Twitter

The good and bad news about the Online Safety Bill

If you care about free speech, the just-published report of the Joint Committee on the Online Safety Bill – a cross-party parliamentary committee composed of six MPs and six peers – is a mixed bag. This is the Bill which began life as a White Paper under Theresa May. Its aim? To make the UK the safest place in the world to go online. It will achieve this by subjecting social media platforms and internet search engines to state regulation, empowering Ofcom to impose swingeing fines on companies that fail to observe a new ‘duty of care’. Let’s start with the good news. The Joint Committee recommends that the current

Is Twitter about to step up its censorship?

Farewell then @jack. Jack Dorsey’s departure from Twitter on Monday came as no surprise given that the firm Elliott Management, one of Twitter’s activist investors, almost ousted him last year. Only the coronavirus may have prolonged the inevitable. Twitter’s stock keeps dropping. It may not reach the revenue and daily user projections for 2023 that it set last February. It also has the smallest ‘Big Tech’ user base, behind Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. The prevailing theory is that Dorsey’s departure involves Elliott Management, which controls two board seats and over $1 billion in stock shares, and which flexed enough muscle to boot Dorsey out. Elliott executives seemed dubious of Dorsey’s

WhatsApp collapse throws Tory plots into chaos

The world’s oldest democratic party has had a few problems with technology in recent years. Famously it was the 2018 Tory conference which saw a security breach where the official party app allowed anyone to access the private phone numbers of members of the Cabinet – or in the case of Boris Johnson change his profile picture to that of a pig. Once again, tech issues are plaguing Tory conference, with three of the world’s most popular apps – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – all being offline since 4:30 p.m. today. The last of these is the favoured platform for disloyal backbenchers and scheming hacks to conspire mischievously to make life harder for long-suffering Tory

Let’s not politicise Emma Raducanu’s triumph

It didn’t take long for the open-borders brigade to try and politicise the magnificent feat of British teenager Emma Raducanu in winning the US Open women’s singles. Rather than just revelling in the general outbreak of joy in the country, or praising the astonishing maturity of Emma’s performance, the usual blue-tick suspects piled onto Twitter within minutes of her victory to argue, or imply, that the fact Emma was born in another country (she moved here from Canada aged two) proved that immigration in all its guises is always a good thing. Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera stated the case plainly: ‘Half Romanian, half Chinese. Born in Canada, brought up in

Freddy Gray

Emma Raducanu’s victory is being spoiled by the usual suspects

How do you take the pleasure out of something so marvellous and joyful as Emma Raducanu’s US open victory last night? Easy — turn on Twitter, which spoils everything including sport. Raducanu’s victory is truly a great triumph; the most breathtaking sporting feat by a female British athlete in our lifetimes. Emma is 18 and beautiful, just did her A-levels and got A* marks, had been 400/1 to win the tournament, never dropped a set — all these facts make her achievement even more delightful. I’ll stop the adulation there, because an entire industry of sports commentators already exists to make these points over and over. We don’t all need

The rise of Taliban Twitter

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was swift, but this victory wasn’t won overnight. For years, the Taliban has been waging a softer fight: one on social media. Since it was removed from power, the Taliban has dedicated enormous resources to developing its presence online.  As it successfully recaptured Afghanistan, the propaganda opportunities which it put to use on Twitter as the eyes of the world watched suggested these efforts have paid off. Images and videos of Taliban forces easily gaining ground and advancing into Afghanistan’s cities – picking up military hardware left by the Americans along the way – spread like wildfire online. Islamists around the world were delighted.  In the years since it

Mesmerising and monstrous: @zola reviewed

The distinction between on and offline life blurred long ago. The greatest spats, sexual self-fashionings and mad soliloquies now unfurl on social media. The splenetic rhythms and fundamental shallowness of this medium make it a questionable source for art, but Janicza Bravo’s @zola — the first film ever released based entirely on a series of viral tweets — makes a tight, original fist of such material. @zola is A’Ziah ‘Zola’ Wells King, who in 2015 as a 19-year-old exotic dancer and stripper living in Detroit unleashed a 148-tweet thread, billed as #thestory, which detailed a chain of nasty but fascinating events during a surreal trip to Tampa. Full of sex,

Beware Boris’s sinister crackdown on free speech

A Conservative government that boasts it is a defender of free speech against the attacks of ‘the woke’ is about to impose the severest censorship this country has seen in peacetime since parliament abolished press controls in the 1690s. In an extraordinary power grab – which is all the more extraordinary for the absence of opposition – ministers want to silence views that carry no criminal penalty. This is more than a much-needed crackdown on racial attacks on black footballers or incitements to violent crime or any other crime; it is an unmerited attack on free speech. The government’s draft Online Safety bill imposes a ‘duty of care’ on internet companies to remove content that

Television, not social media, is fracturing our society

All it took for the Twitter mob to descend on me was a retweet from Michael Gove. Message after message called for a resignation. Often it wasn’t entirely clear who the target was: me, the leader of a medium-sized youth charity, or him, the second best known member of the Cabinet. What on earth was in this few short sentences that had unlocked the world’s bile and aggression? Gove had committed the cardinal sin of recommending a book I have written. Ironically enough, it is a book on why our societies have become so divided and how we fix them. It is blindingly obvious to most of us why our societies have become

The strange boycott of GB News

GB News, the UK’s first new news channel in decades, launched on Sunday night with a monologue from the estimable Andrew Neil, setting out the channel’s philosophy.  ‘We will puncture the pomposity of our elites and politics, business, media and academia and expose their growing promotion of cancel culture for the threat to free speech and democracy that it is’, he said. Just 48 hours later and GB News’s detractors have already proven him right.  Anyone who has bothered to watch GB News’s output in its first couple of days would not have detected anything resembling ‘hate’ Stop Funding Hate, a pearl-clutching campaign group that seeks to deprive news outlets

The first-century saint who went viral

Earlier this year, Saint Veronica went viral. A tweet observing that every painting of the saint made her look like a merchandise seller at the Crucifixion was liked more than 35,000 times and retweeted more than 6,700 times. Not bad for a first-century saint. I disagree slightly. Veronica doesn’t strike me so much as a proto T-shirt tout, more as an early Christian super-fan. ‘I touched the hem of his garment.’ ‘Yeah? Well, I literally mopped the sweat from his brow.’ The Sudarium of Saint Veronica is one of art history’s more peculiar subjects. While some saints and their attributes are easy to confuse (Tau? Sword? Saw? Tongs?), if there’s

The creeping criminalisation of causing offence

At a time when resources are scarce, the Merseyside Constabulary must have thought long and hard about its recent advertising campaign: a stern message to the people of the Wirral. ‘Being offensive,’ it declared, ‘is an offence.’ The slogan was put on a van along with text urging the public to inform on transgressors. Four officers posed beside it for a photograph, as if standing ready to enforce its orders. The police only recognised their error after a public outcry. ‘We would like to clarify,’ said Superintendent Martin Earl, ‘that “being offensive” is not in itself an offence.’ On its own, the incident is merely an embarrassment, but it represents

Is a vile tweet about Captain Tom really a matter for the police?

Should it be illegal to be a moron? That’s the question we really need to be asking ourselves in the wake of the arrest of a man in Scotland over a vile tweet about the death of Captain Tom Moore, the Second World War veteran who became a national treasure in 2020 for his NHS fundraising. Police Scotland has confirmed that a 35-year-old man has been charged ‘in connection with communication offences’. What it is he actually said wasn’t made clear. But a subsequent report, and much online chatter, points to this delightful post: ‘The only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella, buuuuurn.’ That the post was

The toxic side-effect of the Trump Twitter ban

Almost two weeks on from the storming of the US Capitol it’s becoming plainer that the most substantive changes to our political and public spheres are brewing not in Congress but on the internet. First, let’s be clear: Twitter had to act against Trump. By deleting his account, it shut down a large part of his ability to provoke civil unrest. Trump has not been unfairly ‘censored’ and free speech does not give someone the right to stoke violence and insurrection: either in principle or in law. The wider ethical and even philosophical ramifications of gagging the leader of the free world are a different story. Angela Merkel called the ban

Brendan O’Neill

Shame on the ‘four lads’ meme snobs

We need to talk about the ‘four lads’ meme. Specifically we need to talk about the undercurrent of prejudice, and on occasion outright class hatred, that propelled these four unsuspecting young men from Birmingham and Coventry into the internet spotlight. Anyone who has been online in the past year will know about the four lads. It’s a photograph of four young men looking hyper-preened for a night on the town. Their trousers are painfully tight, their tattooed arms are bulging out of their short-sleeved shirts. This is the fashion among the male youths of aspirant working-class communities. They take pride in their appearance. They look good, and they know they

The tech supremacy: Silicon Valley can no longer conceal its power

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’. The examples he gave in his 1946 essay included the paradox that ‘for years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective’. Last week provided a near-perfect analogy. For years before the 2020 election, nearly

Trump’s social media ban creates a host of problems for Big Tech

Facebook and Twitter’s decision to suspend Donald Trump is, legally speaking, fairly clear-cut. Both are private companies which set the rules on who is – and isn’t – allowed to use their sites. Even if you’re the leader of the free world you have no automatic right to a Twitter account. The same logic applies to Parler – the self-described ‘unbiased’ social media platform – which has been booted off Google’s app store over its refusal to remove ‘egregious content’. As with Facebook and Twitter, Google Play is perfectly within its rights to select what apps it will and will not host. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be serious consequences that arise from these decisions. Frustrations from

Dominic Green

Joe Biden’s Big Tech takeover

Twitter’s banning of Donald Trump is like bolting the stable door after the QAnon shaman has gone. The damage was done long before the assault on the Capitol was planned on social media. Long before Donald Trump tweeted his way to the White House, social media had reduced American democracy to a lurid freak show. The ban also shows how far the big-tech oligarchs are prepared to go in order to retain their absurd and damaging monopolies. After the 2016 elections, social media promised to clean up their act. The digital fiascos of the 2020 election and its aftermath confirm that Big Tech is incapable of being the value-free guarantor

Churches are more Covid-secure than trains or takeaways

Monday night’s murderous gunman in Vienna is officially described as ‘Islamist’. Brahim Aioussaoi, the man accused of murdering worshippers in a Nice cathedral last week, arrived (reported the BBC) with ‘three knives, two phones and one Quran’. These would seem to be the basic toolkit required. A friend who lives in southern France tells me that although the latest lockdown measures prevent church services being held, so serious is the terrorist threat to churches that many are guarded by police. So it seems natural that President Macron of France warns of the danger to French Catholics and speaks of ‘Islamist terrorist folly’. Each of his three chosen words rings true,

No, Trump can’t delay the election

While cries of ‘authoritarian dictator’ have been lobbied at the President by America’s progressives over the past three and a half years (he usually has an accusation or two to throw back), US institutions have largely ticked on as normal. But as we come to the end of Donald Trump’s first (and possibly only) term as President, are we about to witness a real power grab – one that would throw the country’s democracy into disarray? Today on Twitter, Trump began to hint at the one thing his critics fear most deeply: a refusal to leave office. Any delay to November’s election would have to involve some cross-party agreement to get it