THE wife of a Conservative councillor in England this week pleaded guilty to stirring up racial hatred during the week of the horrific far-right riots that struck in July.
It was the latest in a spate of court appearances from those involved in inciting and committing violence against British Muslims and refugees. Lucy Connolly perhaps does not perhaps look like someone you would expect to take to X to say: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bas***** for all I care ... If that makes me racist, so be it.”
As well as having a severely damaged her reputation Connolly is facing a significant prison sentence. Her posts on X were not censored and reached thousands of people before the police eventually came knocking. As vile as those posts are, I’m glad they weren’t taken down.
Censorship is of course a touchy subject. Partly because our ideas of democracy are predicated on free speech as a founding value.
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The truth, however, is that there has never really been a time when one could truly say whatever one wanted – in every age there have been consequences.
Democracies rest on the pillar of free speech but now more than ever they are threatened by it in a way that the philosophers of old probably didn’t anticipate. Plato and Plutarch likely weren’t thinking about mudslinging on X, they’d never heard of doxxing and the closest thing to being cancelled then was probably a group stab-a-thon.
It’s fair then to say we need a modern way to deal with a uniquely modern issue, that anyone can whip out a phone and say whatever they like to millions of people.
Now that violence is moving from our phones to the streets is it time to censor the far-right? Clearly some social media bosses think it is, with Facebook and TikTok investing heavily in suppressing violent content. With the events of recent weeks in mind however, I think it’s clear that this isn’t working.
Social media censorship fails for many reasons. Firstly, the far-right like to be censored, they get off on it. In fact, moderating their content just gives these groups the ultimate villain origin story.
Much of the rhetoric leading up to the riots was based around an idea of the downtrodden working man, slandered with the label of racist just for wanting to protect children (putting aside a desire to throw bricks at mosques). Tommy Robinson – Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – is held up by the English far-right movement as a victim who at one point was banned by almost all major social media platforms, yet his ideas continued to spread.
Ironically, Robinson’s views are inherently authoritarian. While proponents of “the great replacement theory” often argue about liberal freedoms being stolen, the world they desire is one where power is weaponised against minorities.
The same people who wish to speak with impunity are instrumental in attempting to censor others they don’t agree with – mostly drag queens and the authors of diverse story books as far as I can tell.
The fear of censorship among this group has led to a moral panic. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy as censoring them leads to the dialling up of their rhetoric, validating a sense
of injustice and providing evidence for the persecution of white right-wing thinkers.
Censoring such views also damages those of us trying to protect our communities from far-right violence. We can’t monitor what we can’t see. Lucy Conolly’s arrest is proof that we must allow these views to be aired to identify racists among us that are too often overlooked because they don’t fit our image of extremists.
Driving them underground to platforms such Telegram or Trump’s Truth Social will do little to further this aim and could make them more dangerous as they get pushed further from the mainstream. I must add a caveat here. I am not advocating for a world with no content moderation.
I think there must be moderation of mis and disinformation and I support social media content warnings and fact checks. Given there are suspicions that a significant portion of the far-right’s rise across Europe can be linked to disinformation campaigns run by the Russian state, this is essential.
Where I do want to see stronger action is the commodification of far-right content. While we have the right to say whatever we want, we cannot and must not allow people to profiteer from lying and inciting violence. YouTube is one of the few platforms acting on this routinely, banning creators who violate the platform’s rules from receiving advertising revenue.
The far right’s rise on social media has partly occurred because it’s lucrative to say shocking things. Algorithms boost engaging content regardless of its political correctness and sky-high views on controversial topics provide the perfect advertising platform.
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To reduce the amount of this content, we must hurt the pockets of fascists. There is good evidence this works. One of the most famous right-wing grifters on the internet, Alex Jones, was forced to declare bankruptcy after being demonetised across multiple platforms for spewing vile conspiracy theories about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shootings.
His show Infowars faces being sold by bankruptcy administrators to pay Jones’s legal fees for slandering the families of the victims of the shooting.
We have passed the point where we can quell the rising tide. The far-right are among us once again and politically they are as relevant as they were in the 1930s. Our task is to meet them in the public square, discredit them, demonetise their activity and show them a way out of conspiracy cults.
We must rapidly ramp up our efforts to create a media-literate population by teaching adults and children alike to spot misinformation. Rather than sticking our fingers in our ears and banning their accounts, it’s time to draw out the rot from our society and make them wish they’d never hit “post”.
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