Everyone needs to rally round all of those fighting for free speech in Britain even if we have major issues with them. No free speech and no access to social media means it's GAME OVER and Starmer will fully usher in agenda 2030. We need support from wherever we can get it. - David Clews.
Susan Wojcicki, former YouTube CEO, died at 56. She battled non-small cell lung cancer for two years. Her death was announced by her husband, Dennis Troper, on August 10. Wojcicki stepped down as YouTube CEO in February 2023. She became infamous for implementing heavy-handed censorship during Covid, but was confident she was "on the right side of history." She took part in the YouTube censorship to take down the "Plandemic" documentary back in 2020 for violating YouTube's misinformation policies.
Firms could be required to suppress posts even if they are not illegal
Tech companies will be forced to ban fake news from their platforms under plans being considered by the Government in the wake of the riots.
Sir Keir Starmer suggested on Friday that the Government would review social media laws as part of efforts to prevent further disorder.
The Telegraph understands that ministers are looking at introducing a duty on social media companies to restrict âlegal but harmfulâ content.
It could mean that firms are required to remove or suppress posts spreading fake news about asylum seekers or other topics such as self-harm, even if they do not meet the threshold for illegality.
However, critics have said the proposals expose âthe sinister and authoritarian sideâ of Sir Keirâs Labour Party, driving âa coach and horsesâ through the principle of free speech.
The plans come after a row between Elon Musk who owns X, formerly known as Twitter, and the Prime Minister over his handling of the riots.
The potential crackdown on tech companies would likely form part of a review of the Online Safety Act, which was passed last year.
The Act requires platforms to take ârobust actionâ against illegal content and activity and will be implemented gradually.
A âlegal but harmfulâ clause, requiring firms to take down or restrict the visibility of content deemed to be dangerous but not against the law, was included in the original Bill brought forward by the Tories in 2022.
However, it was removed because of free-speech concerns, with critics warning it could allow a future Labour government to censor controversial material.
Kemi Badenoch, a candidate for the Tory leadership, previously described it as âlegislating for hurt feelingsâ.
The clause was replaced with a new âtriple-shieldâ of protections, including a duty on firms to give users the tools to filter out content that they do not want to see.
The final legislation was passed last year, following years of campaigning by The Telegraph for social media firms to be subject to a statutory âduty of careâ.
The former Tory government originally said the âlegal but harmfulâ provisions could apply to content posing a threat to public health, such as misinformation.
It comes as police said they would expect to keep making arrests for months in the wake of the riots, with more people jailed on Friday.
Meanwhile, a British businesswoman accused of being one of the first people to post the wrong name for the Southport attacker has said that it has âdestroyedâ her.
Bernadette Spofforth, 55, wrongly suggested on X that the suspect in the killing of three girls outside a Taylor Swift dance class was an asylum seeker who had recently arrived in the UK by boat.
The claim, which was promoted across social media by far-Right accounts and Russian bots, has been blamed for sparking the riots that spread across the country.
Mrs Spofforth, who lives in a million-pound farmhouse just outside of Chester, has denied that she was the first to post the message, saying that she simply made the mistake of repeating it.
People who encouraged the riots on social media have been jailed as part of the swift response by the justice system to the disorder.
A woman has also been arrested on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred and false communications. The latter is a crime under the Online Safety Act, which makes it illegal to convey information that a person knows to be false if they intend the message to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience.
It means people who knowingly spread harmful fake news online can be prosecuted or punished but it is more difficult to crack down on the platforms that host the content.
The prospect of the âlegal but harmfulâ clause being brought back will raise questions about who will decide what is classed as âharmfulâ and how it will be policed.
It has also sparked concerns that legitimate comments in newspapers could be censored by social media sites which consider it to be damaging.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, said: âYou are opening the door to endless vexatious complaints, so that all news media and all comment becomes stifled because one reader may disagree with it and say itâs harmful to them because thatâs how they feel.
âIt risks setting up the online companies as judge and jury and using their own opinions to decide what is published, which may in themselves disagree with yours. But does that make it harmful?â
Under the existing rules in the Online Safety Act, there are protections for journalists. Articles from news publishers are exempt from tech firmsâ duty to remove content.
Esther McVey, the former Tory Cabinet minister, said âperfectly legal commentsâ could be targeted by an âunelected thought policeâ.
âThis is the sinister and authoritarian side of Keir Starmerâs Labour Party. This would drive a coach and horses through the principle of free speech,â she said.
âFor the Government to allow the removal of perfectly legal comments by an unelected thought police would be completely unacceptable in what is supposed to be a free country.â
Sir Keir Starmer has clashed with Mr Musk after the tech boss claimed that Britain was heading for civil war during the riots.
The spat risks complicating the Governmentâs efforts to get social media companies, including X, to be more proactive in removing disinformation believed to be stoking the disorder.
Polling suggests that the majority of Britons think social media companies have done a bad job at tackling misinformation during the riots, with a new YouGov survey finding 71 per cent take that view.
Justice minister signs extradition order for Megaupload founder 12 years after FBI-ordered raid over filesharing site
Kim Dotcom, who is facing criminal charges relating to the defunct filesharing website Megaupload, is to be extradited to the US, the New Zealand justice minister says, which could end more than a decade of legal wrangling.
German-born Dotcom has New Zealand residency and has been fighting extradition to the US since 2012 after an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion. The high court in New Zealand first approved his extradition in 2017, with an appeal court reaffirming the finding the year after. In 2020, the countryâs supreme court again affirmed the finding but opened the door for a fresh round of judicial review.
Now, the justice minister, Paul Goldsmith, has signed an extradition order for Dotcom, a spokesperson said on Thursday.
âI considered all of the information carefully, and have decided that Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial,â Goldsmith said. âAs is common practice, I have allowed Mr Dotcom a short period of time to consider and take advice on my decision. I will not, therefore, be commenting further at this stage.â
Dotcom posted on X on Tuesday: âThe obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload,â in what appears to be a reference to the extradition order. He did not reply to further requests for comment.
As well as copyright infringement, Dotcom faces more serious charges, including money laundering and racketeering. He has long argued that he should not be held liable for copyright infringement carried out using his site, a filesharing service that allowed users to upload content and share the link with others to download.
âNew Zealand copyright law (92b) makes it clear that an ISP canât be criminally liable for actions of their users,â Dotcom said in 2017, after the high court first ruled against him. âUnless youâre Kim Dotcom?â The high court disagreed, arguing that under New Zealand law, the conduct could be categorised as a type of fraud, opening the way to Dotcomâs extradition.
US authorities say Dotcom and three other Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500m (about ÂŁ390m) by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material, which generated more than $175m in revenue for the website.
The site was formally based in Hong Kong until 2012, when the US seized the domain names and closed down the website. But it survived, relaunching in 2013 as Mega, with a New Zealand domain name. Dotcom has had no involvement in the company since at least 2015; it now bills itself as an âonline privacyâ service and is run by a New Zealander, Shane Te Pou (also known as Shane Phillips), who joined as its human resources director.
Megauploadâs chief marketing officer, Finn Batato, and chief technical officer and co-founder, Mathias Ortmann, both from Germany, along with a third executive, the Dutch national Bram van der Kolk, were arrested in Auckland with Dotcom in 2012.
Ortmann and Van der Kolk entered plea deals and were sentenced in 2023 to jail terms in New Zealand but allowed to avoid extradition. Batato died in 2022 in New Zealand.
Richard Thomas Medhurst is an independent journalist, political commentator, and analyst from the United Kingdom with a focus on international affairs, US politics, and the Middle East.
Richard Medhurst: "I was arrested at Heathrow Airport under the Terrorism Act, Sec 12 because of my reporting. 6 police officers were waiting for me at the entrance of the aircraft. I was held for almost 24 hours and questioned. I believe I'm the first journalist to be arrested under this provision of the Terrorism Act. I feel that this is a political persecution and hampers my ability to work as a journalist." End of quote.
Popular podcaster Andrew Napolitanoâs Judging Freedom show remains absent from YouTube . A quick search of corporate media this morning still finds no mention of the sudden disappearance of the popular podcast.
A report of a coming statement yesterday from Napolitano on X/Twitter has not, to my knowledge, appeared.
Judging Freedom features a group of highly qualified guests focused on foreign policy, especially the aggressive US/Nato war on Russia being staged in Ukraine, the US/Gaza genocide and the emergence of dominant control of deep state forces that are making citizen participation in âourâ (the) government moot.
The sudden, unexplained disappearance of Judging Freedom from YouTube several days ago comes at the same time as recent federal attacks on regular Judging Freedom commentator and former UN Iraq weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
In June, Ritter was detained by federal agents as he was about to board a flight to Russia for a conference presentation and reporting trip. Without explanation, his passport was confiscated and â two months later â has still has not been returned. Ritter is not even sure which agency snatched it or why. Napolitano was scheduled to fly out the same day to the same conference. Ritter called warning him not to go and Napolitano heeded the advice.
Then a week ago, a large number of FBI agents raided Ritterâs home with a search warrant for electronic devices and, even though they were not specified in the warrant, the feds also confiscated numerous boxes containing some 80,000 pages of unclassified UN documents from Ritterâs time as a UN weapons inspector. in Iraq. He has recently been working on a book based upon those records.
Are the three events related? No one is saying a word, but it is a legitimate question of ponder.
In the midst of all this, Napolitano had an excellent article yesterday (8/16) in NewsMax entitled Does the FBI Visit, or Invade, a Suspect's Home?
In it, Napolitano details how the wall protecting Americansâ privacy has been dramatically weakened as protections against intrusive, illegal â I would add immoral â government surveillance have eroded. As a result, he observes, our rights are under active attack.
Napolitano notes:
âGovernment spying is rampant in the U.S., and the feds regularly engage in it as part of law enforcement's well-known antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. Last week, the FBI admitted as much when it raided the home of former Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter.â
The Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights was once a protection against illegal search and seizure without legal probable cause. As we have seen with recent brutal attacks on our First Amendment rights to protest and speak out freely against the US/Israel genocide in Gaza, the Fourth Amendment, along with all our other Constitutional rights, are under direct, sustained attack.
If and how the Ritter story figures into the sudden disappearance of Judging Freedom from YouTube is unknown.
Fortunately, you can â at least for now â access the podcast on the free speech platform Rumble, here.
You can also read or listen to Napolitanoâs NewsMax column here .
Meta has permanently banned The Cradle on Instagram and Facebook for covering West Asia fearlessly, with nuance and accuracy. x.com
Telegram CEO billionaire Pavel Durov arrested at French airport 24th August 2024. Why was Telegram messaging app founder and CEO Pavel Durov arrested after landing at the Bourget airport, outside Paris, following a flight from Azerbaijan? Source: SL Noize.
Durov appears to be an old-school cyber-libertarian who believes in privacy and encryption. His arrest will certainly resonate in America, which has seen a similar debate over how much online services should cooperate with law enforcement. The FBI, for instance, has occasionally warned that end-to-end encryption will result in a "going dark" problem in which crime simply disappears from their view, and the US has seen repeated attempts to legislate backdoors into encryption systems. Those have all been defeated, however, and civil liberties advocates and techies generally note that creating backdoors makes such systems fundamentally insecure. The global debate over crime, encryption, civil liberties, and messaging apps is sure to heat up with Durov's arrest.
Pavel Durov knew of the arrest warrant by France that was limited to the location of France. So the question arises, why did Durov land his private plane in the French location / jurisdiction where his arrest could occur?
https://stateofthenation.co/?p=247814
âOne interesting angle is that the Telegram app, well-known for being highly secure as it provides end-to-end encryption, is widely used among the Russian military, as well as the common population.â
The ridiculous explanation that France has given for this false arrest was that the Durov is being investigated and held personally responsible for an assortment of crimes including âalleged fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime, and promotion of terrorismâ.
But what Franceâs OFMIN, the agency tasked with combating violence against minors, is really saying is that anyone who uses the Telegram messenger app who is suspected of said criminal activity, those crimes can be laid at the feet of the CEO.
However, the real goal here appears to be a total shutdown of the uncensored and truth-telling Telegram since it has been widely used to disseminate the most radioactive truth and raw facts about the multifarious ways in which the US, UK, Israel and NATO are using Ukraine to fight this very ugly proxy war against Russia.
In point of fact, there are more daily data dumps on Telegram, about the stark battlefield realities of Russo-Ukrainian War, than there are on the rest of the Alt Media. Hence, the Western powers have been extremely eager to shut down this source of hard evidence of huge Ukrainian losses everywhere but especially those incurred in Donbas.
Even more significantly, NATO (aka the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization) is desperate to terminate this platform which features so much hard proof of their direct involvement with so many acts of savage terrorism perpetrated against Russian civilians and population centers.
At the end of the day, this extremely dramatic arrest in Paris was purposefully conducted by the Western Intelligence Community as a classic CIA-run black operation and psyop.
Which means that an even greater goal of this absurd op is to frighten every single CEO and president and board member of every single social media company in the world that they, too, will risk being arrested should they not comply with the FBIâs commands. And, should they not enforce a regime of strict censorship whenever they are ordered to by the thought-control freaks of New World Order globalist cabal.
