From Snowden to Silence: The Guardian’s Shift Toward Censorship Advocacy

This week's Guardian editorial - essentially endorsing and even asking for more online censorship ("regulation") in the name of "higher goals" - clearly demonstrates the degree of political radicalization undergone over the last decade or so by the legacy media.

It's the same UK newspaper that was among those who helped Edward Snowden get information out and allow people around the world to learn about the enormous government surveillance and spying apparatus; but at the end of 2024, the Guardian was severely critical of X owner Elon Musk - whom the Guardian of 2013 would have easily praised, for the Twitter Files alone.

But it doesn't stop there: the editorial also takes a positive stance on the UK's sweeping and much-criticized censorship law, the Online Safety Act, describing it as "a good start" and betraying that the paper's only noteworthy misgiving about this legislation as distinctly political: the previous, Conservative government is blamed for not "refining" many of its provisions - nevermind that the current, Labour cabinet is the one that has started implementing the law earnestly, as it is.

The Guardian's editors' message is crafted to reveal their bias from the get-go: the piece promises to explore some of the urgent issues that 2025 brings, and lists them as "the crisis in western democracy, Donald Trump's victory, and the role played by digital media."

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