How to exploit a crisis

The phrase ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but it’s something the left is better at than the right. Take the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a lobby group that campaigns for more online censorship run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle. Earlier this month, the CCDH held an ‘emergency’ meeting to discuss the role of social media in fuelling the public disorder that followed the murder of three girls in Southport, and on Tuesday it published the policy recommendations that emerged from that meeting.

The most eye-catching of these is that the Online Safety Act should be amended so Ofcom can apply for ‘emergency powers’ during a crisis that would allow it to demand social media companies remove content that poses a threat to national security or the health or safety of the public. It wouldn’t be Ofcom that decides what type of content falls into this category. Rather, under the CCDH’s proposal, it would be up to Peter Kyle MP, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, to direct Ofcom when applying its new supercharged censorship powers.

You might think: ‘So what? Hate speech should be removed from social media.’ But the difficulty is that ‘hate speech’, along with related terms like ‘fascism’ and ‘extremism’, is often used by people on the left, including those in power, to justify censoring the views of their opponents. For instance, the Soviet delegation to the UN’s Commission on Human Rights in 1946 argued that the free speech clause in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should not protect ‘fascism’, which it defined as including any defence of western capitalism or democracy.