From Joseph Mercola, DO
If you think freedom of speech has gone down the tubes, you haven’t seen the half of it yet. September 19, 2023, the U.K. passed a new law to “regulate” (read, censor) online content. The so-called Online Safety Bill has been described as “one of the most far-reaching attempts by Western democracy to regulate online speech.
Interestingly, the bill has been in the works for the last five years, again proving that online censorship is not something that sprang up in response to COVID. Governments have been steadily moving in this direction for a long time.
As reported by The New York Times, the bill forces online platforms to “proactively screen for objectionable material and to judge whether it is illegal, rather than requiring them to act only after being alerted to illicit content.”
Of course, we now know that flagging material for removal is how the U.S. government has illegally circumvented constitutional free speech rights for the past few years.
September 8, 2023, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld part of the lower court’s injunction, banning the White House, surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI from influencing social media companies to remove “disinformation.”
Unfortunately, the appellate court also reversed, vacated and modified other parts of the original injunction, leaving the door wide open for certain federal agencies to continue their censorship activities.
Importantly, officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) were excluded, even though CISA has played a major, if not central, role in the government’s censorship of Americans.
