these diabolical tactics aimed at censorship are coming from the people who pretentiously parade themselves as being in the front seat of defending free speech. Which is why I always tend to emphasise that it is a mistake to assume that the state is not an absolute moral actor or a yardstick to measure ethical conduct, especially when we consider that atrocious policies like slavery, the holocaust and apartheid were all legal!
And true to form, in the status quo entities like the EU are weaponising laws against Musk and the X platform in order to fabricate justification for aggressive actions towards Musk. For instance, you’d recall that the European Union sent a letter to Elon Musk, demanding him to censor Donald Trump during their interview in early August 2024, ahead of the US presidential election in November. The EU proceeded to threaten Musk with legal consequences if he does not prevent the spread of what they label as “disinformation.” But, even that threat followed a pattern of autocratic figures looking to have more censorship on the X platform, in light of what they say is a problem consistent with the ills of what they have defined as mis and dis information. And so, what we are seeing now is that in addition to the EU feeling comfortable demanding censorship in a US election to comply with the Digital Services Act, the UK is continuing on a similar trajectory.
THE CHURCH IS NOT IGNORANT OF THE ENEMY’S DEVICES
But ultimately, the UK Online Safety Act represents a digression from Godly Wisdom – especially when we consider that free speech is a God-given right, and we observe in the Scriptures that God respects the choice of men, because love connotes free will.
And so, this highlights the significant shift in social narrative in Europe, and the gist of the spiritual war in today’s discussion; which is that when such laws are made in the UK, it is not the Wisdom of God and Scriptures that are at the fore of the discussion, rather it is diabolical activities of witches in the UK, and something must be done.
Written By Lindokuhle Mabaso
