This is interesting.
“American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an e-mail.”
Hopefully more sites and services outside the UK will refuse to comply with the appalling Online Safety Act.
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August 18th, 2025 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A trade group representing companies that build age verification systems is now lobbying to extend these checks to anyone using a VPN in the UK. The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) wants online platforms that fall under the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act, to not only detect VPN usage but also analyze user behavior to guess whether someone might be a minor in disguise. If flagged, users would face a prompt: prove your age, or allow a one-time geolocation to confirm you’re outside the UK. According to the AVPA, this process is necessary because VPNs can mask users’ actual locations, allowing them to appear as though they are in countries where age verification laws do not apply. The association points to data showing a dramatic increase in VPN use around the time the UK’s new internet rules were enforced, suggesting people are using these tools to bypass restrictions. This approach treats privacy tools as a form of defiance. Here, VPNs, once considered sensible and essential for online security, are being rebranded as suspicious. August 17th, 2025 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
August 15th, 2025 | 108 comments - (Comments are closed)
August 13th, 2025 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
These two things were separate items in the Spectator newsletter.
… and…
But of course these are not separate at all. This only ends if the UK gets a factory reset, a literal non-figurative revolution. I really hope we can vote our way out of this, but with the rise of sectarian politics inexorably turning the UK into something akin to Ulster writ large, I am by no means confident that is going to be the case. If so, I wonder what will kick off the 1642 moment? What will the sides even be? August 6th, 2025 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
It comes after Mrs Badenoch wrote in The Telegraph that Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were making “even bigger mistakes” than Ms Truss and had not learnt the lessons of her mini-budget. Responding, Ms Truss says: “It is disappointing that instead of serious thinking like this, Kemi Badenoch is instead repeating spurious narratives. I suspect she is doing this to divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated. It was a fatal mistake not to repeal Labour legislation like the Human Rights Act because the modernisers wanted to be the ‘heirs to Blair’. Huge damage was done to our liberties through draconian lockdowns and enforcement championed by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings.” – Liz Truss as quoted in an article by Daniel Martin (£) August 5th, 2025 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
My drug of choice, however, is X—though using it doesn’t really feel like much of a choice. I’m the editor of a daily politics-focused newsletter, where my duty is to provide readers with a more or less comprehensive digest of everything they need to know from the day’s news. On a normal day, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check X. The last thing I do before going to bed is check X. I browse X while I sip my morning coffee. Throughout the day, I take breaks from writing to see if anything new has hit X that I might need to incorporate into my writing. After I’m done for the day, I keep monitoring X throughout the evening to get ahead of the next day’s stories. When I try to ignore X and source my writing from the “mainstream” press, I inevitably find that The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal has omitted some critical piece of context without which it is impossible to truly understand the story. If I take too much time away from X—on weekends, for instance—I inevitably find I lose the thread of the news, and have to work doubly hard on Monday to catch up. – Park MacDougald (£) in an article about actual drugs of the performance enhancing kind. August 3rd, 2025 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
August 1st, 2025 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC says “According to Ofcom, platforms must not host, share or permit content encouraging use of VPNs to get around age checks.” I encourage the use a VPN to get around all state abridgement of people’s right to access the internet, including age checks. Say no to police state Britain, not to mention a VPN enhances your security online. July 31st, 2025 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK. Since Friday, anyone in Britain logging on to social media will have been presented with a censored, restricted version – a ‘safe’ internet, to borrow the UK government’s language. Vast swathes of even anodyne posts are now blocked for the overwhelming majority of users. The Online Safety Act was passed by the last Conservative government and backed enthusiastically by Labour. Both parties insisted it is necessary to protect children. Supposedly, its aim is to shield them from pornography, violence, terrorist material and content promoting self-harm. Age-verification checks, we were assured, would ensure that children would not be exposed to inappropriate content, but adults could continue using the internet as they please. Yet as we have seen over the past few days, on many major tech platforms, UK-based adults are being treated as children by default, with supposedly ‘sensitive’ content filtered from everyone’s view. Police state Britain needs nothing less than a revolution. July 28th, 2025 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Remember, when the grooming gangs hit the news again in January, after decades of these gangs operating, the official line from No10, repeated by the regime media, remained that ‘the real story here is the tech oligarchs spreading disinformation and the spread of the Islamophobic far right’. They briefed fake news to the media that ‘Cummings is writing Elon’s tweets’. The PM gave a speech about it. Useless regime hacks like Lewis Goodall called it ‘his best speech’. Goodall explained that the ‘real story’ is the influence of Elon, social media radicalising the right, ‘the emergence of a common UK/US online right … making extremist, until recently fringe politics mainstream in British conservatism… Far right thinking … has become mainstream. Remember that the notion of ubiquitous Muslim grooming gangs has long been a trope of extremism, despite little evidence’ — and the idea that there’s been a national conspiracy to deny victims justice ‘is dangerous nonsense’ (Goodall, Jan 2025). This was ‘the mainstream’ pundit view in SW1-media-land only 6 months ago. Being pathological and pathologically incompetent, the regime then tried to organise another layer of coverup with a report but this went wrong because the scale of evidence is so vast the author rebelled and told enough of the truth to make the No10 line untenable. Narrative Whiplash kicked in: suddenly the gangs were no longer ‘far right disinformation’, they’re real, there’ll be an Inquiry, though of course the core Insider belief hasn’t changed — the purpose of the Inquiry (from Whitehall’s perspective) is to control the story and suppress as much as possible voters connecting the collapse of border control and the systematic rape/abuse/killing of English children. July 27th, 2025 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
When Israel struck Iranian targets on June 13th, something strange happened four days later—thousands of Twitter accounts tweeting about Scottish independence just… stopped. That silence? It wasn’t just suspicious. It was evidence. In this video, I walk you through how a digital blackout in Iran exposed one of the largest Iranian disinformation operations targeting the West. Working with Cyabra, we tracked over 1,300 fake accounts—AI-generated personas pushing division in the UK, attacking the BBC, and praising Iran. And when the lights went out in Tehran, those bots vanished too. Then they came back… parroting entirely new propaganda. This is a masterclass in how modern influence warfare works—how state-sponsored actors weaponize your feed and how even silence can be a signal. July 26th, 2025 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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