The UKโs government continues to use last yearโs Southport killings which led to widespread protests to promote online censorship, as a supposed panacea for the societyโs ills.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology Peter Kyle recently wrote to X, Meta, TikTok, Google (and YouTube) to ask that they remove โviolent materialโ that the killer of three children, Axel Rudakubana, was able to access before committing the crime.
Investigators in this case said that among that material was an academic study of a training manual used by al-Qaeda members, and a video of the attack in Australia on Bishop Mari Emmanuel.
Cooper and Kyle told tech companies that โpossessionโ of the material is illegal according to the UKโs anti-terrorism legislation, but that it was โeasily accessibleโ to Rudakubana and continues to be to others.
The two officials also told these companies that their responsibility to remove this content is โmoral.โ
The same argument could be heard from UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves who told the BBC that even though the censorship law โ Online Safety Act โ that would force the removal will be in effect as of March โ โThereโs nothing stopping the companies taking down that material now. Theyโve got a moral responsibility to do so.โ
None of these officials, however, addressed the issue of the perils of removing videos showing violent content that is newsworthy or could be used as evidence of, for example, police overstepping their authority, failing to properly respond during violent events, but also to exonerate them from false accusations (as in the recent case of the Manchester airport incident.)
Beeban Kidron, known as a supporter of censorship and online age verification and a member of the House of Lords, also spoke for the BBC to complain that the previous, Tory government had blocked Online Safety Actโs โduty of careโ censorship provision, and chastised the current, Labour cabinet of โnot coming through on the promises they made in opposition.โ
Kidron, however, failed to mention that the previous government was, regardless of the instance she referred to, very much in favor of stepping up online censorship.
Another House of Lords member, Claire Fox, reacted to the trend to pressure platforms to delete โextreme contentโ or โrisk a second Southportโ in a few choice words posted on X:
โThere isnโt one bloody problem โ political, cultural, economic, social โ that this Labour government doesnโt think the answer is to shut down debate. Their dull, technocratic mantra โ on repeat โ is always โyou canโt say thatโ. They really are censorious, ghoulish scoundrels. Contemptible.โ