Misogynistic abuse should be banned online, the Government believes.
Michelle Donelan, the Culture Secretary, is understood to believe the Online Safety Bill has the power to stamp out attacks on women on the internet.
That’s impossible. The law simply doesn’t work that way. It’s not even possible to try to do that. It is possible to try to outlaw misogynistic and misandrist abuse. Not sure who successful it will be, whether we’d want to, but it’s possible to try. What isn’t, ever, going to happen is the outlawing of abuse against women – it’ll be abuse against people. Could even be “but what we mean is people absuing people because they’re women” which will be met with ah, but exactly the same rules must apply to people abusing people because they’re men.
So, now that we’ve neatly disposed of near all feminist writing, what do we do next?
Tim, I am touched by your faith that the British judiciary would apply this equally.
When we had similar about domestic violence then the campaigners were very surprised – and most upset – to find that a goodly portion of those charged were birds.
Perhaps they’ll pass a Compulsory Gender and Racial Discrimination Act to make sure it’s all done the way they want it??
It’s depressing that there are elected people not simply stupid enough to think that this is possible but so abjectly moronic as to think it can be the business of the state to regulate how people interact with one another.
But surely now Tom Jones cannot incite murder via a catchy tune, there will soon be no more misogyny..?
Now here’s a thought. Passing a law to ban something rarely has a straightforward outcome. Those who don’t care, carry on. Those who care find some loophole in the law and carry on. Others find some other displacement activity. Still others carry on in secret.
And this assumes the law is enforced.
Is the law going to define what a woman is or will that task be subcontracted to the Führerin of Alba?
DiscoveredJoys,
“And this assumes the law is enforced.”
This law isn’t supposed to be enforced. Donelan might be a well-meaning person, but like most politicians she doesn’t really understand how things actually work, hasn’t thought it all through, and more senior people will let this happen just because it makes the government sound like it’s doing something. Like:-
“Under the new Online Safety Bill, currently being finalised, social media firms will be required by law to abide by their terms and conditions, which generally bar misogynistic abuse. Failure to enforce them will result in fines, and their services could be blocked by Ofcom, the online watchdog.”
The thing is, these social media firms generally try and do this, because it’s what their customers want. It’s like writing a law banning the publishing of bukkake porn, and limiting it to what WH Smiths sell.
What politicians can never grasp is that there’s a lot more to the internet than Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. And as soon as a social media platform becomes normie, people leave.
Oh, and good fucking luck banning anything with the internet when a VPN costs £3/month.
DiscoveredJoys,
“And this assumes the law is enforced.”
This law isn’t supposed to be enforced.
The whole point is that it will be selectively, and rigorously, enforced against the sort of people who were accused of non-hate crime hate crimes such as sending hurty Tweets.
Also in the firing line will be Incels, TERFs, white men sharing a harmless but boorish joke, anyone labelled a Transphobe etc. The people who won’t be in the firing will include the trans nutters who go after women who want a safe space, hate mongers from the religion of peace, left wingers who think its acceptable to scream they hope Tory women get raped etc.
“Michelle Donelan, the Culture Secretary, is understood to believe the Online Safety Bill has the power to stamp out attacks on women on the internet.”
Stupid bitch.
– Oh, and good fucking luck banning anything with the internet when a VPN costs £3/month.
Easy. VPNs will be limited. Essentially banned for private use, and only licensed, registered, compliant operators permitted to run services for commercial outfits, etc. You know it’s coming.
@Bloke on M4 – “as soon as a social media platform becomes normie, people leave.”
So in this age when diversity and includion is supposed to be so important, the goal of politicians is to make Internet platforms bland and homogenous.
When we had similar about domestic violence…
And having learned their lesson in that instance, they will be very careful to specify that it is only “misogynistic” abuse that is criminalized. That, coupled with the selective enforcement BiND outlines, will be enough to control speech the powers-that-be object to.
BoM4/PJF
I changed my VPN a month or so ago and was given a link to d/l the new one I had just subscribed to so I uninstalled the previous one and clicked on the link for the new one. Nix.
I reinstalled the trial version of the previous VPN and tried again and was then able to d/l the new one.
Subsequent ferreting revealed that my ISP (vodafone) blocks access to all VPN sites except its own although I also found that altering the standard DNS settings is also a work-around. The moral, I suppose, is not to hang around until the government decides you can’t use a VPN.
@The Meissen Bison – Can’t get the staff these days.
Don’t even need to cough for that when things like Brave browser include censorship bypass and even in built TOR privacy mode for nowt. I mean, you wouldn’t want to order a murder through it (get a member of LEA turning up anyway), but for a bit of light misogyny, just the job.
Thing is, the partner abuse law was written as “partner abuse”. If the law is written as “miso*gyny*” then is will be miso*gyny* that is outlawed. Lezzers were never outlawed ‘cos the law explicitly specified shirt-lifting, not scissoring.
No doubt the women in comfortable shoes will argue (as they often have done) that there’s no such thing as Misandry because “reasons”*.
* – some wibble about power imbalances or such twattery.