So what is "free speech" and does it

actually matter?

There is yet more in today's paper about the demand of our government to the owner of X (Twitter). 

"Remove that footage or face a fine!" the government is declaring. "It is violent. It is extremist. It will do harm."

The footage in question was, up to a certain point in the clip, aired on national television. It had gone around the world many times, been shared many more times before the government acted. By then it was simply too late to do anything about it.

Rightly or wrongly the owner of X challenged the move. There is now a major problem where there could have been a minor one. The government has moved itself into a position where it is actually saying, "We control social media, not you. We can decide what people will see." 

I have absolutely no issue at all with people being prosecuted for posting violent, extremist, racist or other vile footage. We should come down on them hard and fast. Whether we can control and demand the owner of X for it however is another story.  Is it something which would give a government control of what we see? Would it allow them to censor "misinformation" they do not want us to see?

It is possible it could. Under sec. 51(v) of our Constitution the government has the power to make laws about "postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services". That certainly covers the internet. Imagine having the power to control the internet. The government does in North Korea. Most people there know very little about the outside world and they are not permitted to travel either. It is one of the many ways in which the government keeps such tight control over the population.

No, we won't go that far but the government is seeking to control what we see and hear. They are anxious, or so they claim, to prevent the spread of "misinformation". That can all too easily mean anything they disagree with or anything that might harm their control over us. 

I don't know anyone who disagrees with the idea that the climate is changing but I do know people who disagree with the ideas about why it is changing. Even people who agree will disagree with how it should be handled. But then comes something interesting. Ask people what the biggest problem is and those words "carbon emissions" will come up over and over again. We have to be "carbon neutral" we are told. Someone I know who works in a very senior capacity in environment, a trained scientist, told me not so long ago that carbon emissions make up 0.04 of the atmosphere - and we actually need at least 0.03 of those in order to survive. In other words it is not the problem we make it out to be. There are problems but they are not the problems we are being told about. It is convenient for the government to let us go on believing this though because they have invested vast sums of money in telling us this. This is in no way to deny we need to do something about the environment - and do it quickly - but it may be that carbon emissions are not the main source of the problems we face.  Misinformation from the government and other sources will allow us to go on believing otherwise. It may be that we are also being misled about other problems because of what the government wants us to know.

I may be very misinformed. I am almost certainly misinformed about a lot of things but I do not want to be further misinformed because the government has control of what I can and cannot see. Violence and real harm can be dealt with in other ways.