Boris Johnson is considering introducing new laws to limit the ability of social media giants such as Twitter to ‘censor’ British politicians.
According to senior Whitehall sources, the Prime Minister was alarmed by the way Twitter applied warning labels to more than 65 tweets by Donald Trump during the US presidential election. It did not, by contrast, apply any to tweets from the victorious Joe Biden.
As a result, Mr Johnson has discussed amending a Bill currently before Parliament – designed to punish social-media companies that publish harmful material – to ‘limit the ability of a bunch of woke Californians to interfere in the UK’, according to a source.
Twitter applied more than 300,000 warnings to messages related to the US election as part of a ‘civic-integrity policy’ to address ‘misleading or disputed information’.
Trump’s supporters say that these were overwhelmingly directed at them because of what they describe as an institutionalised Left-leaning bias at the company.
The Online Harms Bill, which is currently before Parliament, is intended to introduce duty-of-care laws to protect children from disturbing material such as suicide footage or jihadi videos on platforms including Facebook and Instagram.
The measures have already been delayed because of concerns they could lead to the censorship of mainstream content on sites such as MailOnline, which publish legitimate news stories about related iss... (Read more)
Submitted 1215 days ago
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