The elite crusade against ‘fake news’ is authoritarian, anti-democratic and deeply hypocritical.
The transatlantic campaign to stanch ‘misinformation’ burgeoned with the elites’ revulsion at the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain and the election of Donald Trump, also in that year. That campaign has intensified with the prospect of Trump’s re-election in the US and in the wake of the recent riots in the UK, which were sparked by erroneous online reports that the person who fatally stabbed three children in Southport on 29 July was an asylum seeker. In both countries, the right-on, smart take is to embrace, in the name of democracy and social justice, such doublethink as the Labour government’s new enthusiasm for the policing of and crackdown on ‘legal but harmful’ online content.
