Mike Robinson and Patrick Henningsen with Friday’s UK Column News.
Topics in this video:
00:19 – Online Safety Bill
23:44 – Freedom Rallies: – https://bit.ly/34VykrG
24:15 – Ukraine Virtue Signalling
27:09 – Zelensky’s Invokes MLK As He Asks For Weapons
39:47 – The New Jihad In Ukraine
58:01 – Arnold Schwarzenegger Gets His Nazis Mixed Up
01:00:54 – Real Nazis
01:15:56 – NATO Defence Ministers Meeting
01:17:46 – BoE Raise Interest Rates
01:21:25 – Pelosi Blames Putin For Rising Gas Prices
01:22:50 – Zaghary-Ratcliffe Released
01:26:59 – Politician Parnked? Surely Not.
The UK’s notorious Online Harms Bill has now been unveiled, and it’s perhaps the most Orwellian enabling acts ever seen in history. If passed, it will be the end of free speech on social media platforms, as well as a historic power-grab by the state to quell and shutdown any dissent against the government policies, overseas operations and general corruption. (Patrick Henningsen on 21st Century Wire)
The redrafted Bill has been presented to Parliament. It still contains the controversial category of legal-but-harmful. The definition of this will now be done by Government in secondary legislation, and not deputised to social media companies. This leaves open the potential for defining views critical of the government as “harmful” as used by the US Department of Homeland Security (Feb 7, 2022) – that American citizens sharing ‘misinformation’ may now be considered domestic terrorism.
(1) the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions;
In this case misinformation is defined as:
“Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation make up what CISA defines as “information activities”. When this type of content is released by foreign actors, it can be referred to as foreign influence. Definitions for each are below.
– Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.
– Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.
– Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
(Online Safety Bill—Dylan Roberts)
See also: Online Safety Bill Poses Great Threat to Free Speech
The Online Safety Bill (OSB) has been presented to the public as an attempt to protect children from online grooming and abuse and to limit the reach of terrorist propaganda.
This, however, does not seem to be its primary focus. The real objective of the proposed Online Safety Act (OSA) appears to be narrative control.
In order to understand where the legislation is heading, first we have to interpret it. Even seasoned legal experts have struggled to get to grips with it. For a reasonably voluminous piece of legislation (the Bill alone runs to 134 pages), it is almost completely devoid of any relevant definitions.
The proposed Act, as it currently stands in Bill form, is an abstract jumble of ill-defined and seemingly meaningless terms, requiring practically limitless legal interpretation before anyone can even begin to consider what it means. A thorough breakdown of this mess has been attempted by CyberLeagle:
The draft Online Safety Bill is nothing if not abstract […] [it] resolutely eschews specifics […] The detailing of the draft Bill’s preliminary design is to be executed in due course by secondary legislation, with Ofcom [broadcasting regulator] guidance and Codes of Practice to follow.
In other words, the OSB is full of references to legal concepts and terms which no-one can decipher—including the Members of Parliament who will vote on it. Once it becomes law, it will then be adapted through secondary legislation and Ofcom regulation, as yet unwritten.
Unless stopped, MPs will be creating a law that has no defined parameters. This will allow the Government to insert whatever objectives they wish after it is enacted, as they have done with the Coronavirus Act.
The use of secondary legislation to give effective meaning to the OSA will greatly reduce parliamentary scrutiny.
MPs can reject secondary legislation but they can’t amend it. Therefore, the scope of the OSB can be continually amended and subsequently resubmitted until the Government gets whatever it wants.
This is a complete betrayal of the democracy most people imagine they live in. It is difficult to envisage how the opacity of the OSB is anything other than deliberate. It suggests a plan to hide legislation from scrutiny before it is made law.
Read the full article on UK Column: https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/the-online-safety-act-an-act-of-betrayal