Facebook’s not-so-secret police

I was greatly tempted by Sam Leith’s suggestion in a column on The Spectator’s website this week that we should all shut up about Israel and Palestine because we don’t know what we’re talking about. Certainly the crisis there has made London dinner parties almost unendurable – and it is true that as soon as anyone brings up Sykes-Picot, which they always do, I begin to choke on my baba ganoush and start demanding that the host open another bottle of Fairtrade Palestinian pinot noir. But then I thought that if in future I wrote about only those things of which I have a perfect understanding, pace Wittgenstein, I’d be well and truly buggered as a columnist.

Old Ludwig didn’t think about that, did he? A lack of expertise has never stopped me weighing in with a jiffy bag of bile on every subject under the sun and I don’t see why Jews and Arabs should be exempt. Further, while I daresay my understanding of Middle Eastern politics is woefully incomplete, I have always tended to be on the side of civilisation when it is opposed by medieval barbarity. In making this choice, I consider myself progressive as well as – Ludwig, take note – both logical and positive.

This article is not about Israel and Palestine, as it happens, but about the way in which the narrative regarding that conflict is being carefully marshalled by our institutions. The BBC, with its – on the face of it – hilarious decision not to call Hamas ‘terrorists’, you will be well aware of; much as you will of the entirely justified protest outside New Broadcasting House. But the hi-tech social media giants are another issue entirely. I know you know this, but we have to keep an eye on these bastards, remembering their gleeful distortion of the narrative during the last US presidential election: the deliberate suppression of stories that might be damaging to the Biden campaign and finally the removal of the then president from all social media outlets so that he no longer had a voice.