It's not often that BBC Trending's Mike Wendling veers away from his pet subject - the far-right on the internet - but #wreathgate has tempted him to do so. Linking to the BBC's Newswatch, he's tweeted:
The real story of the PM, the wreath and the footage on Breakfast is actually very dull and will not go viral, because it’s not nearly as sexy as a half baked #wreathgate conspiracy theory.
And I agree with him. He's right about that. It won't. (Despite my post about it!).
Where I part company with him is that I favour argument and mockery in dealing with such conspiracy-mongering folly. He - as his following tweet shows - inclines towards censorship: i.e. the tech companies 'doing something' to stop it:
This is a major problem with our information ecosystem, and atm its {sic} very difficult to see what anybody (other than a few dudes in Silicon Valley) can do about it.
Fools will always be among us. Getting the dudes in Silicon Valley to prevent them from being able to use social media to accuse the BBC of deliberately inserting the wrong footage of Boris Johnson at the wreath-laying service at the Cenotaph in order to cover up for his wreath-laying ineptness (because of their 'pro-Tory bias') isn't the right way to go, at least according to my way of thinking. And I find it rather worrying that a senior BBC journalist seems to think it is.
The fool on the internet is no different to previous fools: fools down the pub, fools in the classroom, fools in the pulpit - fools everywhere. I remember a vicar delivering a v. pro-Arab sermon in 1967 and also opining that the marriage of Paul and Linda McCartney wouldn't last. :)
ReplyDeleteBut how typical of the BBC's Right-Finder General Wendling to wish to censor as his first instinct.
One aspect of Labour's broadband proposal is how it could be used for censorship. What the government gives with one hand, it can take away with the other. I can easily envisage a state of affairs where a future Labour Government enacts legislation to deny broadband service to the "Far Right" - which to them means potentially anyone who doesn't agree with mass immigration, Islam and transgenderist propaganda.
That was my first thought when I heard McDonnell’s announcement. The government in charge of the internet - what a great idea! Not. I was rather surprised that none of our intrepid BBC journalists have picked up on it.
DeleteWhy is it that whenever John McDonnell makes one of his announcements I feel as if I am listening to a fourteen-year-old trying to sound like an adult? Maybe it’s just me.
No Terry, there's nothing odd about your conclusion: you are applying a lifetime's experience and your native intelligence to something that the BBC apply only ideology to. :)
DeleteHasn't this already been tried with newspapers - getting shops to stop stocking right-wing ones? I forget who or what was behind it; it wasn't the government though. But it's not hard to see a government doing something like it.
ReplyDeleteWe already have laws criminalising speech as hate; Police policing speech for shades of dissent or unapproved opinion and recording non-crimes as hate incidents and rapists as female; judges insisting that a rape victim in court refer to her alleged rapist as 'she' - never mind that rape in English law requires a penis (or a non- penis possessor helping a penis possessor). Women losing their position in childbirth organisations because they say only a woman gives birth or people losing jobs or facing censure because they do not adhere to the promotion of the M or D words - both Labour doctrines but treated as if they are mandated by law upon individuals; MPs and public chatterers spreading the creed that controlling immigration or wishing to leave the EU is racism. The machinery is in place.