This article has been updated.
Recently, there was a post circulating on X that claimed Labour is about to give Ofcom the power to shut down social media in Britain. The bill is real but the attribution is not.
What Baroness Floella Benjamin, a Liberal Democrat life peer and former Play School presenter, introduced in the House of Lords on 7 September was a private member’s bill. Although it is not government policy and has only had a formal first reading, the Social Media Platforms (Ofcom Licensing) Bill should still be read with great care.
This is because it states, more plainly than most official documents dare to, the direction in which speech regulation has been travelling for a while.
For several years, I have written about the West’s descent into digital authoritarianism. In 3/11 Viral Takeover I forensically examined how “misinformation” became the pretext for pervasive coordinated censorship during Covid. I made the same argument about the Online Safety Act and its amendments, as well as Starmer’s under-16 social media ban, which I described as a Trojan horse for digital ID. I have also analysed the government’s own dystopian manual on “misinformation.”
It appears that while the veneer changes, the machinery of censorship beneath it does not.
