The Online Safety Act: Britain's Censorship Superweapon

How bad is the Online Safety Act?

✅10% revenue fines for not banning hate speech & disinformation
✅Americans in the UK face criminal charges and 2 years in jail for non-compliance
✅Mandatory ad boycotts

It's bad..🧵 The Act was introduced by the UK's previous Conservative government, and implemented by the current Labour one.

Ministers have spun it as purely a child safety measure. Keep kids safe online!

They don't want the public to notice the other stuff...

https://x.com/peterkyle/status/1950092871614230571

For nearly a decade, online advertisers were the shock troops of censorship.

News outlets feared a boycott for publishing the wrong viewpoint.

Social media companies feared a boycott for platforming the wrong person.

The FTC just called time on this censorship tactic 🧵 In December, two of the world's largest ad agencies, IPG and Omnicom, announced plans to merge.

Mergers of this size can't take place without the approval of competition regulators like the FTC.

We discovered a $2.6m grant from FEMA to censor "disinformation" online.

It was given to a private contractor that employed former CIA agents.

The spider's web also leads to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the nonprofit that wants to "kill Musk's Twitter" Guidehouse Inc. is a massive recipient of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Total govt payouts to Guidehouse over the years: $700m

Agencies working with Guidehouse include the FBI, DHS, DoD, State, and HHS.

Formerly a division of PwC, it's now owned by Bain Capital.

🇪🇺 23 U.S. FUNDED ORGS BACK EU CENSORS

The EU is an existential threat to free speech.

Its Digital Services Act imposes crippling fines on platforms over disfavored speech - a tariff in all but name.

We found a trail of soft-power money that leads back to the State Department Recent news from the EU sounds like it came from the Soviet Union.

- Political leaders arrested for liking tweets.
- Cancelling elections in Romania because they didn't like the result.
- Threatening the same in Germany

The kicker? Up till now, EU tyranny had U.S support.

19th Century Elite Human Capital: Weeb Edition 

Does xenophobia doom nations? 

You cannot compete, we are told, if you care about where your CEOs & geniuses come from.

Is that true?

Let's learn about one of the most successful-and xenophobic-national modernizations ever /1 Edo (Tokyo), 1852: 

Japan is COOKED. 

An American fleet has forcibly docked in the harbor, demanding an unequal trade treaty. 

Japan has been isolated for 200 years.  

It’s a feudal society with no modern industry or military.  

ZERO Elite Human Capital. 

Is it... over?

🇬🇧 The Transatlantic Censorship Blob 🇺🇸

Britain's prime minister, Keir Starmer is frantically trying to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration.

One little problem: a nonprofit founded by Starmer's top aide wants to censor Americans and "kill Musk's Twitter." CCDH was founded in 2018 by Morgan McSweeney, currently chief of staff to UK prime minister Keir Starmer.

He's also embroiled in a foreign interference controversy after it emerged that the UK Labour party paid for him to fly to the DNC and meet with Harris.

Would be less of a big deal if 100 Labour party activists hadn't campaigned for Kamala in the swing states...

U.S. TAXPAYERS PAYING BILLIONS TO COMPANIES THAT BOYCOTTED @X

The world's biggest advertising agencies are also the world's biggest censors, boycotting platforms that allow dissident speech.

They also gobble up billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars through federal contracts...👇


foundationforfreedomonline.com/censorship-ind…

EXCLUSIVE: USAID supports censorship of GAMING SITES.

A USAID "disinformation" primer obtained by @America1stLegal claims "gaming sites" have become hubs for "problematic information."

USAID also characterizes "satire and parody" as misinformation.
foundationforfreedomonline.com/usaid-internal… USAID: "problematic information regularly originates from networks of alternative sites" including gaming sites, Reddit, Discord, and 4chan.

These alternative networks create a "populist expertise" offering "interpretations of the world that differ from mainstream sources."

The rot at Google has been apparent for a while.

An anon Google employee, speaking to me in 2017:

“the diversity gospel has been woven into nearly everything the company does.”

https://twitter.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1760885099984261564

“Pro-censorship voices have the management’s ear. The anti-censorship people are afraid of retaliation.”

“Our leadership (Sundar in particular) is weak, so he capitulates to the meanest bullies on the block.”

Congressionally-Chartered Nonprofit’s "Disinformation Dashboard" Used to Track Hunter Biden Laptop Story

Once again, an organization that claims to be a non-partisan opponent of "disinformation" participated in 2020's biggest disinformation operation.
foundationforfreedomonline.com/congressionall… The suppression stories about Hunter Biden's shady foreign business deals had a tangible effect on the 2020 election.

Significant numbers of voters said they wouldn't have voted for Biden had they known the facts before the election.
newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-…

"Trusted Messengers"

A head of 2024, the censorship industry is adopting a more targeted approach, focused on key demographics.

Central to their plans is the cultivation of "trusted messengers" who can overcome so-called disinformation spreading in particular communities.
foundationforfreedomonline.com/grassroots-cen… "Trusted Messenger" is a marketing term, describing a person or institution with public trust. It's popular among NGOs and government agencies trying to win people over to their agenda.

During COVID, the government sought out "trusted messengers" to overcome vaccine skepticism.

'Civic Listening': Political Informants, Rebranded

Paranoid that someone is spying on your based groupchats? You should be..

Government-funded online censors are cultivating a network of informants to monitor "disinformation" on private messaging apps🧵
foundationforfreedomonline.com/civic-listenin… Every modern regime that has tried to police the opinions of its citizens has ended up fostering networks of informants, aka snitches.

At its height, the GDR's Stasi had 1 informer for every 50 citizens.

But that's just a German thing, right? It couldn't happen here...

Britain is often incorrectly accused of being woker than the U.S., but the NHS has now banned puberty blockers for kids faster than a few red states.

Critical race theory is another invention of the American left that has totally failed to take off in Britain.

There are some… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Britain’s education Deep State was actually quite opposed to the spread of American-style wokeness at one prestigious school: amp.theguardian.com/education/2022…

"Net Zero" is coming to the video games industry. But what is Net Zero and why should you care?

The subheading of this CNET article carries the core concept.

"What will games have to give up?"

Spreading into every industry, Net Zero makes the same demand.

Sacrifice.
🧵👇 "Net Zero" is everywhere, but it always makes the same demand: lower your standards!

Lower-quality protein: bugs instead of steak.

Lower-quality stoves: electric instead of gas.

And now, lower-quality video games.
breitbart.com/tech/2023/05/3…

Your guide to virtue-signaling at #EURO2020

Of the remaining teams, the worst are England and Belgium. Switzerland are also bad.

Wales, like the rest of the British teams, were also big on kneeling. They were knocked out today👌
thesun.co.uk/sport/15221988… Denmark, which knocked out Wales (4-0 lmao) seem ambivalent on kneeling. They don't care much either way.

Other remaining teams in this category: Italy (some players kneeled, some haven't) France (initially planned to kneel, but noticed the fan feedback), Germany. #EURO2020

"Global elites" is a misunderstood term. They aren't primarily the politicians. They're the NGOs, corporations, media conglomerates, academic institutions, pressure groups and bureaucrats that shape the views and policies of politicians. They aren't always successful.

https://twitter.com/Meijiro26/status/1348724062500118528

Politicians range from those who are 100% agents of that ecosystem (Buttigieg, Clinton, Blair) and those who are 100% independent of them (Orban, Salvini, Bolso).

But there are also plenty of politicians who are in between those two extremes. Boris Johnson is one example.

The irony: Europe, without a First Amendment, may end up with more internet freedom than the US.

In Europe, governments decide definition of hate speech, extremism, etc. They are bound by legislative processes.

In the US, Silicon Valley decides. And it is not bound by anything.

https://twitter.com/MacaesBruno/status/1348259760970338304

Called it.

Even foreign politicians who are the complete opposite of Trump in terms of style/policy aren’t happy to see Silicon Valley silencing a world leader.

https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1348599979091365888

It's not like they put this all down in writing or anything.

breitbart.com/tech/2018/10/0… Not like they were caught on video!
breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/1…

I've seen a lot of media-democrat outrage spirals so I know how they go... thread: Day 1: Media gaslights conservatives into engaging with their concerns in good faith. Dead Syrian refugees, George Floyd, etc. Anyone who offers a contrary opinion is immediately destroyed. The smart conservatives stay silent. Cowardly ones grovel.

Journalists really are to blame for this.

The YouTube ad boycott, the Facebook ad boycott - that was all them.

The transformation of tech companies into weapons of the ruling elite would not have happened without constant pressure from the media.

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1347965491546091528

There were always people inside the tech giants who wanted censorship. But numbers swelled because of agitation from the media, and media-inspired ad boycotts immeasurably strengthened their hand. More than Democrats, more than the tech companies themselves, the media did this.

If only there had been a conservative news organization that, five years ago, established a dedicated team of reporters to cover Silicon Valley's growing attacks on free speech.

(breitbart.com/tech/) If only there had been whistleblowers, and leaks, and smoking guns proving that the leaders of Silicon Valley were determined to stop the President and his supporters from effectively using the internet to communicate with voters.
breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/1…