Southport is no excuse for censorship

It has been quite a spectacle to watch the government maneuver over the last week to shift blame, away from the institutional failings leading up to the Southport attack, and onto anything else.  

First, we were told that Amazon and other online retailers were at fault for making it easy to buy knives. Then the Prime Minister blamed “young men in their bedrooms” who spend their time isolated and online. As the public has not received these deflections with any enthusiasm, a new strategy has emerged, and we are now being told it’s the fault of the big tech companies for radicalising the murderer Axel Rudakubana.

To that end, this weekend the Home Secretary wrote a letter to X, Meta, TikTok, Google, and YouTube urging them to remove violent material viewed by the Southport killer before he committed his terrible crime last summer.

The Chancellor Rachel Reeves joined the latest blame shifting effort and told the BBC over the weekend that it is “totally unacceptable” Rudakubana was able to access “such hateful material” online, and she urged social media companies to remove it.  

The violent material the Ministers are referring to includes an al-Qaeda training manual, possession of which is illegal, and footage of an Australian bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel, being stabbed in an act of terrorism last April, which Axel Rudakubana viewed shortly before murdering his victims.  

Of course, someone should not be able to download a terrorist training manual from the internet, but the government has no right to call for the removal of the video of the bishop being stabbed. It does not, in and of itself, incite violence. 

X was forced to censor the video in Australia by the country’s eerily named “e-Safety Commissioner”. However, X successfully legally challenged the e-Safety Commissioner’s attempt to force a worldwide ban on the video, in the name of freedom of expression. 

The government calling for the removal of content they arbitrarily deem “hateful” is an affront to free speech and lays the groundwork for more egregious censorship under the Online Safety Act 2023, which enters force in March and will be overseen by Ofcom. In her letter, Yvette Cooper made a veiled threat that failure to remove material the state finds objectionable will result in the use of the powers under the Act, setting the stage for a standoff with companies such as X.

And this is where the government begins to play a high stakes game. On one side of the equation is their desperation to shift the blame for the Southport attack, and they have calculated that it is a political imperative that the public are led to blame someone, anyone, so long as it’s not them.

On the other side, they have to factor in the reaction of the USA if Ofcom starts using the censorship powers under the Online Safety Act, which include the possibility of legal action resulting in enormous fines, against American tech companies.

Legislation such as the EU’s Digital Services Act, the German Network Enforcement Act and our own Online Safety Act are relics of a recent era when it was almost universally agreed that censorship was the only way to tackle political radicalisation and that maximum free speech was a quirk of US constitutional exceptionalism. That era ended on 20 January 2025.

However, it seems not everyone has got the memo, and in the wake of the US Presidential inauguration the German Chancellor, the Spanish premier, and members of the European Parliament have all stated that censorship is critical to “protect democracy”. 

Just as the US is re-affirming its commitment to free speech, elites on this side of the Atlantic have decided censorship is the only way to suppress growing public anger with the reality of their low trust, high crime societies. In one sense the European elites are correct — the truth is kryptonite to their manifold anti-reality narratives.

With this letter, the Home Secretary and government take the clear view that “hateful material” online leads to mass murders like we saw this summer. But the very fact they are making threats such as those in the letter to tech companies is a measure of the government’s desperation. 

They must know they risk further damaging their already fragile reputation with the new US administration. Last year, Vice-President JD Vance threatened to leave NATO if X was censored by the EU, and the administration showed this week it is not adverse to using the threat of tariffs against countries who don’t play ball with their new immigration policy.

Rather than addressing their own institutional failings, such as the authorities’ failure to protect the public from the Southport attacker, the government has turned to censorship. But in doing so they are showing the weakness of their position, as well as taking an enormous political and legal gamble. They may quickly find the new American administration calls their bluff.