UK PM Theresa May orders review of online abuse laws in suffrage centenary speech UK Prime Minister Theresa May has ordered a review of British laws governing online communications in her latest shot at big tech firms. In a speech today marking the centenary of at least some women gaining the right to vote in Blighty, May will say that public debate is "coarsening" with a lot of this troubling behaviour …
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I could not agree more. Of course political debate is coarsening when the politicians themselves behave like toddlers fighting over the last biscuit, hurling insults at one another and all the public school boys desperate to keep the riff raff out of their old boys club at any cost.
While I'm not saying that every, or indeed any, insult hurled online is justified, they can't pretend that it's the only problem. While insults hurled online are a problem, there is a simple way to avoid them as a minority MP - don't go on facebook / twitter / whatever. What you sadly can't avoid are the "civil" servants or career MP's from privilaged public school backgrounds in whitehall who still think that "poofter" is appropriate language, and all the rest that I won't list. Online abuse is relatively easy to avoid. Workplace abuse, sadly, is not.
So to summarise, the Prime Minister said today:
"I'd like to celebrate this day, where we started to redress the imbalance in women's rights by using this event as a platform to argue why you should have your rights and internet freedoms removed".
Well done there, Pry Minister - is there anything you can't use to push your own agenda? Why not consider the root cause of why people are so hacked off with politicians in the first place?
Treat the cause of the disease, not the symptoms.
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"Er, we're talking about hate speech, not interrupting someone."
Define hate speech?
Is calling someone like Katie Hopkins "A nasty narcissistic piece of scum, who contribution to society would have been greatly improved if she had never be born" hate speech or the truth?
Lets not even start on Murdoch.
Either way, it will be forbidden under the overly draconian and knee jerk changes that get made to appease the thin skinned.
It is quite definitely one thing to be rude or even offensive towards something someone has done or said, but quite another to make death threats or harass someone just for who they are.
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Are the standards of behaviour of politicians really "declining", are they "coarsening"? The red lines on the floor between the Government and Opposition are two sword lengths apart to prevent over-exicited MPs whipping out their weapons in the pursuit of immediate satisfaction from other members.
.... indeed. It's quite easy to deal with death threats received via the Internet. Ignore them. The kid that made said threat won't pass their driving test for several years, so won't be able to come find you.
I got some death threats in the early days of the Web. How I laughed.
"It's quite easy to deal with death threats received via the Internet. Ignore them."
For most of us, that's true.
However, for public figures (MPs, Royals, Celebs) these threats aren't always throwaway insults by "kids [who] won't pass their driving test for several years, so won't be able to come find you." It's not long since an MP was stabbed in the street by one of her constituents. If they do just ignore them and something happens....
Also, MPs are supposed to be listening to the public*. They should be readin through comments made. If a fair number are abusive, they can't just abandon reading the comment thread as they may miss "important" information. They can't even just delete their online profiles, as most of us could if faced with large numbers of threats or abusive comments.
Finally, it's very easy to say "just ignore it". However, unless you've been the victim of "bullying" you don't know how this affects you (and even then, you can't know how it will affect someone else). After a while you start to believe what's being said about you. It can have a massive effect on your mental health, with knock on effects to your physical wellbeing.
* I say supposed to. I will not comment on how well they perform in this task...
"t's not long since an MP was stabbed in the street by one of her constituents."
Did Thomas Mair threaten Joe Cox via social media before he murdered her? Nope, so death threats via social media and actual murders would not appear to have any relation. Can we think of any real life cases where social media threats have been carried out? Quite the opposite I think, only recently some far right numpty was prevented from carrying out an atrocity at an LGBT event because he blurted his intentions on social media.
Maybe the putuative "edgelord" thinks there is a difference, but it's essentially only in /their/ head. There is rarely any way for the target to be sure which is which.
I'm pretty much of the "just ignore all the nutters and trolls on the internet" school of thought, but if I were a target of multiple death threats, even ones delivered by internet, I might find it difficult just to think "oh, those crazy hedgelords are at it again, ha ha..."
She did. The idea is not to mention the suffragettes and to starve the organisations and cebrations of funding so people don't realise they can make a difference.
As she's that much of a one trick pony, when she doesn't want to mention something, she fills the silence with her pet hate, the Internet.
This woman has done more to foster a population of hatred than any other PM since Thatcher, and she has the pure audacity to stand there and say that other people/tech companies should be doing more to combat it?
I notice she's not mentioning her friend Paul Dacre's cesspit The Daily Fail as well.
Andrea Leadsome has more to do with that then Pig Botherer Dave.
Comments she made during the leadership election along the lines of "women who have never had children don't know what compassion and empathy are" lead to her withdrawing from the "contest". Which then meant Frau May-Bot won by default.
I think Tony Blair wins the 'worst PM since Thatcher' award, and by a comfortable margin.
They were the two worst prime ministers in my memory. And for the same reason. They behaved like dictators, over-riding cabinet with the threat that if they showed disagreement with the PM the party would lose the next election.
Thatcher was definitely the worst of the two. Blair was only in it for himself, wanting to gain stature and go down in history a great statesman (oh, and whatever money he could pocket while doing it). If Blair did something really unpopular he'd reverse course. Thatcher appears to have believed the shit she spouted, so even if what she did was unpopular she'd continue doing it for your own good.
And if that hasn't earned me some downvotes, this probably will...
It has been said of Tony Blair that if somebody managed to somehow convince him that it would enhance his political stature, he'd brutally rape his grandmother live on Breakfast TV. That scurrilous assertion is completely without foundation. Tony could never do such a thing. Both his grandmothers are dead.
I voted Leave because that pigheaded idiot assured us that he would be a safe pair of hands to lead us through to a well-managed sustainable Brexit.
No problems with slurring the civil service
No problems with Davis lying to parliament about the biggest issue in modern times
No problems with wrecking the good friday agreement.
No problems with introducing friction filled trade to destroy manufacturing that relies on JIT flows with the continent.
No problems with attacks on the judiciary and MPs by the editors who tell her what to say
No problems with treating 3 million people like some sort of slave commodity to be bartered
No problems with trying to increase the power of the executive so it can bypass Parliament.
Yes. Let's talk about online abuse. FFS
She remained in power because 85% of the media in the UK do not like Labour. So they set about repeatedly beating Dianne Abbot about forgetting/fudging figures over police, yet didn't mention Phil Hammond admitting he had no idea how much HS2 was going to cost, or even had cost at that time. (He was being "interviewed" by Andrew Marr).
One isn't in Government, and the other is in Government and sets the agenda. Tell me which figure recollection faux pas was worse?
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