Is Keir Starmer coming for Twitter? | Freddie Attenborough

FFormer President Donald Trump’s campaign team has filed a complaint The Federal Election Commission (FEC), the US election regulator, accuses the British Labor Party of “blatant election interference.”

“In the last few weeks [Labour] “We recruited and deployed party members to fight for Kamala in critical battleground states in an attempt to influence our election,” the Trump campaign said a press release entitled “The British are coming!”.

In its complaint, the Trump campaign points out that Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, his communications director Matthew Doyle and a number of Labor MPs, advisers and strategists attended the Democratic National Convention in August to meet with them to meet Ms Harris’s presidential campaign team, apparently to help them understand how Labor secured one of the biggest landslides in British electoral history.

Also cited is the fact that Starmer’s strategy director Deborah Mattinson traveled to Washington in September to brief the vice president and her running mate Tim Walz on the election strategy.

What the Trump campaign’s complaint doesn’t mention is that it’s not just about a shared interest in an “election strategy” that brings the two parties closer together.

Leaked internal documents seen by The Disinformation Chronicle Reports show that a lobbying group linked to McSweeney worked with the Biden/Harris administration as well as prominent Democrats such as Senator Amy Klobuchar to censor what it describes as “harmful content.”

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which campaigns for greater online censorship, was founded by McSweeney – who was appointed director of think tank Labor Together after the 2017 general election campaign – and is now led by Imran Ahmed. a former advisor to Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle. CCDH’s head of research, Callum Hood, previously worked for Labor MP Ian Austin, now Lord Austin of Dudley.

Accordingly The Disinformation Chronicle“It is important to understand that CCDH, Labor Together and Keir Starmer’s Labor Party exist as a single package, with McSweeney at the helm.”

Some insight into the nature of the organization can be gleaned from the fact that “Kill Musk’s Twitter” is the first item in their monthly agenda submission from earlier this year.

This does not appear to be an idle threat.

The group perfected its “financial strangulation” technique back in 2019 when it silenced Sir Keir’s Corbynite critics by asking companies to stop advertising on news sites such as the Left canary on the grounds that their pro-Palestinian views were anti-Semitic.

“Destroy those canaryor the canary destroy us,” McSweeny told Labor Together MPs at the time.

A subsequent investigation by media regulator Impress found nothing canary was published was anti-Semitic.

Ahmed opened a CCDH office in Washington in 2021 and also worked with American journalists to suppress dissent and enforce narratives His staff is friendly to Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration and is currently working on plans for “Canary 2.0” – that is, “killing” the online presence of Democratic rivals like Musk by attacking X’s advertising revenue.

The leaked documents show that the group has connections to the current US government.

“60 meetings on the hill” reads a CCDH task assignment from the beginning of 2024.

“Meeting with 16 congressional offices over the next two weeks to provide updates on the Elon lawsuit,” reads another, referring to Musk’s lawsuit that has since been dismissed against CCDH, accusing it of manipulating data to argue that “hate speech” on X has increased since Musk took over the social media platform.

Elsewhere, CCDH documentation states: “U.S. Political Engagement: Arrange meetings with Klobuchar’s team to obtain press release offer/confirmation. Our meeting with your team is on Tuesday.”

CCDH also held meetings with federal lawmakers to promote an initiative that would “STAR framework” which would create an “independent digital regulator” that would “Impose consequences for harmful content“.

STAR’s core concepts are similar to those of the United Kingdom Online Security Actwhat the national media regulator Ofcom Responsible for regulating social media through the threat of large fines.

Although not quite similar enough. CCDH says the Online Safety Act does not give the regulator enough powers to censor online content it considers to be “disinformation”.

In August the group held an “emergency meeting” to discuss the role of social media in fueling the unrest that followed the murder of three girls in Southport.

The meeting was attended by officials from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the Home Office, Ofcom and the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, as well as representatives from the Community Security Trust, Tell Mama, the Incorporated Society of British Advertising and current and former MPs.

Conveniently, this small meeting took place under Chatham House rules, which meant that there was no need to attribute views to individual participants when publishing the CCDH’s policy recommendations that emerged from the meeting.

The most striking of these is that the Online Safety Act should be amended to give Ofcom – one of the bodies involved in the CCDH dispute – additional “emergency response” powers to combat “misinformation” that poses a “threat” to the ” national security” and “the health or safety of the public.”

Unfortunately, the provision that these new powers will only be used in an “emergency” or “crisis” is neither politically nor epistemologically reassuring: “politically,” as such terms have notable meaning Tendency to expand to suit the agenda of our would-be censors; “epistemological” because the difference between “misinformation” and “plausible hypothesis” – the Laboratory leak theory about the origin of Covid-19for example – is often little more than the passage of time.

CCDH’s proposal would include a change to the Section 175 of the Special Circumstances Policy. was created by the Online Safety Act to enable Peter Kyle MP, the Secretary of State for DSIT (also represented at the CCDH chinwag, of course), to issue a “direction” to Ofcom to increase its censorship powers if the Government of Opinion is that this threatens national security or the health and safety of the public.

Not only that, but the “target” he would “instruct” Ofcom to prioritize, e.g. B. which online content should be removed would be defined by him.

Kyle, who was recently accused He is a close confidante of Sir Keir Starmer.

Measured by Interviews Although he has spoken out about the failings of the Online Safety Act, he would certainly be in favor of a change to give himself the power to order Ofcom to remove content he believes poses a risk to public safety.

Picking just one example from the myriad forms of speech that a Conservative Labor minister will undoubtedly find politically repugnant is of course a difficult task, but consider the current public debate around Net Zero as an example. We keep hearing from environmental lobbyists that we are in a “climate emergency.” In fact, Kyle was there back in 2018 Bragging rights to his constituents how he and his Labor colleagues had “managed to force the government to declare a climate emergency”.

So what guarantee is there that, as DSIT State Secretary, he will not convince himself of this “climate denial” – which is the case in a report? Released earlier this year The CCDH is defined as “arguments undermining climate action.” Will this cause significant harm to the health or safety of the public and issue Ofcom a direction to remove this dangerous “misinformation”?

You might be thinking, “So what? Climate denial is ridiculous, potentially harmful and should be removed from social media.”

The difficulty, however, is that while it is undeniable that average global temperatures have risen since the mid-19th century, many people, including climate scientists, hold different views about the causes and effects of climate change, and these in turn influence theirs Opinion on how best to address the problem – or whether “climate action,” as CCDH calls it, is possible or necessary.

Different solutions to combat climate are based on different values, and recommending one approach over another inevitably requires a political decision. There is no non-political, “scientific” solution and therefore labeling dissenting opinions on a particular solution as “misinformation” is a dishonest sleight of hand.

Of course, under the Chatham House rule, Ofcom is free to meet with as many think tanks as it likes – but under proposals from a group set up by the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, the regulator would become a weapon of censorship controlled by Ofcom government is used.