The Online Safety Act’s age-gating is live — delivering mass censorship, huge privacy risks, and a surge in VPNs.

Critics? Branded pedos by the Secretary of State.

None of this is a surprise. And it’s just the beginning.

Here’s what's happening and to expect next… 🧵 Among the Brexit wars in April 2019, the government quietly released the Online Harms White Paper.

It received relatively little attention, but it is the genesis of the 'duty of care' model at the heart of the Online Safety Act, which has become Ofcom's mass censorship machine.

I told @BBCNews at the time about the threats to free speech imposed by the legislation.

But it was 'overwhelmingly' supported by children's charities and supposed internet safety experts. They were listened to among the post-2016 Brexit and Trump internet panic. Anyone who raised issues was accused of not caring about children.

bbc.co.uk/news/technolog…

The OECD finds that over half of the UK's inflation is demand-driven ⁠(52%), that is, loose monetary policy NOT the war in Ukraine.

This is much higher than the likes of France (42%), the US (28%), or Korea (15%) or Denmark (27%).

The Bank of England has a lot to answer for. There's a lot of uncertainty in these findings, we should not be obsessive about the precise numbers of these findings. Nevertheless, it is notable that they believe more of the UK's inflation is driven on the demand side than on the supply side.

🚨 The Government will today introduce the long-anticipated Online Safety Bill into Parliament.

It’s a messy and incoherent piece of legislation that will undermine free speech, privacy and innovation.

I’ll post thoughts here

⬇️ ➡️ The Bill creates a ‘duty of care’ on tens of thousands of platforms to tackle illegal content, content that is harmful to children and ‘legal but harmful’ content for adults. If they fail to comply will face up to 10% global revenue fine.

This tweet may be legal but it is harmful misinformation.

The Online Safety Bill will require platforms to remove legal but harmful speech. It’s a gigantic threat to a free society.

https://twitter.com/NadineDorries/status/1503662845837381632

‘Companies will only be required to remove “legal but harmful” content if it is already banned in their own terms and conditions.’

The T&Cs, as you say, are resulting in censorship. They are broad and ill-defined. The Bill will require, under threat of fine, more removals.

The Government has taken this timely opportunity (?!) for more announcements on the online safety bill.

They are about (1) anonymity and (2) ‘legal but harmful’.

Buckle up for another wild ride…🧵 1/n (1) Anonymity: Govt will require larger social media sites to provide the option to block non-verified users — that means forcing Big Tech to create a new online identity system. 2/n

Jenny Harries has been put in charge of the organisation meant to prevent future pandemics and replace Public Health England.

Let’s take a quick look at her record during Covid-19

⬇️⬇️⬇️ 5 March 2020: Harries tells Parliament that there will soon come a point when testing is no longer necessary, foreshadowing the plan to give up on preventing Covid from spreading (and allowing the population to get herd immunity through natural infection)

committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/1…

Matt Hancock is disgracefully rewriting history.

The guidance in March and early April instructed doctors to discharge patients, untested, to care homes to free up beds.

There wasn't a plan to expand testing after Jenny Harris announced it was no longer necessary in mid-March. There were tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths in care homes because the state put pressure onto homes to take Covid-positive patients. It's a total scandal.

Ministers should take responsibility for their failings not obfuscate and lie.

Cummings’ remarks about Hancock and Boris will grab the most attention. But they were the least important.

The real issue is the total institutional failure.

The system was ill-prepared, overconfident, and inflexible. Bad export advice combined with operational failure. As Cummings said, Boris and Hancock made plenty of bad decisions — but no matter who was in charge at the start of last year the results would have been similar. That’s a very frightening thought: you can’t just change the leader, the entire system is broken.

Cummings is back and talking testing.

Testing wasn’t prioritised: why would you bother testing if you’re going for herd immunity by September?

“Even in mate March, PHE said on the record that there’s no way this country will do test, track and trace like in east Asia.” Jeremy Hunt asks why a South Korea-style testing and tracing programme wasn’t modelled until May.

Cummings says government was melting sown in late March. PHE was doing few tests and had no plan to expand. Core of Government collapsed when PM got ill which delayed.

Dominic Cummings reveals how the public health bureaucracy, including PHE, WHO and CDC, downplayed the threat presented by Covid-19.

Health Minister Matt Hancock assured pandemic planning was complete and ready. This resulted in a lack of urgent action. It's stunning how the authorities meant to warn us about and respond to pandemics were both overconfident on preparation and unwilling to raise proper alarm when the pandemic arrived.

The Online Safety Bill draft is coming out today.

It's shaping up to be a totally incoherent train wreck — promising everything to everyone while not doing anything to address serious online crime.

⬇️ The bill would create a so-called "duty of care" on digital companies. This creates extreme pressure to remove content.

Most frighteningly, for larger social media sites this will extend to "lawful but still harmful" speech.

Yes, they are mandating the removal of legal speech.

The Government’s “online safety” legislation is an incoherent train wreck.

They’re creating a “duty” on companies that will include removing legal speech — while also threatening punishment for removing legal content. telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/0… Make no mistake: this is a state takeover of what you’re allowed to say online.

If the state, whoever happens to be in charge, likes the speech then they will protect it. If they don’t, it’ll be possible to instruct companies to remove the speech.

It’s an absurd situation.

The biggest untold story of 2020 is that Moderna took just 48 hours in Jan to develop a 95% effective vaccine.

It then took 11 months for vaccinations to begin — largely because of huge regulatory burdens. Millions have died as a result.

We cannot ever wait this long again. Moderna can develop and manufacture a vaccine within weeks of sequencing a new virus.

Now the method has been proven safe and effective, regulatory barriers must be removed and manufacturing prepared so there are never any delays in future.

We can prevent pandemics.

The EU and Germany’s hubris has left them with vaccines that will arrive late and there might not be enough.

Meanwhile, the U.K., US and Israel are getting on with vaccinations.

Germany’s media has noticed:
spiegel.de/international/… “For months, it has been clear that other countries would have more doses of the vaccine, would start vaccinating sooner and, as a result, would be able to take more effective action against the pandemic.”

We should be concerned about rising case numbers — but now is absolutely not the time to panic.

There’s plenty of reasons a second wave is unlikely to be as nasty as the first: (1) Testing

By March 31, the U.K. had done just 143,000 tests in total since Jan.

Today alone, the U.K. will do more tests than that (175,000+). This means we can isolate cases and target policies to local areas.

More testing would still be ideal: capx.co/track-and-trac…

Tony Abbott is not a misogynist or homophobe.

The Government should not capitulate to the woke mob.

My column for the @Telegraph:

telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/… Tony Abbott is not a supporter of abortion or same-sex marriage. But he is not an unabashed sexist or homophobe.

Abbott has written nobody should be “discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, religion, political opinion or sexuality.”

This photo from Brighton on Saturday night in the @Telegraph is a piece of art: There’s the mixed emotions to this centrepiece fight — the shock, the turning away and the random guy laughing.

George Monbiot has, to nobody’s shock, decided to blame state outsourcing is to blame for the UK’s troublesome coronavirus response.

He gets it completely wrong: the bureaucracy failed to engage the private sector.

https://twitter.com/sam_j_street/status/1265606213846392834

(1) Monbiot doesn’t mention the testing catastrophe. Public Health England’s “command and control” strategy meant they didn’t engage private sector, meaning a lack of testing over key weeks in February and March to prevent outbreak.

Cygnus was a simulated influenza pandemic exercise led by Public Health England between 18 and 20 October, 2016.

The Government have refused to release the documents.

The Guardian has received and now published the exercise report.

⬇️ Thread ⬇️

scribd.com/document/46016… 1. Preparedness: It is remarkable that this simulated pandemic was undertaken and the report written.

The UK was consistently ranked among the top countries in the world for pandemic preparedness.

Pandemics have got lots of resources, effort and attention.

😷Masks save lives 😷

The advice is wrong. We've been told a "noble lie".

The studies are clear: any mask, even those made of cloth, can help reduce the spread of COVD-19.

Let me explain...

spiked-online.com/2020/04/06/the… PHE have said there is "very little evidence of widespread benefit from [mask] use outside of these clinical settings".

publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2020/01/23/wuh…

“She tried to ar­gue that the dis­ease could be con­ta­gious. They said her ac­tion caused panic and ‘dam­aged the sta­bil­ity’ of Wuhan.”

China didn’t handle this outbreak well.

Authorities covered it up and thousands have died as a result.

wsj.com/articles/how-i… On Dec 10, Wei Guix­ian, a seafood mer­chant at Hua’­nan mar­ket, started to feel sick. Eight days later they were in hospital.

The symptoms, fever, cough­ing, fatigue and aching limbs, were appearing among market workers and people unconnected with the market.