We reported last week that Britain's most undemocratic and authoritarian Prime minister to date, Theresa May, was planning to set up a committee of MPs and government officials to monitor and advise on shutting down 'fake news' internet sites. They would use a definition of fake news that embraced satire, parody and comedy.
The UK Independence Party (UKIP), currently enjoying a resurgence in polls as support for both government and officials weakens, has urged UK citizens to defend free speech in the West after big tech firms are rumoured to have collaborated with governments to remove non - conformist websites, including InfoWars and Tommy Robinson, from social media.
On Monday, Apple, Facebook, Pinterest, Spotify, and Google-owned YouTube removed content from InfoWars and its owner Alex Jones, saying he and the website violated their policies against hate speech and harassment.
Supporters of the ban say Mr Jones is a conspiracy theorist (he is,) who deserves to be silenced (he doesn't), while critics have claimed the purge is an attempt to interfere in the U.S. midterm elections and described it as a form of “political censorship”. It is a move that is likely to backfire as Trump is gaining in popularity ahead of the US mid term elections in November and the 2016 experients shows his supporters are far less likely to reveal their voting intentions than the virtue signalling democrats.
On Tuesday anti - Islamification activist Tommy Robinson was expunged from Facebook's Instagram platform. He has already been banned from Twitter but still has an un-verified Facebook page with approaching a million followers, which he fears will be next.
In a statement, UKIP said: “These are private companies but the politically correct establishment is acting through corporations hand in glove to snuff out anything the globalist elite do not like.
“Free speech is under threat in the West, and we must stand firm in defence of it, otherwise, all dissenting voices will be muzzled.”
UKIP itself, which has won the last European Parliament election in Britain and remains the nation’s most significant party in that assembly, has also been the target of censorship by big tech firms, while those same firms are happy to promote propaganda they know to be blatantly untrue.
The party’s leader and Gerard Batten MEP and one of its representatives in the London Assembly were “shadow banned” on Twitter last month, making it hard for most users to see their messages and severely restricting their reach on the platform.
