Barry Gilheany ✍ Last week’s announcements by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook now Meta that fact checkers on his platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Threads, are to be abolished and that his networks will “prioritise free speech” just in time for the return of Donald Trump to the White House cements the new loci of power in the global media and information ecosystem. 

Zuckerberg has made little secret of his genuflection towards the current political climate in the USA by defining the results of the 2024 Presidential as “a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech”. To accommodate this new reality, fact checkers are to be ditched because “they are too politically biased” and that Meta intended to “get a rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” It is proposed that the fact checkers be replaced by the Readers’ Community Notes system as implemented on Twitter/X. A form of voluntary regulation then. But never mind, while changes to the way Meta filters content may mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff” it will still take seriously “a lot of bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.” [1] Note, for example, the absence of health lies and misinformation around vaccines and cancer cures, for example, from that list of iniquities.

This move and the flagrant interventions of Elon Musk in the politics of nations like the UK and Germany plus his soon to be assumed key strategic role in the incoming Trump administration represents a further and possibly irreversible development in the evolution of “surveillance capitalism”` as conceptualised by Shoshana Zuboff in 2016. The original sin of surveillance capitalism is that of “primary extraction” in Zuboff’s opinion. The term describes how the social media behemoths took our private actions and lives by utilising machine learning and artificial learning to gather and organise our personal data and constructing models of each of us, and then declare corporate ownership of these assets which are then used to design algorithms that silently and deviously manipulate us for profit.[2]

The Cambridge Analytica scandal shows how the social media companies connived in the sale of this data to bad actors who then used it to undermine the democratic process during the Brexit referendum in the UK and the US Presidential election in 2016. Now the disavowing of any accountability for the dissemination of untruthful content, no matter the social and political harm caused, to suit the agenda of Donald Trump and other authoritarian leaders, by the tech titans represent the consolidation of a new oligopoly in plain sight. A new dispensation of political elites running nations in executive concert with the digital moguls.

Last week’s announcement represents a full return to the status quo ante prior to the “apology tour” of the United States Zuckerberg undertook in 2017 in the aftermath of the revelations of Facebook’s role in serving US voters Russian disinformation and as a superspreader of what entered common vocabulary as “fake news”. As part of his mea culpa, he announced that Facebook had amended its algorithms and a major initiative to include “third party factcheckers” as part of the content moderation reforms. Now, two election cycles later, Zuckerberg, borrowing from a Trump tirade in 2022 on how the “Silicon Valley tyrants” had colluded to “silence the American people”, Zuckerberg accused the factcheckers themselves for “eroding trust” and “government and legacy media pushing to censor more and more” The “censorship cartel” or tech platforms, academics and civil society groups studying and campaigning against the unrestricted spread of disinformation, is the top target of America’s top communications regulator Brendan Carr, the Trump appointee for chair of the Federal Communications Chair (FCC).[3]

The synchronicity between the imperatives of the incoming White House and Meta’s new agenda is further cemented by the departure of former Deputy British Prime Minister, Liberal Democrat party leader and self-professed “radical” centrist as its global policy chief in favour of a Republican-leaning one plus the appointment of Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) CEO to Meta’s board. A stark symbolism of this extinction event for the idea of objective truth on social media is the intended removal by Meta of the remains of its trust and safety and content moderation teams from liberal California and the location of its US content moderation team in staunchly Republican Texas.[4]

Clues as to the nature of free speech in the brave new world of the Metaverse are laid out unambiguously in its guidelines which allow users to call others mentally ill on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity and its recommendation of “more political content based on. personalised signals.”[5] A specific injunction against calling transgender or non-binary people “it” has been deleted. The rationale behind the new guidelines on mental health and gender identity is that they reflect “political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious words like “weird.” The policies are designed to permit types of speech including people “using insulting language in the context of discussing political and religious issues, such as transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality.” While Meta’s policies regarding people with protected characteristics, it is now possible to compare women to household objects or property and to compare people to faeces, filth, bacteria, viruses, diseases, and primitives. Meta has deleted warnings against self-admission of racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia; allows users to say that transgender people “do not exist” and to post about the “China virus;” Donald Trump’s frequent categorisation of the coronavirus. Warnings against expressions of hate and abuse such as “cunt,” “dick” and “asshole” have also been removed.[6]

Considering recent charge sheets against Facebook for its facilitation of the profusion of hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar which was such a contributory factor in the genocidal attacks on that ethnic group by the military junta in that country in 2018 which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Rohingya and its failure to stop anti-Muslim hate speech and conspiracy theories and calls for violence in India on its platforms,[7] their new guidelines can reasonably be interpreted as direct licences to hate.

A possible direction of travel for Meta could be “boomer radicalisation” or the susceptibility of older people to misinformation or radicalisation. Since Facebook is the social media platform of choice for older people and since according a Guardian analysis of hundreds of defendants charged after last summer’s anti-immigration riots in England as much as 35% were in their 40s and over, anti-extremist campaigners and researchers are becoming concerned about the vulnerability of this demographic to far right disinformation in which Facebook is the chief MO. Professor Sara Wilford of De Montford University, a lead researcher on a pioneering pan-European project called Smidge (Social Media Narratives: Addressing Extremism in Middle Age) is concerned that the crowd-sourced ‘community notes’ approach will not encourage middle-aged users at risk of exposure to extremist content in that they are reluctant to fact check[8] (limited educational attainment and growing up in fairly homogeneous communities are possible factors in such reticence). The hyper-locality of the Facebook experience in that anti-migrant Facebook groups were central to the organisation of attacks on asylum centres and the transformation of the Facebook experience by seismic, transformative events such as Brexit, Covid, Trump’s 2016 election win and the migration controversy .acted as catalysing agents for engagement for far or Alt-Right politics via Facebook according to Dr Natalie-Anne Hall of Cardiff University, author of Brexit, Facebook, and Transnational Right-Wing Populism. She states that “Facebook is a key site for algorithmically driven encounters with these harmful ideas within people’s everyday practices of social media use.”[9]

How have we arrived at this juncture in the evolution of the (mis) information industrial complex headed by bad actors in politics and their accomplices in the new digital media global empires. A good starting point is the “Market for Lemons” synonym with information systems developed by the economist George Akerlof who was to share a Noble Prize for his work in this area. Akerlof published a twelve-page article with this title in 1970 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics which looked at how information asymmetries could adversely affect economic markets, and how to solve the problem. His principal comparison was the market for used cars.[10]

Akerlof explained that buyers in the hunt for a used car struggle to figure out whether the seller is offering a reliable used car or a “lemon.” The seller knows the vehicle from experience. Since potential buyers lack this vital knowledge, make lower offers, discounting the offering price by the probability that the car will be unreliable. The depressed price for used cars caused by the information deficit or asymmetry forces better-quality cars out of the market because potential vendors who possess high-quality used cars are less willing to sell them at a lower price. With a higher proportion of lemons in the market, buyers discount their offers even more, and the downward spiral continues.[11]

In the “cheap speech” era, the market for political information has come to resemble Akerlof’s used car market. Bad information is eclipsing good, and voters are discounting all information as potentially unreliable (“They are all as bad as each other” pathology). This market failure deals a blow to the basic conditions of democratic governance: voters must be able to access sufficiently reliable and accurate information about the state of the world to permit them to vote in step with their interests and values and have confidence in a fair and impartial election system.[12]

Hasen points to the decline and disappearance of quality (especially local) journalism in the USA due to changing business models whereby advertising money that once supported newspapers now flows to digital media platforms, mostly Facebook and Google. According to analysis by the Guardian, between 2000 and 2015 newspaper print advertising revenue declined from $60 billion to $20 billion per year. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook collected 59 percent of digital advertising revenue in 2019 and were on track for a $77-billion year in advertising revenues before the pandemic struck.[13]

With the disappearance of local newspapers due to the drying up of traditional advertising revenue and unable to operate behind a paywall, voters are deprived the precious resource of relevant information. Without journalists making freedom-of-information requests, attending government meetings, pursuing tips from whistleblowers and generally monitoring government, valuable information concerning corruption, maladministration and lack of official accountability never sees the dawn of day. This draining of the oasis of this important public good, the turning away of younger demographics from consumption of traditional media towards digital outlets like Tik Tok and the proliferation of cheap speech outlets particularly partisan news sites like Breitbart, Fox News and podcasts like Joe Rogan show alongside the wider disenchantment with “elites” and “establishments has created a meteorology that has led to the perfect storm of today’s bromance between the oligarchs of Silicon Valley and the Trump world. The revolution of reactionaries. Back to the future of the robber barons of the contemporary communications world and the reminiscences of 1930s populism.

References

[1] Robert Booth Dismay as factchecking ditched on Facebook on ‘free speech’ drive. Zuckerberg describes Trump re-election as ‘cultural tipping point. Guardian 8th January 2025.

[2] Quoted in Maria Ressa (2022) How to Stand Up to a Dictator. The Fight for Our Future. London: WH Allen p.248.

[3] Emily Bell, Facts Just Don’t Matter to Men Who Wage War on the Truth. Guardian Opinion 11th January 2025.

[4] Chris Stokel-Walker.An extinction-level reversal for truth-seeking. Guardian. 11th January 2025.

[5] The Guardian Comment 9th January 2025 Meta has done far too little to tackle hate and lies. Now it wants to do even less.

[6] Guardian, 9th January 2025.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ben Quinn. Fears of radicalisation of older people with no Meta factcheckers. Guardian 13th January 2025.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Richard Hasen (2022) Cheap Speech. How disinformation poisons our politics – and how to cure it. New Haven and London: Yale University Press p.30

[11] Ibid

[12] Ibid pp.30-31

[13] Ibid p.32
 
Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Free Speech For The Few 🪶Hate Speech, Lies And Disinformation For The Masses In The Dystopia Of The Metaverse 🪶 Zuckerberg Removes Fact Checkers From His Platform

Barry Gilheany ✍ Last week’s announcements by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook now Meta that fact checkers on his platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Threads, are to be abolished and that his networks will “prioritise free speech” just in time for the return of Donald Trump to the White House cements the new loci of power in the global media and information ecosystem. 

Zuckerberg has made little secret of his genuflection towards the current political climate in the USA by defining the results of the 2024 Presidential as “a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech”. To accommodate this new reality, fact checkers are to be ditched because “they are too politically biased” and that Meta intended to “get a rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” It is proposed that the fact checkers be replaced by the Readers’ Community Notes system as implemented on Twitter/X. A form of voluntary regulation then. But never mind, while changes to the way Meta filters content may mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff” it will still take seriously “a lot of bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.” [1] Note, for example, the absence of health lies and misinformation around vaccines and cancer cures, for example, from that list of iniquities.

This move and the flagrant interventions of Elon Musk in the politics of nations like the UK and Germany plus his soon to be assumed key strategic role in the incoming Trump administration represents a further and possibly irreversible development in the evolution of “surveillance capitalism”` as conceptualised by Shoshana Zuboff in 2016. The original sin of surveillance capitalism is that of “primary extraction” in Zuboff’s opinion. The term describes how the social media behemoths took our private actions and lives by utilising machine learning and artificial learning to gather and organise our personal data and constructing models of each of us, and then declare corporate ownership of these assets which are then used to design algorithms that silently and deviously manipulate us for profit.[2]

The Cambridge Analytica scandal shows how the social media companies connived in the sale of this data to bad actors who then used it to undermine the democratic process during the Brexit referendum in the UK and the US Presidential election in 2016. Now the disavowing of any accountability for the dissemination of untruthful content, no matter the social and political harm caused, to suit the agenda of Donald Trump and other authoritarian leaders, by the tech titans represent the consolidation of a new oligopoly in plain sight. A new dispensation of political elites running nations in executive concert with the digital moguls.

Last week’s announcement represents a full return to the status quo ante prior to the “apology tour” of the United States Zuckerberg undertook in 2017 in the aftermath of the revelations of Facebook’s role in serving US voters Russian disinformation and as a superspreader of what entered common vocabulary as “fake news”. As part of his mea culpa, he announced that Facebook had amended its algorithms and a major initiative to include “third party factcheckers” as part of the content moderation reforms. Now, two election cycles later, Zuckerberg, borrowing from a Trump tirade in 2022 on how the “Silicon Valley tyrants” had colluded to “silence the American people”, Zuckerberg accused the factcheckers themselves for “eroding trust” and “government and legacy media pushing to censor more and more” The “censorship cartel” or tech platforms, academics and civil society groups studying and campaigning against the unrestricted spread of disinformation, is the top target of America’s top communications regulator Brendan Carr, the Trump appointee for chair of the Federal Communications Chair (FCC).[3]

The synchronicity between the imperatives of the incoming White House and Meta’s new agenda is further cemented by the departure of former Deputy British Prime Minister, Liberal Democrat party leader and self-professed “radical” centrist as its global policy chief in favour of a Republican-leaning one plus the appointment of Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) CEO to Meta’s board. A stark symbolism of this extinction event for the idea of objective truth on social media is the intended removal by Meta of the remains of its trust and safety and content moderation teams from liberal California and the location of its US content moderation team in staunchly Republican Texas.[4]

Clues as to the nature of free speech in the brave new world of the Metaverse are laid out unambiguously in its guidelines which allow users to call others mentally ill on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity and its recommendation of “more political content based on. personalised signals.”[5] A specific injunction against calling transgender or non-binary people “it” has been deleted. The rationale behind the new guidelines on mental health and gender identity is that they reflect “political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious words like “weird.” The policies are designed to permit types of speech including people “using insulting language in the context of discussing political and religious issues, such as transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality.” While Meta’s policies regarding people with protected characteristics, it is now possible to compare women to household objects or property and to compare people to faeces, filth, bacteria, viruses, diseases, and primitives. Meta has deleted warnings against self-admission of racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia; allows users to say that transgender people “do not exist” and to post about the “China virus;” Donald Trump’s frequent categorisation of the coronavirus. Warnings against expressions of hate and abuse such as “cunt,” “dick” and “asshole” have also been removed.[6]

Considering recent charge sheets against Facebook for its facilitation of the profusion of hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar which was such a contributory factor in the genocidal attacks on that ethnic group by the military junta in that country in 2018 which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Rohingya and its failure to stop anti-Muslim hate speech and conspiracy theories and calls for violence in India on its platforms,[7] their new guidelines can reasonably be interpreted as direct licences to hate.

A possible direction of travel for Meta could be “boomer radicalisation” or the susceptibility of older people to misinformation or radicalisation. Since Facebook is the social media platform of choice for older people and since according a Guardian analysis of hundreds of defendants charged after last summer’s anti-immigration riots in England as much as 35% were in their 40s and over, anti-extremist campaigners and researchers are becoming concerned about the vulnerability of this demographic to far right disinformation in which Facebook is the chief MO. Professor Sara Wilford of De Montford University, a lead researcher on a pioneering pan-European project called Smidge (Social Media Narratives: Addressing Extremism in Middle Age) is concerned that the crowd-sourced ‘community notes’ approach will not encourage middle-aged users at risk of exposure to extremist content in that they are reluctant to fact check[8] (limited educational attainment and growing up in fairly homogeneous communities are possible factors in such reticence). The hyper-locality of the Facebook experience in that anti-migrant Facebook groups were central to the organisation of attacks on asylum centres and the transformation of the Facebook experience by seismic, transformative events such as Brexit, Covid, Trump’s 2016 election win and the migration controversy .acted as catalysing agents for engagement for far or Alt-Right politics via Facebook according to Dr Natalie-Anne Hall of Cardiff University, author of Brexit, Facebook, and Transnational Right-Wing Populism. She states that “Facebook is a key site for algorithmically driven encounters with these harmful ideas within people’s everyday practices of social media use.”[9]

How have we arrived at this juncture in the evolution of the (mis) information industrial complex headed by bad actors in politics and their accomplices in the new digital media global empires. A good starting point is the “Market for Lemons” synonym with information systems developed by the economist George Akerlof who was to share a Noble Prize for his work in this area. Akerlof published a twelve-page article with this title in 1970 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics which looked at how information asymmetries could adversely affect economic markets, and how to solve the problem. His principal comparison was the market for used cars.[10]

Akerlof explained that buyers in the hunt for a used car struggle to figure out whether the seller is offering a reliable used car or a “lemon.” The seller knows the vehicle from experience. Since potential buyers lack this vital knowledge, make lower offers, discounting the offering price by the probability that the car will be unreliable. The depressed price for used cars caused by the information deficit or asymmetry forces better-quality cars out of the market because potential vendors who possess high-quality used cars are less willing to sell them at a lower price. With a higher proportion of lemons in the market, buyers discount their offers even more, and the downward spiral continues.[11]

In the “cheap speech” era, the market for political information has come to resemble Akerlof’s used car market. Bad information is eclipsing good, and voters are discounting all information as potentially unreliable (“They are all as bad as each other” pathology). This market failure deals a blow to the basic conditions of democratic governance: voters must be able to access sufficiently reliable and accurate information about the state of the world to permit them to vote in step with their interests and values and have confidence in a fair and impartial election system.[12]

Hasen points to the decline and disappearance of quality (especially local) journalism in the USA due to changing business models whereby advertising money that once supported newspapers now flows to digital media platforms, mostly Facebook and Google. According to analysis by the Guardian, between 2000 and 2015 newspaper print advertising revenue declined from $60 billion to $20 billion per year. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook collected 59 percent of digital advertising revenue in 2019 and were on track for a $77-billion year in advertising revenues before the pandemic struck.[13]

With the disappearance of local newspapers due to the drying up of traditional advertising revenue and unable to operate behind a paywall, voters are deprived the precious resource of relevant information. Without journalists making freedom-of-information requests, attending government meetings, pursuing tips from whistleblowers and generally monitoring government, valuable information concerning corruption, maladministration and lack of official accountability never sees the dawn of day. This draining of the oasis of this important public good, the turning away of younger demographics from consumption of traditional media towards digital outlets like Tik Tok and the proliferation of cheap speech outlets particularly partisan news sites like Breitbart, Fox News and podcasts like Joe Rogan show alongside the wider disenchantment with “elites” and “establishments has created a meteorology that has led to the perfect storm of today’s bromance between the oligarchs of Silicon Valley and the Trump world. The revolution of reactionaries. Back to the future of the robber barons of the contemporary communications world and the reminiscences of 1930s populism.

References

[1] Robert Booth Dismay as factchecking ditched on Facebook on ‘free speech’ drive. Zuckerberg describes Trump re-election as ‘cultural tipping point. Guardian 8th January 2025.

[2] Quoted in Maria Ressa (2022) How to Stand Up to a Dictator. The Fight for Our Future. London: WH Allen p.248.

[3] Emily Bell, Facts Just Don’t Matter to Men Who Wage War on the Truth. Guardian Opinion 11th January 2025.

[4] Chris Stokel-Walker.An extinction-level reversal for truth-seeking. Guardian. 11th January 2025.

[5] The Guardian Comment 9th January 2025 Meta has done far too little to tackle hate and lies. Now it wants to do even less.

[6] Guardian, 9th January 2025.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ben Quinn. Fears of radicalisation of older people with no Meta factcheckers. Guardian 13th January 2025.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Richard Hasen (2022) Cheap Speech. How disinformation poisons our politics – and how to cure it. New Haven and London: Yale University Press p.30

[11] Ibid

[12] Ibid pp.30-31

[13] Ibid p.32
 
Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

30 comments:

  1. Wouldn't have happened had the legacy main stream media been shown to lie over and over again at the behest of vested interests.

    ReplyDelete
  2. And what vested interests are the social media giants lying on behalf of?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Barry you don't strike me as someone who is so blinkered you cannot see the danger of censorship from any quarter. The vested interests that social media platforms protected are those you cannot critique. Rememeber the old adage or " If you wish to know who controls you first see who you are not allowed to criticize."

      I'll give you a personal example of pre-Musk Twitter. I don't use Twitter but I thought I'd try an experiment and opened an account. My first and only tweet was ..

      " A man cannot become a woman and a woman cannot become a man".d

      Instantly and permanently banned. No discourse, no reason. Make of it what you will. I have said for years that as far as the Left push the pendulum will also swing back.

      The gnashing of teeth over Trump's re-election by the Left is ridiculous as the writing has been on the wall for years. The vast majority of US citizens are utterly sick of the woke wanker nonsense and cancel culture. That's why outside of a few cities they came out in force to say enough is enough. Musk is riding this sentiment but make no mistake the sentiment is there and visceral. It is also clearly on the rise in Europe. Even the darling of the UK Left in Stephen Fry made comment that the Left bears the responsibility for the rise of the Right.

      I stopped believing in anything journalists had to say in the late 90's in Belfast and that was me dealing firsthand with the BBC. They can spin stories better than a DJ spins vinyl. Not to say there aren't a few with a modicum of integrity but at the end of the day they know who pays their wages.

      And not to forget..." CNN..brought to you by Pfizer" FFS!

      Delete
    2. Steve - there is no doubt that woke wank has a lot to answer for. Had you put up on Twitter that the world is 6000 years old, a ridiculous view with no support in the world of science, it would not have led to a ban. But when you put out what you feel is a scientific view with huge support from within the science world you get banned.
      I am not as hostile to journalists as you are as we still get great knowledge from them. But the focus from them at all times needs to be on what is factually correct and not on what is politically correct.
      I think the argument that the Left bear responsibility for the rise of the right is one that needs to be explored further. The organising principle of the right across Europe is immigration. Yet the Left has no answers to the spread of the right while it continuously fuels them. At some point the Left needs to ask itself how energising the far right is going to benefit either the Left or immigrants. The Left needs to win people over to its ideas rather than seek to impose them and cancel everybody who asks questions.

      Delete
    3. The "Old" left of the ilk I subscribe to (and now I'm showing my age) never supported the European Union for the reasons I've mentioned many times but I'll repeat ; the 'EU' is nothing more than the wanton Capitalists wet dream made flesh. Cheap labour too afraid to Unionize, happy to accept the West's idea of poverty as it is leagues ahead of the poverty line in the migrants birth nation.

      We are not being utter bastards when we oppose unfettered migration, we wanted each nation to be self sufficient and compassionate to it's own citizens. Unfortunately the West is fed on a diet of corporate news media where any dissent on the issue of migration is framed as xenophobia.

      Easy pickings for the Right and the 'new' ( young) Left are too caught up in asinine identity politics to see that those who actually control power are laughing their arses off at how well their plan is working.

      The Right is on the rise but the responsibility lays very squarely at my door and the door of every old school leftie who allowed themselves to be fooled by usurpation disguised as compassion.

      And yet we will show the very human trait of compassion to those less fortunate than us, even if it invariably leads to the decline in living standards for all of us..

      Except the rich capitalist without morals or ethics.

      Delete
  3. Barry laughing at a journalist nearly being prosecuted for a deleted tweet but getting annoyed at Facebook and Joe Rogan while clutching his copy of "On Liberty" and pretending that this has not been the culmination of various disastrous decisions over the years is...something.

    Legacy media did its best to drum out differing opinions (e.g. Brexit might be beneficial, Trump may not be a literal fascist, cancel culture is a thing) and, for a while, social media helped out as well (particularly when it came to the trans debate). I suggest reading 'Morning After the Revolution' to see how deep the rot was in the New York Times. As a result, partisan news outlets (e.g. GB News, Breitbart) came into being and covered stories that the mainstream were unwilling to cover. They also covered a load of shite as well but considering the mainstream media tried to tell us that the 2020 BLM riots were "fiery but mostly peaceful protests", most chose their poison accordingly.

    Now that a significant chunk of the population are pushing back against the excesses of the last ten years, it's interesting how some who had little to no interest in social media moderating are now clutching their pearls as the tech bros sense which way the wind is blowing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Christopher, there were legacy media outlets that called those that challenged the Brexit process such as Gina Miller and the judiciary that found it wanting "enemies of the people"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Which, considering they were trying to overturn a democratic result, is not an unfair comment. However I think you'll find that a good 80% of legacy media outlets were in favour of Miller's actions. Maybe they should have petitioned the EU as they like overturning results not in their favour.

      Delete
  5. They were challenging Theresa May's attempt to use Henry VIII rules to force through Brexit plan through the Commons without a Commons vote. Most of the legacy media in Britain were pro Brexit e.g. Mail, Express, Sun, Telegraph

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "They were challenging Theresa May's attempt to use Henry VIII rules to force through Brexit plan through the Commons without a Commons vote."

      That the plebs voted for in a referendum and thus multimillionaire Gina Miller was upset because...democracy.

      "Most of the legacy media in Britain were pro Brexit e.g. Mail, Express, Sun, Telegraph"

      No they weren't. The Guardian, The Mirror, Financial Times, New Statesman and Independent endorsed remain. And those papers (particularly The Guardian and FT) have a cultural cache greater than the papers you cited.

      Delete
  6. The Brexit referendum said nothing about what form EU with drawal should take i.e leaving SM and CU and was won through nativist scares about asylum seekers and migration.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So that justifies invalidating a vote? Because you didn't like the result or what it didn't say?

      You clearly have a problem with democracy and free speech when it doesn't go your way.

      Delete
    2. those scares are not free floating concepts just plucked from the air but are deeply rooted within communities the length and breadth of the UK. The scaremongers did not invent them but tapped into them. They used them to challenge elitist democracy and fueled a greater unease within communities that any concept of participatory democracy was redundant as elite democracy powered forward in the interest of elites.
      The far right of course have no interest in participatory democracy - they want civil society suppressed so that authoritarian government can be pursued more easily.

      Delete
  7. As usual for Barry, it is a very well laid out piece which marshals its points very well.
    However, like others here, I have a serious problem with the waving of a woke wand and thinking that speech or ideas not approved by the wand waver will suddenly vanish.
    These days I don't see things in terms of free speech but free inquiry. And without being able to speak we will not be able to inquire. For me free inquiry is the principle value and free speech the indispensable instrument for pursuing it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Christopher,

    Isn't it a precondition of democracy that the public are informed?

    The fact that the side proposing major constitutional change (in 2016) wasn't required to write down what they were actually proposing might be said to be less than democratic.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Isn't it a precondition of democracy that the public are informed?"

      Yes, hence why the matter was covered in the media, plus I'm sure they could use Google and discuss the matter with friends

      "The fact that the side proposing major constitutional change (in 2016) wasn't required to write down what they were actually proposing might be said to be less than democratic."

      If you can't figure out that voting to leave a technocratic bloc was going to (at the very least) cause problems as said technocratic bloc may not like the idea of other countries leaving, then I have some magic beans for sale.

      Delete
    2. "the matter was covered in the media"

      Was it accurately covered in the media? (This would be the politically unbiased media we know and love in the UK?) Did friends accurately describe the consequences of Leave winning? How reliable a source is Google? Are these not important distinctions? I never met two Leave supporters whose understandings of what they were voting for were the same.

      If there was a referendum on Northern Ireland leaving the UK, wouldn't the Leave side be expected to write down what would happen if they won? Or would it be a case of "fuck it, we'll work the details out later" (like the Brexit plebiscite)?

      Some people clearly were unable to figure out the consequences of Leave winning. This should have come as no surprise; there's no rule that says you need a specific IQ to participate in a democracy.

      Maybe there should be.

      Shopping lists, employment contracts, constitutions... Generally I'm in favour of important things being written down.

      Delete
  9. "there's no rule that says you need a specific IQ to participate in a democracy. Maybe there should be."

    More contempt for democracy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Maybe there should be"

      Fair enough, I should know by now that understated irony doesn't work well in online discussions.

      I'm not suggesting there should be a minimum IQ needed to vote. There should be no such restriction. I should have been clearer on that issue.

      You don't engage with the point about democracy requiring proposals being put in writing.

      If, in the run up to the referendum, the UK government (pro-EU at the time) had banned the Leave campaign from articulating their proposal, I would have objected. I would have objected because such censorship would show contempt for democracy. The voters have the right to be told what they're voting for (or against).

      If the Leave side decide that the voters don't have this right, then that's not any less anti-democratic.

      Democracy requires that voters can hold politicians accountable. Farage, Johnson et al can't be held accountable for what Google says Brexit is going to mean, or for what someone's friends say it'll mean. What the Sun or the Mail (or the Guardian) say Brexit will mean cannot be regarded as a political commitment.

      I've voted in many elections and several referendums, and only rarely been on the winning side. I'm fine with losing, as long as it's clear what the winning side actually stands for. It has to be clear before the plebiscite.

      Finally, can you let me know if I'm misinterpreting your point about magic beans? My reading is that it suggests that if people are not sufficiently intelligent, then they deserve to be lied to....As illustrated by my own unfortunate use of "maybe there should be", it's easy to misrepresent oneself in contexts like this, so sorry if I'm misunderstanding your meaning here.

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    2. Britain was particularly ill suited as a liberal parliamentary democracy to deliberation by plebiscite on such a complex matter as leaving the EU.

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    3. By contrast the Abortion and Equal Marriage referendums in Ireland were good deliberative exercises as citizens juries clarified the issues at stake and so the electorate knew what it was voting for.

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  10. Steve, can you provide any examples of the "corporate" media framing opposition to migration as "xenophobia"? For, the constant diet of immigrant scare stories in the Tory press on GB helped to deliver Brexit

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  11. Steve, closer EU integration has facilitated labour and consumer rights across the bloc, something which Tory Brexiteers and Nigel Fagash wanted the UK to be "free" from.

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    1. Never said there weren't regulations. Do you think these regulations are at the forefront in the minds of poor migrants?

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  12. Steve you are making generalist statements without evidencing them. Once again, where is the evidence that the corporate media framed opposition to migration as xenophobia?

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    1. "Steve you are making generalist statements without evidencing them."

      The irony is stunning.

      "...where is the evidence that the corporate media framed opposition to migration as xenophobia?"

      https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2016/10/21/xenophobia-britannica-anti-immigrant-attitudes-in-the-uk-are-among-the-strongest-in-europe/

      https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/brexit-racism-eu-referendum-racist-incidents-politicians-media

      https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/brexit-prejudice-scientists-link-foreigners-immigrants-racism-xenophobia-leave-eu-a8078586.html

      https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/post-brexit-racism-truth-hate-8787243

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  13. Chris, these sources are from reputable newspapers of record or trusted information outlets. Nobody is saying that all Brexit voters are racist but it is undeniable that all racists voted Brexit. How is that corporate propaganda?

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  14. Chris, it is also undeniable that the Leave campaigns drew on nativist narratives and there was an upsurge in hate offences after the referendum. Besides Brexit achieved zilch

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