They agreed to force Internet companies to bar nonviolent "extremism". The meeting at Paris got almost no news coverage in the West and I must rely on RT's Dan Glazebrook op-ed (the only other medium to report on it was Al Jazeera).
Specifically, what was announced was that both countries would be introducing heavy fines for internet companies that failed to remove what they, very loosely, defined as “extremist content.” (...)
It was former PM David Cameron who originally came up with the idea that “nonviolent extremism” should be criminalized alongside violent extremism. Intriguingly, as an example of what he meant, he included the idea that the “West is bad,” as well as elsewhere arguing that the promotion of “wild conspiracy theories” would also qualify.
This is exactly what Macron and May, both managers for the Bankster Mafia, to attempt to destroy freedom of speech in NATOland. The idea is not so much to clamp down on terrorist propaganda outlets (many of which are actually backed and actively protected by the British and French states) but to impede any form of dissident expression within the Western Empire or at least its European province.
Their problem is as follows:
For example, an RT interview I did about British collusion with terrorism shortly before the election got over one and half million views on Facebook – higher than the daily readership of the Daily Mail. Jonathan Pie’s fantastic piece tearing apart the Tory’s ‘strong and stable’ nonsense, got 11 million views. That is two and half million more than the combined circulation of the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Guardian, Sun, Daily Star, Times, Telegraph, Evening Standard, and the Mirror and Metro – the country’s ten leading newspapers. And hilariously, when I had just watched one of Theresa May’s speeches on YouTube during the campaign, immediately afterwards, YouTube automatically played Liar Liar, the anti-May anthem that reached number four in the UK pop charts last week. And I suspect YouTube auto played that video after anyone watched anything about Theresa May due to the algorithms that they employ.
All this is pretty much like book (and witch/heretic) burning in the early Modern Ages, when the oligarchs felt threatened by the new invention: print! Just like then, but multiplied times a thousand at least, the new media and its power-democratization capability feels threatening to those who try to retain their dinosaur power heavily reliant on mass-media, which, the more they get manipulated, the less they are watched/read (because there are alternatives, reasonably good, critical and diverse ones).
Probably not even Goebbels (on whom the likes of May and Macron base their ideas) would be able to survive something like that, Berlusconi didn't, his Serbian precursor Milosevic didn't either, the declared admirer of Hitler, Turkish President Erdogan, is struggling all the time against the likes of YouTube and Twitter: he bans them once and again but it's never enough, more so with people in the more totalitarian countries getting quickly used to skip censorship via TOR. Not even a giant like China can control it, because it's like the first law of chaos: you just cannot have absolute power, nor absolute control, the more repressive you get, the less you can actually control in the mid run.
It does not surprise me the least with dinosaurs like May or Trump, they are just too old to know, they belong to a long gone era, but Macron is young and supposedly quite smart, how can he also fall for that megalomaniac fallacy? Well, he's probably too "viejuno" or "viejoven", as they say in Spain, i.e. "old-like" or "old-young" (just look at his haircut and his clothes, he seems taken from an old Hitchcock movie), and not at all as smart as the oligarchs sell him: one thing is smart-lackey (which does not really need true intelligence only operational smarts) and another thing is smart-brilliant (which is automatically critical and scientific, even if sometimes not too practical). That's the difference between Thatcher (brilliant even if truly evil) and Reagan (a mere sockpuppet with performance skills), Macron seems to be rather in the latter category (and so is May of course, a quite gray woman).
Glaezbrook's conclusions:
So that’s what this new crackdown on the internet is really about; it’s about regaining control of that narrative. It’s about turning the CEOs of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google into the Rupert Murdochs of the 21st century – the political allies and mouthpieces of the British state and the capitalist class, and doing this by forging a new relationship that explicitly punishes them if they refuse to play ball.
(...)
The Open Rights Group has warned that “to push on with these extreme proposals for internet clampdowns would appear to be a distraction from the current political situation and from effective measures against terror."“The government already has extensive surveillance powers. Conservative proposals for automated censorship of the internet would see decisions about what British citizens can see online being placed in the hands of computer algorithms, with judgments ultimately made by private companies rather than courts. Home Office plans to force companies to weaken the security of their communications products could put all of us at a greater risk of crime.”Those who are worried about extremism should be calling for an end to the British intelligence services’ collaboration and facilitation of terrorism and the extradition of those who have carried out or facilitated attacks abroad, as well as an international investigation and prosecutions of all those involved.Theresa May’s new proposals do nothing to end the impunity of her own government in the grooming and facilitation of terrorism. Rather, they serve to extend this impunity. They must be resisted.
Hopefully they will fail (again) but let us be most vigilant and ready to fight against this kind of pseudo-democratic fascism. It is extremely dangerous and we must indeed resist it: we need more freedom of speech, not less.
