Britain is Losing its Free Speech, and America Could be Next
Britain is Losing its Free Speech, and America Could be Next
From age and ID restrictions on the Internet, to charging rappers with “terrorism,” the U.K. is demolishing the most basic civil liberties. If we let them, U.S. leaders may be close behind.
Just what the fuck is this timeline? I was born in Russia and spent a good chunk of my life basically idolizing USA, UK, EU, other European countries, English-first countries, etc.
By the time I had the language and professional skills to try and migrate into a probably really good life, suddenly there's a rise of authoritarianism, loss of privacy, rollback to the political right and intolerance and hatred and whatever.
There's still a long way for these nations to go before things are as bad as here, but the differences still are dwindling at an alarming rate and I often find myself wondering if it's gonna be worth the effort if I want to eventually move to someplace that still respects privacy and freedom and is sensible about the Internet and digital technologies.
There's still a lot of perks from knowing English as well as I do, but at this point, I think I'd have to learn German or Swedish or some other northern EU language if I ever make up my mind.
And by the time I'm ready, these countries will roll out some bullshit, too, right?
And then there's Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can't purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails - but gamers' emails are ignored...
It's all so demoralising. I miss looking forward to the future with hope and excitement for things.
what's happening is our current system right now is in the process of failing. it's dying, it didn't work and it can no longer sustain itself. Someone once said something along the lines of "When the current system fails, the next one will consist of whatever ideas are left"
So what ideas are left? the ideas of the far right, just like far right ideas are ALWAYS left when a system is about to die. So all these governments, all these wealthy individuals, all these people that have the most to gain are are going start backing the new up coming system. We're seeing it in real time.
But this has happened time and time again. We're a collectively dumb species and love watching repeats. it's always the same song and dance "well lets go this way, sure it didn't work out last time but I don't believe it'll happen to us THIS time".
So it's not so much "what the fuck is this timeline" but rather "well it's our generations turn for bullshit". And it always skips a generation. So the boomers didn't experience it, but their parents did, and now it's our turn. Hopefully our children or our Kids children will be smarter than boomers but...we as humans sure do love watching reruns.
i believe that "far-right" sentiments are a natural defense mechanism against a perceived threat.
if your tribe is in danger, you start kicking the foreigners out, you start going back culturally to what you perceive as "safe",
it's literally like if a windows computer fails to boot properly 3 times in a row, it re-boots into "safe mode", which is a locked-down, dumbed-down, simplified version of the actual os. we are the computer. if people experience hardships too often throughout their daily lifes, they start "dumbing down" and "rebooting into safe mode". just that that safe mode causes more hardships for everyone else. and that's where we're at right now.
it is a simple as the rich thinking they no longer need plebs soon
it is no coincidence this is happening during the blown up of AI
And then there’s Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can’t purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails
They didn't just write emails, they actually picked up the phone and called them, non stop. They made it into a problem that couldn't be ignored. Gamers haven't done that, unfortunately.
As someone still in Russia, a bit of the same.
That is, I expected things to get worse, but not "avalanche of shit, cockroaches and rat bones" levels of worse.
Except the idolization part started receding much earlier, when I actually learned English well enough to understand that these are very intolerant societies. Say, where in Russia people disagreeing with you on some key matters would look at you like a fool or just decide to stop this conversation so that neither of you would offend the other, in English-speaking countries, it seems, there was simply no way to survive outside of some echo chamber and God forbid you find none to fit into. But that was like 10-15 years ago, now, of course, in Russia you can get jailed or strongly fined for words.
But I thought there's some deeper wisdom and in those harsher societies people are also somehow better capable to maintain their common freedom and dignity yadda-yadda. In fact that's not what I see.
As a bit of gloating - at least now the "why are you not all revolting against Putin" Western types can be answered with their own regrettable example instead of common sense and logic, these are fine, but an example is more efficient.
in those harsher societies people are also somehow better capable to maintain their common freedom and dignity
that used to be the case, back in 1960s when the economy was booming and workers were in high demand. they got paid a lot, and if you have money, you can do whatever you want and live a good life, in the US at least.
Sweden teaches its kids English first now. You'll be fine.
Back in the '80s my British father would get as far as opening his mouth to use the Swedish he'd been practicing before the shopkeeper would preempt him in flawless English "How can I help you, sir?".
My inlaws actually don't speak any English and they're the first adult Swedes I've known that don't. Fortunately I speak Swedish fluently but it was comedically awkward for my wife's previous British boyfriends!
You can now do secondary schools in English in Finland.
Except if you speak Finnish or Swedish as a native language.
Fucking stupid addition. Some right-wingers afraid of Finnish dying must've added it to the legislation but it's beyond silly and not having it would promote integration of non-Finnish speaking immigrants with Finnish/Swedish speaking natives. And there definitely isn't a lot of people who would prefer doing secondary school in English. Probably more from the newer generations but still a tiny minority.
There's always Canada, a similarly large yet sparsely populated land with awful winters and bad food, you'll fit right in.
Excuse me, bad food? I'll have you know we have at least 10 flavors of poutine truck at every public event
FYI Germany has been rolling out bullshit already, so that's one out for the count. I'm in a similar situation to you, and I think it's time to give up on the traditional first world. The future for economic immigrants is honestly pretty bleak, but your best bet is either the sane part of Eastern Europe (here's hoping Ukraine pulls through with its democracy intact), South America or somewhere in Southeast Asia if you're looking for a democracy with a decent standard of living.
It seems that our leaders idolize Russia back. 🤣
It's all about this,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
Apparently, Putin's regime is seen as an example for our leaders to follow.
P.S.: Without the direct threat that the communist USSR posed to Western elites, social-democracy faded away as the rich became more and more emboldened.
Dear christ, is there anything Russia isn't responsible for? Apparently we're all puppets in the West, easily hypnotized by gifs generated on washing machine CPUs, and conveniently it's never our own making.
Please seek therapy. This "Russia Russia Russia" thing is McCarthyist hysteria on steroids.
You're idolizing Russia as much if you think they're somehow behind everything you don't understand or like.
What's the difference between your elaborate near-psychotic take and any other conspiracy theory?
Russia Russia Russia. Jesus motherfucking tapdancing Christ on a rubber crutch.
I dropped a plate this morning, Russiaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh!!!!
Well, UK partially aside, your country is the root cause of all the shit happening here. Specifically Putin el Puto.
Well, not so much "cause" as pouring gasoline on what was a light smolder.
You're shifting way too much blame on Russia. Our democracies are failing by themselves, because of complacent politicians who care more about their career and being elected than doing good for their countries. Politicians who learned they don't have to apply their promises and everything will turn out fine. Voters got pissed and fell for far right lies and propaganda.
It turned into a roaring fire by itself. Putin just made sure the fire doors don't shut.
Blaming Russia for the inadequacies of much more powerful nations like the US is pretty ignorant, imo.
A few stolen elections in a row were approved by US politicians and various European politicians almost unanimously, because of "supporting Yeltsin against reaction", and "if not this imperfect democracy, then Commies or neo-Nazis", and "but we're having a reboot of relations", and then with almost open realpoliticking shit about how Putin is convenient to do business with, and if there's a change of regime, it won't be as easy.
So I would argue about root causes a lot. Especially since the root cause would be Western interference during USSR's breakup, first aimed at preserving USSR, then after that failing aimed at preserving Russia as 1) some sort of superpower, 2) authoritarian regime led by Yeltsin's crowd.
It doesn't even matter that they likely didn't know what they were doing, likely led by Tom Clancy books style idiotic ideas of the dangers and chances in that process, and the main "threat" perceived was some "radical reactionary takeover" leading to someone launching nukes just for the sake of it. It even reads idiotic, but such opinions were said officially, however nuts it was.
EDIT: And also there's the subject of Ukraine's nukes. If someone didn't know, it's not Russia that pressured Ukraine to get rid of its nukes in favor of Russia. It's USA. Convenient to have one hegemon in a region, with whom you can deal, except that hegemon might eventually accept the idea that they are the hegemon.
Russia only helped spread the cancers that were already here
This is absolutely insane. Russia is NOT the root cause of anything bad happening in the United States. Pull your head out of your ass.
i wish people like you could take a moment to contemplate on the simple fact that russia is not to blame for every single problem that US and UK have internally. if there's a car crash in US, people are gonna blame russia for it. if the vegetables go mold, people are gonna blame russia for it. it's always somebody else's fault. how about you take some self-responsibility?
"and america could be next!" they literally have domestic concentration camps in america there is no freedom there
But how nice of the headline to imply such things don't exist while pretending to be shocked about other things
Our speech has been controlled here since media's inception. We just live in the world of manufactured perception that because we can argue on the internet or have marches that somehow speech and propaganda isn't a tightly-controlled system.
You don't NEED to jail critics to have control over your country's speech, you just need to control the narratives via news outlets, reddit posts, newspapers, facebook "friends" and popular television fiction shows.
The US is already well down the path with masked men kidnapping people on the street, holding them without any contact, defunding all sorts of media and billionaires suppressing all sorts off stuff in their media outlets.
Britain has never had free speech in the same way as the US, nor even of the press. Only in the last few decades, they've only had what's required by the ECHR.
Well US free speech is telling lies and misleading millions of people on broadcast television.
I'd argue that's more of a problem with media consolidation and not having some form of truth requirement in broadcast media. When only a handful of organizations own the majority of media outlets and aren't held to account for their content, this is what we end up with and why we can't have nice things.
They literally have a Press Censorship system where they will send something called "D-Notices" to newspapers to shut them up.
GB is #20 world press freedom, netizens included. USA are on #57... So what do you mean exactly by "never had free speech in the same way as the US"?
They mean not guaranteed the same way by law.
Practice of course is a different matter
That was lost a while ago, but it's nice more people are noticing that it's getting worse.
Remember VPNs definitely don’t help here, definitely don’t try to skirt any protections using a VPN, definitely remember to have your ID with you at the ready for any website to show to.
If you could project into the future, you might see that VPNs are a dwindling non-solution to the problem. As this unsettling trend makes waves across all jurisdictions in the world, every VPN's IP will be subject to these new controls. Eventually normies might need to understand technologies like Tor or I2P. Only problem is, if things get really bad they might ban the use of both outright. I'm not sure if I2P can be detected just as Tor, but I do know Tor users can be detected easily. Which is why if you're in a "censorship" country you need to use some sort of special subset of entry guards. I2P might be better because every node in the network is like a router, none are specifically entry, middle, or exit nodes. Only thing I could think of, maybe some form of deep packet inspection? If everybody runs an I2P router, then simply making requests to other nodes is not enough to determine it's an i2p communication?* It's just distributed computing, the way the internet was intended!
Any other useful info like this? Tryna snag as much of this stuff as possible (taking screenshots and offline copies of the pages) in the event it becomes unavailable and my existing methods fail on me.
You’ve convinced me to create an i2p router
I found this to get me started: https://www.reddit.com/r/i2p/comments/zp9p94/setting_up_an_i2p_router_on_a_raspberry_pi/
It's a good thing there are no scammers that could try stealing IDs pretending to verify you 😌
Hopefully this doesn't devolve into another USA vs UK shit flinging contest. Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, Trump and Starmer are both utilising state power to crack down on dissent and opposition. Those of us who are opposed to this shit are on the same side.
100%.
Doesn't matter the country.
Do you work for a living?
Do you want to live without fear of governments and corporations breathing down your neck waiting to make an example of you or profit from you?
...Then we should be on the same side. Simple as.
Good-natured jabs aside, of course. ;) Love ya, Brits. <3
Pretty much every company that matters decided to go full 1984 censorship and surveillance all at the same time. And the governments are more than happy to play along. UK, US, etc. Pretty much all of "the west"
They are paving the way for feudalism to replace liberal democracies,
Big time.
And thanks for the link! learned a new philosophy tag for the silicon-valley-government-buying-neo-nazi-death-cult.
🌠the more you know (about the enemy) and all that. . .
Hopefully we'll see more fediverse instances that allow freedom of speech.
I already can't say what I really think about politicians and CEOs without getting banned from comments all over the place, so didn't preach to me about censorship. I'm already chest deep in this shit.
The UK has really crossed a red line by overtly outlawwing support of Palestinian Action.
Uh, America had free speech? First I'm hearing about it.
If you're wealthy enough, you can do whatever you want.
Freedom™
With a president meddling in both universities and media free speech, there is no way to seriously say USA has free speech.
But even before these issues freedom of speech was very challenged in USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index
thank you random Canadian Lemmy user!
/s
You're more than welcome!
How many whistleblowers and reporters did Bush and Obama charge with the Espionage Act?
A lil late on that
Come on... Things have been getting worse for a while, but this is a huge turning point
I’d still like to see the numbers comparatively
this is a huge turning point
The last actual huge turning point was Citizens United and the ability to outright own politicians. What we're seeing now is the slow-turning boat finally catching up with that last big destruction of democratic rule.
But further back than that, people like Reagan and his administration laid a large percentage of the groundwork that made all this possible.
Lol its been decades since the UK had free speech. I haven't forgotten the Nazis pug.
I lived for over a decade in Britain until about 5 years ago and by the time I left I truly believed the UK was the most likely country in Europe to turn Fascist within a decade.
So far, they're well on schedule and there isn't a month without some news about it further confirming how wise my decision to leave after the Brexit vote was.
UK joined the US suicide pact after the queen. Sad.
i feel like that's a story much much older than the queen.
England used to be the first "liberal" place in the world, and it invented capitalism. Both spread to the US after 1800, and then UK had fulfilled its role in world history and became irrelevant. US is literally UK offspring.
Will be. Then Europe.
I think it's odd (and pretty terrifying) the U.K. and U.S. have been on such similar and almost coordinated authoritarian tracks over the last few years. It started with a lot of gradual steps and more recently they seem to be ramping things up (which also seems pretty common for authoritarianism/by the time most people notice something weird is happening it's too late).
Both ramping up A.I. to spy on, and control/micromanage their own civilians while refusing regulations or any public accountability for the A.I. they're developing.
April 2024: U.S., U.K. Announce Partnership to Safety Test AI Models
Feb 2025: UK and US refuse to sign international AI declaration
May 2025: Brexit’s Failures Could Foreshadow Trump’s. Just Not in the Way You Might Think.
We have been on the same track in many respects since Reagan/Thatcher.
Definitely not a coincidence.
https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/reagan-and-heritage-unique-partnership
Very information heavy article. I appreciate that.
What's happening in Britain, thought current government was a good one?
Labour is centrist and they desperately want to exert more control. English are sheep, so no one will protest daddy government.
Supposedly centrist. They're curious whether being populist right wing on some issues will win over Reform UK voters. It's just that they're so curious and are doing this so often that they're well on their way into morphing into a right wing party.
so no one will protest daddy government.
Yea this is a problem..
Someone call up the fine people of France and ask for lessons on how it's done!
(Heck, we North American should, too...)
US lost thiers before, UK did.
Could? go publicly criticize the Pedo in chief and watch what happens
The idea that America EVER had free fucking speech is propaganda. There is no such thing, not in the US and not anywhere. Nations have to control their propaganda or they lose their power. Want an example? Just log into your favorite feed-site in another country and look how radically different every post, every comment and every news story is. Our perspective in the US is as cultivated as it is anywhere else.
The only way we would ever have truly free speech in any capacity would be if we had a borderless world, and I don't see that happening as long as we have money and classes.
Short of some alien species descending and absorbing everyone into a hive-mind, this isn't going to change for a thousand years at least.
It's the useful idiots on the left who keep saying freedom speech is a dogwhistle.
Anyone looking for "dogwhistles" in ANY capacity at this point is an idiot. It's like flypaper to morons.
Yah kiddos, keep screaming about blue-jeans ads and making the other sides scream back, that will SURELY remove the actual white nationalists and fascists who own and control the country. Keep arguing on the internet to give the impression we actually have free-speech. It's a planned and working system to delude the masses into thinking they have power to anything in the face of capitalism and the fascist system it requires to keep the line going up.
Britain never had free speech and always have been a absolute nanny state. It's a prime example that government overreach does not result in any safety improvements.
Many people seem to ignore that british legislation is choke full of gag laws and restrictions on pretty fundamental rights.
Yeah why shoild they be able to tell me to wear seatbelts.
What is this 'could be' business?
America is already well on its way to lose free speech as well. We have a secret police called "ICE" now, so it's only a matter of time unless the "resistance democrats" finally do their fucking job
So did people in the 80's (before internet) have more free speech than now, or less?
Can't anyone just build their own website and "free speech" all they want?
Private media owners always had control over their property, that isn't new.
Don't you guys cheer ending free speech anytime you are in power? I'm all for you joining the team, but please stop vilifying the people who got there before you.
Hasn’t Britain always been like this? Are people generally upset about this or just a vocal online minority? I mean I would never support something like this but if the people support it well, it’s their will.
Yeah, the younger ones don't remember all the dystopic shit under Thatcher. Sure analog cameras in every corner isn't as effective as AI monitoring 24/7, but it's not like the intention was different.
According to lefties, free speech is only a weapon for conservatives, so they won't care.
Obvious troll is obvious
Then explain comments we can find right here or common sentiments you can find at lemmy for restricting hate speech (rejecting they're part of the same coin). Messaging from the left opposing or skeptical of free speech
I didn't make this up.
Free speech is dead easy & at one time a lefty cause, then a new generation of fuckwits lost their way to devalue it.
This is dumb.
I think the US will be fine as long as we don't repeatedly elect some kind of cabal of pedophile authoritarians.
You mean the Republican party? At this point I'm convinced their voter based would elect a serial killer so long as they said they were Republican.
I mean they re-elected Bush so.
Yes that's the joke lol
It's a YUGE stretch to assume there were no democrats in the Epstein files.
Ted Cruz
Irony is truly lost on this platform
I feel like that was the entire intent of the comment you are replying to
why do you say that? seems like a pretty ironic thing to say. found it!