Censorship Sanitised As Clampdown On 'Hate'

Our Woke Irish Government is Pushing Back Against The Trump Tide Of Open Online Borders

It’s astonishing how exercised the illiberal elite have become following the takeover of Twitter (now X ) by Elon Musk and the decision of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook to put an end to 'fact checking’. The classic liberal aspiration to freedom of expression and open highways of information and opinion has been replaced by a mission to clamp down on ‘disinformation', and 'hate speech'. But who could possibly be in favor of ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’, one might demand ? The simple answer at the outset is that that is not the right question. The question is who is to be trusted with the power to police what we read and hear and define things about which there is contested opinion ? The government in power? Some quango of arbiters selected by the government in power?

Agreeing who should be the policeman is not a a new conundrum. Back in the day when fact checking and cancelling were known as censorship we were having the same debate but it was more honest. In Ireland then, it was largely about determining what ‘profanity’ and ‘indecency’ were. There were censors who banned books because some passages offended their sense of decency and propriety or the plot didn’t play out to assert the superiority of virtue. These prim arbiters of propriety were often at the receiving end of derisory yowls of protest from those of broader reading and more developed, liberal, literary taste. It’s a bit like the wheel has gone full circle in our own time as the arbiters of propriety have become the liberals. Nowadays, parents object to what they consider ‘pornographic’ in magazines on public library reading tables while librarians insist it’s not at all pornographic. Times change and ideas around propriety change. However, disputes about what is moral or immoral, true or false, appropriate or inappropriate are perennial. So too is the desire of the powerful to control what the ordinary man and the ordinary woman may ‘safely' view or hear. More so today because the task is so much more difficult when news and views, fake or true, can literally land on peoples’ laps before the censors are out of bed.

It was government organs of information that tainted the word ‘propoganda’. Governments are the prime engines of censorship, however it is dressed up. In the UK this week we found that a manipulated narrative about the savage murderer of young girls in Southport was spun by both Prime Minister and a quiescent media. The suspicions or hunches about the identity of the killer proved to be correct and that was acknowledged finally by those who believed they had the right to control the narrative. It proved to be, as widely suspected, a terrorist inspired attack, not the aberrant act of a local lad who 'sang in the church choir’ though it was that too.

The purpose of this manipulation was to prevent the outbreak of dangerous civil unrest. It had the associated objective of protecting the government’s liberal attitude to immigration from countries with a deep animosity towards western culture. Treating people like fools, I would argue, is more likely to exacerbate civil unrest than coming clean, denouncing the culture that promotes such horror, and promising to hold to account those who allowed a known dangerous individual to roam free. When public anger is not acknowledged, when its expression is suppressed, it tends to spill out into protests that cross the line into lawbreaking. That is a characteristic found in repressive regions of every era and ideology.

A similar example of how those in power try to capture a story to make a political point, or suppress a political point, happened in Ireland when a young teacher, Aisling Murphy, was murdered while out jogging. A Irish politician of leftist disposition, Aodhan O Riordain of the Labour Party, immediately concluded that this was the result of the 'male toxicity' fostered in Irish same sex schools. In fact, the killer turned out to be a Slovak immigrant to Ireland who would have most likely been educated in a mixed school in Slovakia.

Opinion is varied and people often make assumptions that need to be corrected as more information comes to light. Information, more and better information is the only cure for disinformation if it really is disinformation, and not just a reading of the facts that is unpalatable to those in power.

More to the point here, we may ask why a government so focussed on ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ is not confronted more often with their 'two tier’ thinking? Why are they so slow to confront hate that is so easily demonstrable and undisputed, the 'harmful content’ accessed by the Southport killer, for instance? This is the kind of hate around which there is actual national consensus. The entire population of citizens would welcome the censorship of online grooming of disaffected young males from ethnic minorities in particular that target and murder little girls.

There is a an argument that it is impossible to police what is called the ‘dark web’. Well it might be less so if the resources of the police and other agencies were diverted from rounding up online posts from reputable journalists who refuse to use plural pronouns when referring to an individual.

We see great flurries of activity when public figures are the targets of dis- or misinformation online. Simon Harris, Ireland’s new deputy Prime Minister, is the latest to take issue with fraudulent advertising that used his name to sell some dubious money making scheme. These kind of ads are very familiar to people who use the internet and in many cases are clumsy enough to give themselves away. Simon Harris’s disingenuous claim that he was concerned that people might be duped overlooks the far more effective fraudulent advertising and misspelling that is everywhere online.

Not just online. People regularly receive texts on their phones, of various levels of plausibility, advising them on offers and discounts and fake deliveries that require them to share personal information on a webpage or phone line. Vigilance as Harris should know is the only response to these attacks. Clearly Harris and his fellow political travelers don’t much like the more open online highway post the Trump election.

Of course they don’t ! Harris and his party were enthusiastic members of a campaign that successfully persuaded Facebook to place an offensive content alert over a photo of a fetus at 12 weeks for Pro-lie advertising advertisement during the 2015 referendum. That is one to dwell on as it illustrates perfectily just how far the powers that be at any time will go to control the flow of information to advance their agenda.

'Fact-checking' is invariably the work of liberal media outlets who base their corrections on unsubstantiated claims by those who appeal to them. A good example is the effort to cancel the revelations of a teacher who attended an inservice programme to prepare teachers in Ireland for the revised Social and Personal Health classes in our schools. I reposted her post to find it over posted with a ‘fact checker’s warning’ from liberal news platform the journal.ie. The fact check was a misnomer because they did not take issue with any of the ‘facts’ she posted which included sample worksheets and other material. The best rebuttal they had to offer was a statement from the Dept of Education that ‘it was made clear' that no offensive or lurid material was to be used in the classroom. The tangible evidence of the handouts posted by the whistleblower made it very clear that what very many parents would consider lurid and inappropriate and offensive was offered to teachers and they were offered without any evidence whatsoever of a health warning. Fact checking masked as censorship.

We are living in a new era where information is disseminated like never before and accessed just as easily. We do not need censors beyond what is necessary to control violence and criminality and such censorship should require judicial oversight. Beyond that, opinions, information, disinformation and misinformation are best left to the judgment and discernment of readers and viewers who need to acquire the policing skills and tools, including technological tools, to cross check sources and to be alert to how stories can unfold to reveal that things aren’t always as they may first appear and that statements from those in power may be self-serving virtue-signaling, dressed up as a defense of truth, safety and the protection of communities. 'The Nanny State' is really 'Big Brother' even though it is as likely as not to be controlled by women as men these days. I think on reflection more likely.