Increasing state censorship of the internet is not the answer to Covid conspiracies – Morning Star Online

LABOURS belief that tougher state control of online information is the answer to anti-vax disinformation needs to be challenged.

This is not because the partys concern about anti-vaxxers is misplaced. Reports that the vast majority of those ending up in intensive care are now the unvaccinated demonstrate how important the vaccination rollout is.

Vaccination saves lives, and not just of the vaccinated the occupation of available intensive care beds by people who, had they been vaccinated, would not need them reduces NHS capacity to treat people with other acute problems.

Every peak in Covid infections has knock-on effects across the health service, diverting scarce resources, delaying non-emergency care and therefore inevitably leaving myriad health issues unidentified, untreated and liable to get worse.

The unvaccinated are not primarily responsible for these problems. The government is.

The impact on NHS capacity of the unvaccinated minority is limited by comparison with that of a government which has forced the NHS to operate with tens of thousands of unfilled vacancies through a failure to invest enough in the service or in its staff.

Labours efforts should be concentrated on forcing the government to act on NHS pay and funding. But there are other reasons to be wary of its proposals.

They exude an authoritarianism that is becoming familiar from Keir Starmers party.

Labour is the party that called for a ban on TV channel RT over allegations that its broadcasts sought to influence the EU referendum. Starmer was not alone in assuming that voting to leave the EU an action incomprehensible to so many Westminster insiders must have been the result of manipulation by shadowy forces. But he was wrong.

The reach and influence of Covid conspiracy theories online is harder to judge.

But even though they are a harmful presence, we should all be alarmed at Labours indifference to any negative consequences of state overreach in response.

The tech giants are failing to wipe out vaccine lies, shadow digital, culture, media and sport secretary Lucy Powell warns, railing against government complacency on fake news. Lest we be tempted to try to assess the scale of the problem and the proportionality of the response, she adds: One person put off the vaccine by dangerous anti-vaxxers is one too many.

Too many on the left adopt a naive attitude to the use of state power to police communications so long as the targets are sufficiently unpleasant. Even at the huge Cop26 protests in Glasgow being brutalised by the police, there were climate activists calling on the government to ban fake news from polluters, seemingly without thinking about who would define the fake news to be silenced.

We, however, can have an educated guess. It would be a combination of the tech giants Powell berates for not having done so already, and the state.

There is abundant evidence of the political deployment of censorship by the tech giants. We know that Facebook shut down former Ecuadorean president Rafael Correas account and that Venezuelans expressing support for their elected government on Twitter in 2019 had their accounts closed as supposedly fake.

We saw the creation of tens of thousands of actual fake accounts allowed to operate with impunity to support the military coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in the same year.

As for the state, the Conservatives are already seriously curtailing the right to protest and threatening free speech on Palestine. Labour, whose right wing has deliberately tried to obscure the difference between political positions such as anti-zionism and racist hate speech directed at Jews, is hardly a safer pair of hands.

The anti-vaxxers are a menace whose disinformation must be countered with argument and persuasion.

If they are used as an excuse to extend the states right to police communications, the left will soon find that those doing the censoring are not our friends.

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Increasing state censorship of the internet is not the answer to Covid conspiracies - Morning Star Online