Manchester Central MP Lucy Powell is proposing a bill in the House of Commons today aimed at tackling online hate, fake news and radicalisation by stopping people using closed forums on social media.
The bill has been backed by a cross party group of senior MP’s including Nicky Morgan, Anna Soubry, David Lammy and Jacob Rees-Mogg .
Closed forums on Facebook she argues,allow hateful views to spread unchallenged among terrifyingly large groups.
Writing in the Guardian she says:
“Social media has given extremists a new tool with which to recruit and radicalise. It is something we are frighteningly unequipped to deal with.
Worryingly, it is on Facebook, which most of us in Britain use, where people are being exposed to extremist material. Instead of small meetings in pubs or obscure websites in the darkest corners of the internet, our favourite social media site is increasingly where hate is cultivated.
As we all know the internet was designed to see censorship as damage and route around it. This MP is wasting Parliamentary time. The internet simply can’t be censored short of shutting every node down. What denotes ‘hate speech’? Its like the old saying ‘one mans freedom fighter is another mans terrorist. Instead of trying to shut down speech which is offensive to some or any sort of politically incorrect views more effort should go in to opening the public up to all views in order for it to be an informed public not one that is coddled and steered into a particular ideology. Free speech – including so called offensive speech and unpopular and politically incorrect speech – is crucial to a true democracy. Censorship is what all totalitarian regimes impose on their populations.
Lucy Powell is only doing this because her own constituents don’t like her you never see her in Manchester central and she has left us to Richard leese and pat karney who are socially cleansing manchestet and no this is not false news and I am not a agitator Ian a grandmother who is worried for my grandchildren future in Manchester after this council have bled it dry