If Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t such a mong, he would use the recent policies coming from from the Tories and Thersa May, the ones I’m about to show you, to his advantage. Then again, he’s pretty much doomed no matter what, so whatever. Still, if you’re a free speech proponent and this new push from May and the Conservatives doesn’t send a shiver up up your spine, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe you’re not that bright. And yes, I realize there’s already a lot more internet censorship in the United Kingdom than there is here in the States, but that’s no reason to sit back and let this shit slide without a fight.

The Independent outlined the new proposals earlier today. It’s not some liberal media plot, though. It’s taken directly from the Conservative Party manifesto:

Theresa May is planning to introduce huge regulations on the way the internet works, allowing the government to decide what is said online.

Particular focus has been drawn to the end of the manifesto, which makes clear that the Tories want to introduce huge changes to the way the internet works.

“Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet,” it states. “We disagree.”…

[T]he phrasing indicates that the government intends to introduce huge restrictions on what people can post, share and publish online.

The plans will allow Britain to become “the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet”, the manifesto claims…

It comes just soon after the Investigatory Powers Act came into law. That legislation allowed the government to force internet companies to keep records on their customers’ browsing histories, as well as giving ministers the power to break apps like WhatsApp so that messages can be read.

The manifesto makes reference to those increased powers, saying that the government will work even harder to ensure there is no “safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online”. That is apparently a reference in part to its work to encourage technology companies to build backdoors into their encrypted messaging services – which gives the government the ability to read terrorists’ messages, but also weakens the security of everyone else’s messages, technology companies have warned.

Well, that sounds just swell! I wonder if this can get any worse…

The government now appears to be launching a similarly radical change in the way that social networks and internet companies work. While much of the internet is currently controlled by private businesses like Google and Facebook, Theresa May intends to allow government to decide what is and isn’t published, the manifesto suggests.

The new rules would include laws that make it harder than ever to access pornographic and other websites. The government will be able to place restrictions on seeing adult content and any exceptions would have to be justified to ministers, the manifesto suggests.

The manifesto even suggests that the government might stop search engines like Google from directing people to pornographic websites. “We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm,” the Conservatives write. 

What in the fuck! And guess what? We still haven’t reached the bottom of the Big Brother barrel…

The Conservatives will also seek to regulate the kind of news that is posted online and how companies are paid for it. If elected, Theresa May will “take steps to protect the reliability and objectivity of information that is essential to our democracy” – and crack down on Facebook and Google to ensure that news companies get enough advertising money.

Needless to say, this is one of the most cancerous proposals I have ever seen in my entire life. I know you Brits don’t have the same cult of free speech that we Americans do, but these proposals are legitimately scary to me. The meager internet freedom you have left is about to be torpedoed by the Conservatives in Parliament and the opposition parties are too weakened to do anything about. That’s assuming, you know, that they would actually want to do anything to stop this in the first place. I’m not at all convinced that they would.

The only hope to stop this coming down the pike is massive public outrage, both inside and outside Conservative Party.