Will Jones – The Daily Sceptic Sept 14, 2026
Labour’s online censorship plan to force social media companies to promote the BBC and other ‘trustworthy’ news outlets and demote the rest is not based on evidence, according to a new report by David Rose for the Free Speech Union. David writes about his report in today’s Telegraph; here’s an excerpt.
In the past year, ministers have said they want to impose broadcast-style rules of accuracy and balance on social media platforms before elections, to compel them to push ‘trustworthy’ news into every citizen’s feed. Everything else will be demoted.
In other words, barely noticed by opposition politicians or the media, the Government is rolling the pitch for the most restrictive regime to control public speech since the reign of Charles I.
They justify each of their measures with the same freedom-chilling argument: that misinformation and disinformation, pumped out to innocent users by malevolent algorithms engineered to monetise extremism, division and hatred, now threaten democracy itself. The narrative has been repeated so often that it has acquired the status of fact. But the evidence suggests it is largely false.
Consider the detail of what is proposed. Lucy Powell, Labour’s Deputy Leader, wants platforms to be treated like broadcasters during elections because of the impact of what she says are “social media feeds decided by opaque algorithms, where falsehoods, deepfakes and co-ordinated mis and disinformation can spread at alarming speed”.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s Green Paper Watch this Space proposes laws to give “regulated public service media” prominence in social media feeds, so that sources such as the BBC are “seen and heard in the fierce battle against mis and disinformation”.
Meanwhile, the media regulator Ofcom is imposing new rules requiring major platforms to identify and restrict the circulation of content suspected of being illegal during “extraordinary events” such as the riots that followed the Southport murders in 2024.
Behind all this sits an “evidence review” which was published earlier this year and commissioned by the Government Office for Science (GO-Science). It claims online misinformation has become “a systemic national risk”, blames algorithms and platform business models for its spread, and calls for “system-level” intervention, including the compulsory integration of “quality signals” into the ranking of content.
In March, Steve Reed, the then communities secretary, told the Commons that voters had been driven into “online echo chambers exacerbated by malevolent algorithms”.
Yet, as I reveal in a report to be published this week by the Free Speech Union, research evidence published by prestigious academic journals suggests otherwise.
In 2024, Nature issued an authoritative review by a team led from the University of Michigan. Its conclusions were the reverse of the Government’s premise. It found that exposure to misinformation and extremist content is low on average and heavily concentrated among a small fringe of users who actively seek it out, rather than coming across it by accident thanks to malign algorithms.
Visits to 490 websites deemed “untrustworthy” by self-appointed fact-checking organisations made up less than 6% of visits to news sites. Meanwhile, “fake news” accounted for some 0.15% of the average American’s daily media diet. According to the paper, exaggerating the threat was creating a risk of disproportionate measures that would threaten free speech.
In 2023, Science published the result of an experiment in which algorithms dictating the feeds of tens of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users were switched off. Content the algorithms ‘thought’ they wanted to see was replaced with feeds based on the chronological order of when content was posted.
After three months, there was no measurable change in their political attitudes, and it turned out the algorithms served less untrustworthy content than a chronological feed, not more. The same journal later found that misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines played a very small role in persuading people not to be vaccinated, and that accurate stories published by legacy media outlets about people who fell ill after having jabs were far more influential.
None of this appears in the GO-Science review. Astonishingly, its assertion that platform algorithms push divisive content because they are “exclusively” driven by profit and engagement rests on a single citation: a 2025 paper from Universitas Muhammadiyah Buton, a small private institution in the Indonesian province of Southeast Sulawesi, ranked 470th of 562 universities in Indonesia and 12,117th of 14,131 in the world. …
Even more troubling is that the word “misinformation” is being stretched to cover dissent, not just untruths. A label that purports to denote falsehood is being applied to legitimate opinion, and to accurate statements that officialdom finds unhelpful. For example, in 2020, the suggestion that the Covid virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan was widely branded a conspiracy theory. Since then, the CIA and FBI have concluded a lab leak is the likeliest explanation, and several high-profile scientists support this view.
The GO-Science review says misinformation requiring Government attention includes dangerous “media narratives” that “decouple” Net Zero from climate science and challenge the validity of electric vehicles and heat pumps.
The review’s catalogue of falsehoods also lists “anti-LGBTQ+ narratives”, “‘gender ideology’ claims targeting schools” and “transgender athlete controversies”.
Worth reading in full. And read David’s full report for the FSU here.
Stop Press: Watch FSU External Affairs Officer Connie Shaw discuss the new report on GB News.
“It’s yet another thing the Government seems to be trying to do under our noses and think that we will not notice.”
The Government is spreading misinformation about misinformation in order to justify mass censorship on social media.
The argument that mis- and disinformation is… pic.twitter.com/kY14DxUjqX
— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) September 14, 2026
two tier policing
Huw edwards who just looked at filthy pictures was punished terribly
but stephen fry actually boasted about using rent boys and hads a long police history for abuse is still in place
there are still BBC personalities who need to be exposed david jason freddie starr graham norton lenny henry and clare balding
erm… they already do that. and yapping about “charles” the anything is grossly offensive.
we in germany dont need censorship laws .
there are overwelmingly majority of holocaust
brainwashed leftistgreenliberal slaves of the
jewish Zentralrat everywhere in all institutions,
companies in a hacking order like the chickens
in the stable . casualy a woman in radio asked :
must I leave germany as jewess ? inmediately I
cut off + asked myself : must I now as goy arian
leave the jewish BRD ? BRD IS JEW REPUBLIK !
its just kanakistan .
A BIG MISTRUSTING LURES EVERYWHERE
no wonder by so many traitors around .
The BBC, about the only thing that should have been privatised. About the only thing that wasn’t.
Major petition with millions of signatures calling for a halt to UK migration hits huge milestone
Story by Adam Toms • 2h •
A major petition calling for a halt to UK migration, and sending them back has hit a major milestone. The online document has garnered more than 75,000 signatures at the time of writing). It was set up on July 15 by Simon Worley and will close on January 15.
Parliament has had 3 like this totalling millions of signatures confirmed that the Government will respond, to the millions of people pledging their desire to send them all back. The petition is the third one to go to parliament
they will not say why they are importing them in
LOL..
by forcing the lol, ‘platforms’ according to the script, to push pabulum created by the child molesters in the the brit-ish regime and it’s withered organs..somehow free speech, whatever the fuck that is ..is somehow proscribed..presumably these platforms are the ones already busy censoring, nudging, scraping all your data and filtering it all..before passing it on to the NSA, CiA, Mossad and every other acronym that wants you dead…
oo the outrage!!
what a joke..you see, that’s the perfect illustration of narrative creation and reality construction..drawn down from the fifth..dimension not amendment.. because of course you have no freedumbs and if indeed you decided to exercise what passes for them, it wouldn’t be freedumbs to DO..it would be freedumbs FROM..
for example the shitty platforms you all subscribe to and your shitty Ai accounts..
that would be a good start.. very good, very good indeed.
lolo..
READ IN APP
Imagine a world where your every major and minor life decision is being made by someone else, yet you believe you are completely free. Today, we will talk about an invisible force that commands far more financial control than the power or political might of any nation.
Recently, I was watching a deeply insightful and informative analysis on the Think School channel. The video detailed a firm named BlackRock. I carefully analyzed the mechanism behind how BlackRock built an unimaginable empire of fifteen trillion dollars. As a market analyst, I always try to look at the underlying structure of a business. One question kept revolving in my mind: how did a company that has never manufactured a single basic mobile phone or small microchip in its life come to control almost everything on Earth? This entire affair did not strike me as just a simple business case study; rather, it was a chilling yet flawless reflection of modern capitalism. Therefore, I decided to present this entire mechanism to you through my own lens and a first-rate corporate analysis. I am confident that this discussion will completely transform your perspective and take your understanding of the global market to a whole new level.
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First, we need to understand just how massive a figure fifteen trillion dollars really is. If we combine the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of three huge economies like India, Japan, and France, it still won’t equal this number. Naturally, we tend to think that they are the actual owners of tech giants like Apple or Microsoft. However, the internal reality of the corporate world is entirely different. Steve Jobs owned less than one percent of Apple’s shares, whereas this institution named BlackRock controls nearly eight percent of Apple’s stock. Bill Gates holds merely 1.34 percent of Microsoft’s shares, but BlackRock holds over eight percent ownership in Microsoft. Jensen Huang, who built Nvidia piece by piece with his own hands, holds only a 3.7 percent stake, while BlackRock’s share there also sits above eight percent. These statistics point out plain as day that these invisible players on Wall Street hold far more power than the innovators of Silicon Valley. They don’t run factories themselves; they don’t bring any physical products to market. Yet, they are the largest shareholders in almost every profitable business on Earth. This didn’t happen by magic. Behind it lies a flawless and, in some ways, extremely ruthless financial strategy that began several decades ago.
Many may wonder how a company with just an eight or ten percent stake can control a tech giant like Apple or Microsoft. Simple mathematical logic suggests that controlling a company requires at least fifty-one percent of the shares. But corporate finance operates on an entirely different math. The remaining ninety or ninety-two percent of shares are scattered across millions of retail investors around the world. These ordinary investors never come together to vote at board meetings; they lack a collective voice.
However, the eight percent held by BlackRock is an extraordinarily well-organized and unified voting block. Whenever a major decision needs to be made, this eight percent vote plays the decisive role. They place their preferred candidates on the company’s Board of Directors. Through this, they quietly control the company’s future strategy, product line, and even sensitive decisions like employee layoffs from behind the curtain. In other words, how the iPhone in your pocket functions or how Microsoft deploys its new AI technology is not being decided by Silicon Valley engineers, but by these suit-and-tie financial executives on Wall Street.
The mastermind behind this massive empire is a man named Larry Fink. Back in the 1980s, Wall Street called him the King of Money. Larry built a mechanism that could literally be described as a machine for printing money out of thin air.
At that time, the banking sector faced a major structural problem. When banks issued home loans to everyday people, they had to wait up to thirty years to collect that money back with interest. This long waiting period was anything but healthy for a bank’s cash flow.
Larry Fink came up with a groundbreaking yet extraordinarily complex solution to this problem. He created a financial instrument called the Collateralized Mortgage Obligation. To regular people, the term might sound convoluted, but the mathematical logic behind it is utterly fascinating.
Suppose a particular bank holds a total of 100 million dollars in 30-year home loans, earning an annual interest rate of nine percent. Larry and his highly skilled financial team divided this entire 100-million-dollar loan portfolio into 100 smaller units, pricing each unit at one million dollars. Now, retail investors could buy these units from the market as bonds.
Whenever homeowners paid their monthly mortgage installments to the bank, a portion of that money flowed directly into the accounts of these bondholders. This meant banks no longer had to wait thirty years to recover their principal; they received their capital back immediately from investors, while bondholders earned a steady, guaranteed rate of interest right from home.
At first glance, this might seem like a perfect win-win situation where both the bank and the investors profit. However, the real game on Wall Street is never quite that simple.
Larry Fink divided these loans into three separate portions—or tranches—based on risk. He categorized these bonds into A, B, and C.
Bond A had a total size of 50 million dollars, but it offered the lowest interest rate: just six percent. Bond B was sized at 30 million dollars with an interest rate set at seven percent. Finally, Bond C had a size of 20 million dollars and offered the highest yield at eight percent.
Now, you might wonder why there was such a difference in these interest rates. The sole reason was managing the degree of risk. Whenever homeowners began repaying their loans, that money went straight into the pockets of Bond A holders first. Consequently, their investment was the safest, which is why their interest rate was lower than the market average. Once Bond A was fully paid off, any surplus funds flowed to the investors in Bond B, and lastly, if anything remained, it went to Bond C.
In other words, if a homeowner defaulted on their mortgage for any reason, the investors in Bond C would be the very first to lose their capital. Because their risk was the highest, their interest rate was kept the highest as well.
Taking a closer look at this mathematical calculation reveals the true face of Wall Street’s exploitation. On this 100-million-dollar loan, homeowners were paying the bank a total of nine million dollars in interest. Yet, the total interest distributed proportionally to the investors of Bond A, Bond B, and Bond C amounted to just 6.7 million dollars.
The most critical question here is: where did that massive 2.3 million dollars in the middle go?
That 2.3 million dollars was pure profit for Larry Fink. Without manufacturing any product, without performing any physical labor or offering direct customer service, and simply by shifting mathematic
Netherlands brought to standstill after train sabotage
Story by Alexandra Snow
The Netherlands has been brought to a standstill after a sabotage attack on its rail network.
Migrants are fighting back against deportation
Pipes and cables were found attached to rails at more than 20 locations, halting services across much of the country and disrupting trains to Amsterdam’s Schiphol International airport.
just in from peter french
Netherlands brought to standstill after train sabotage
Story by Alexandra Snow
The Netherlands has been brought to a standstill after a sabotage attack on its rail network.
Migrants fighting back against deportation
Pipes and cables were found attached to rails at more than 20 locations, halting services across much of the country and disrupting trains to Amsterdam’s Schiphol International airport.