UK News

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has found troubling evidence that there is a thriving marketplace for fake and misleading online reviews. After web sweeps performed in the period November 2018 to June 2019, the CMA was concerned about over 100 eBay listings offering fake reviews for sale. It also identified 203 during the same period 203 26 Facebook groups in total where people offered to write fake reviews or businesses recruited people to write fake and misleading reviews on popular shopping and review sites.

It is estimated that over three-quarters of UK internet users consider online reviews when choosing what to buy. Billions of pounds of people's spending is influenced by reviews every year. Fake and misleading reviews not only lead to people making poorly informed choices and buying the wrong products, but they are also illegal under consumer protection law.

The CMA is not alleging that Facebook or eBay are intentionally allowing this content to appear on their websites. Since the CMA wrote to the sites, both have indicated that they will cooperate and Facebook has informed the CMA that most of the 26 groups have been removed. The CMA welcomes this, and expects the sites to put measures in place to ensure that all the identified content is removed and to stop it from reappearing.

Andrea Coscelli, CMA Chief Executive said:

Lots of us rely on reviews when shopping online to decide what to buy. It is important that people are able to trust that reviews are genuine, rather than something someone has been paid to write.

Fake reviews mean that people might make the wrong choice and end up with a product or service that's not right for them. They're also unfair to businesses who do the right thing.

We want Facebook and eBay to conduct an urgent review of their sites to prevent fake and misleading online reviews from being bought and sold.

Exeter Cathedral has banned a Ukip candidate from taking part in hustings for Thursday's European elections.

Carl Benjamin, blogging as Sargon of Akkad, is the focus of a PC lynch mob after making a rape joke referencing Jess Phillips.  He had been due to speak at the event alongside other candidates for the South West England region on Wednesday evening.

In a statement, Exeter Cathedral justified the censorship supposedly being concerned about milk shakes being thrown. The church said:

Under the rules of the Electoral Commission, we may exclude candidates from a non-selective hustings for a number of reasons, including concerns about public order.

In this case, the cathedral believes that the presence of one particular candidate may cause a risk to public order, given a number of incidents over the last few weeks. Ukip has been invited to send another candidate from its list of six candidates standing for election in the South West region.

Ukip's Devon chair, Margaret Dennis, said the move was outrageous and an affront to democracy. She told DevonLive :

The hustings are either open for the public to discuss and debate or it is an attempt to censor and restrict an opportunity to hear a range of views at this election.

She said Benjamin was an articulate and intelligent advocate not only for our party but for free speech.

The obscenity trial over DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was a national sensation. The 1960 case was also a watershed moment in Britain's cultural history, when the legacy of Victorian morality was finally overtaken by the liberal attitudes of the Swinging Sixties.

Now that book -- complete with notes by his wife -- has been barred from export because of its cultural significance. The book sold for £56,250 last year and the new owner had planned to take it abroad. UK buyers now have until October to match that sum.

Sir Laurence Byrne and his wife Dorothy made annotations on the copy, marking out sexually explicit passages Sir Laurence Byrne and his wife Dorothy made annotations on the copy, marking out sexually explicit passages

Arts minister Michael Ellis said he hoped a buyer could be found in order to keep this important part of our nation's history in the UK.

But not to worry, this government is dreaming up lots of new censorship ideas, and no doubt this will lead to lots more trials and prosecutions, and historically significant censorship decisions.

A man investigated by police over a poem about transgenderism is launching a landmark High Court case to overhaul unfair police rules on hate crimes.

Harry Miller is to seek a judicial review of the hate crime guidelines followed by police forces across Britain, claiming they are unlawful because they inhibit freedom of expression.

He argues that the current guidance, published by the College of Policing in 2014, the body responsible for training officers, promotes the recording of incidents as hate crimes even when there is no evidence of hate beyond the opinion of an accuser.

Miller's legal team has highlighted a clause in the rules that state such incidents must be recorded by officers irrespective of any evidence to identify the hate element.

Miller is also challenging a decision by Humberside Police to record his re-tweeting of the poem as a hate incident -- despite officers concluding that no crime had been committed.

He was quizzed by Humberside Police in January after posting the verse about men who transition to be women, which included the lines: You're a man ... And we can tell the difference ... Your hormones are synthetic. He said he was dumbfounded by the exchange and furious when he found out that his sharing of the verse had been recorded as a hate incident.

Explaining his reasons for launching legal action, the businessman told the Mail on Sunday:

It is about the ability to have freedom of speech within the law and being allowed to have a debate without one group being able to call on the police to shut another group down.

Free speech is being closed down by a climate of fear and secrecy and the police are contributing to this Orwellian culture.

Twitter has bannedTommy Robinson and Ukip candidate Carl Benjamin's campaign accounts

Both had already had their personal accounts banned from the platform - but now their campaign accounts are also suspended.

Benjamin, a vlogger who calls himself Sargon of Akkad, was banned from Twitter in 2017 whilst Robinson was permanently banned in March 2018.

In a tweet from the party's official account, Ukip said:

Official UKIP MEP Campaign account @CarlUkip, of which Carl Benjamin has no access to has been suspended from Twitter. This is election interference, and UKIP will get to the bottom of this.

And Ukip defended Benjamin as a YouTube entertainer fighting political correctness - before telling the Mirror: He will remain on the UKIP ticket.

Offsite Comment: Twitter's outrageous meddling in British democracy

4th May 2019. See article from spiked-online.com by Brendan O'Neill

Twitter's outrageous meddling in British democracy

In banning Tommy Robinson and Carl Benjamin, Twitter is behaving like a corporate dictator.

An art exhibit that aimed to spark conversation about violence against women by showing Barbie dolls being abused has been moved out of a shop window.

A few complaints were made about the collection, named Girls World , which were displayed in a Middlesbrough shopping centre in full view of children.

The work showed pictures of the children's toy being kicked by boyfriend Ken, giving birth to an unwanted child, and hanging herself from a tree. It was hoped the display, created by artist Lidia Lidia, would raise awareness of violence against females.

The exhibition was first put up on April 10 and was due to run for a fortnight before being removed from the front window on April 18. The exhibition has now been moved to the back of the gallery, in Middlesbrough, where it will remain until May 11.

In a statement, Lidia Lidia thanked the co-directors of the Pineapple Black galler for showing the 'somewhat controversial piece and apologised to people who found her work uncomfortable. She added:

I am totally aware that my work is provocative and sometimes disturbing but I strongly believe that art nowadays is one of the most powerful tools for shaping a fair and equal society.

NewsGuard is a US organisation trying to muscle in governments' concerns about 'fake news'' It doesn't fact check individual news stories but gives ratings to news organisations on what it considers to be indicators of 'trustworthiness'.

At the moment it is most widely known for providing browser add-ons that displays a green shield when readers are browsing an 'approved' news website and a red shield when the website is disapproved.

Now the company is pushing something a little more Orwellian. It is in talks with UK internet providers such that the ISP would inject some sort of warning screen should an internet user [inadvertently] stray onto a 'wrong think' website.

The idea seems to be that users can select whether they want these intrusive warnings or not, via a similar mechanism used for the parental control of website blocking.

NewsGuard lost an awful of credibility in the UK when its first set of ratings singled out the Daily Mail as a 'wrong think' news source. It caused a bit of a stink and the decisions was reversed, but it rather shows where the company is coming from.

 Surely they are patronising the British people if they think that people want to be nagged about reading the Daily Mail. People are well aware of the bases and points of views of news sources they read. They will not want to be nagged by those that think they know best what people should be reading.

I think it is only governments and politicians that are supposedly concerned about 'fake news anyway'. They see it as some sort blame opportunity. It can't possibly be their politicians' own policies that are so disastrously unpopular with the people, surely it must be mischievous 'fake news' peddlers that are causing the grief.

Facebook has banned far-right groups including the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League (EDL) from having any presence on the social network. The banned groups, which also includes Knights Templar International, Britain First and the National Front as well as key members of their leadership, have been removed from both Facebook or Instagram.

Facebook said it uses an extensive process to determine which people or groups it designates as dangerous, using signals such as whether they have used hate speech, and called for or directly carried out acts of violence against others based on factors such as race, ethnicity or national origin.

Offsite comment: How to fight the new fascism

19th April 2019. See article from spiked-online.com by Andrew Doyle

This week we have seen David Lammy doubling down on his ludicrous comparison of the European Research Group with the Nazi party, and Chris Key in the Independent calling for UKIP and the newly formed Brexit Party to be banned from television debates. It is clear that neither Key nor Lammy have a secure understanding of what far right actually means and, quite apart from the distasteful nature of such political opportunism, their strategy only serves to generate the kind of resentment upon which the far right depends.

Offsite comment: Facebook is calling for Centralized Censorship. That Should Scare You

19th April 2019. See article from wired.com by Emma Llansó

If we're going to have coherent discussions about the future of our information environment, we--the public, policymakers, the media, website operators--need to understand the technical realities and policy dynamics that shaped the response to the Christchurch massacre. But some of these responses have also included ideas that point in a disturbing direction: toward increasingly centralized and opaque censorship of the global interne

Wikileaks was a whistle blowing website that shone a light on how governments of the world have been running our lives. And it was not a pretty sight.

Julian Assange who ran Wikileaks, is surely a freedom of speech hero, however he broke many serious state secret laws and has been evading the authorities via diplomatic immunity afforded to him by the Ecuadorean embassy in London. This has now been rescinded and Assange has been duly arrested. He is now in serious trouble and will surely end up being sent to the USA to answer the accusations.

It is hard to see that the prosecuting authorities will be convinced by ethics or morality of the ends justifying the means.

Maybe its best to let the BBC report the current situation. See article from bbc.com