Hello everyone, this is Diane Rasmussen, Makati with UK Column News. I'm really happy today to be talking with Judith Brown, who runs a really, really interesting sub stack called the Control of Information, which of course is of particular interest to me as an information scientist and librarian for many, many years. Judith, I know that you've been interviewed previously by UK Column, but just for viewers who might not have seen that interview, would you mind telling us a little bit about
yourself please? Yes, thank you very much, Diane, for inviting me to speak. My name is Judith Brown. I was a nurse in in the Middle East and in Africa. And when I was there I sort of felt that the things that I'd seen didn't relate to the things that I'd expected to see. So especially in the Middle East.
So when I came back to UK and I retired, I undertook APHD, which was looking into the way that the people influenced the media in order to create the images that they wanted to to portray. In other words, I looked at the media as a sort of as a
competing space. And following that, I did more research because when the Yemen war started, I noticed that it was getting very little media coverage, even though perhaps it should have done because, you know, UK has had a lot of links with Yemen. It was under British occupation for many, many years. And so, so I, I, I did some more investigations into story selection in that war.
And then later on I joined a group of academics and I looked into censorship, both how governments controlled information themselves and how that interacted with the the very extensive Fact Check platform group, which I think that when I was on UK column before we discussed that in in great detail. Right. So can you tell me a little bit more about your PhD work and what what you found in the results?
Well, when I did my PhD, which was at Exeter, it was called the influences on Arab imagery in the British media. And I looked at different groups that had different perspectives like British Muslims, the British government, the the Palestine lobby, the pro Israeli lobby and just different groups. And they also looked at at the commercial interests of Arab and they're the way that they portrayed themselves.
Like for example, the the Emirates airline sponsors a lot of sporting events and sporting venues. And I looked at how those interacted with the media and, and what, how how successful they were.
In fact, what I found, which I sort of didn't really expect to find was that this was at the time of the build up to the Iraq war was that in fact, it very much gave like for example, when you looked at the media coverage of the Iraq War, it wasn't really talking about Iraq. It was talking about whether America should invade. And when I interviewed peace groups in Israel, for example, and I said what makes you go to
the media? They said, well, we listened to what America says and if they say something that's that's that that's likely to be a story, then we go to the media because we're more likely to get hurt. So overall, you could see that had hegemonic influence on media coverage in UK.
But the very interesting one was the was the section where I looked at that people who had Arabs who weren't trying to influence the media, but were trying to sort of like portray themselves, like artists, like authors, like business interests. And in fact, when they were trying to portray themselves as opposed to trying to counterbalance American influence, they were much more
effective. And I thought that was, that was quite an interesting conclusion and it showed that Arabs need to sort of like relay their own narratives and their own stories rather than trying to counter a different narrative. And that was that was very interesting to me. And then I did some work for a non profit as a volunteer called Arab Media Watch where we took stories to the and that we looked at stories in the British media that portrayed Arab imagery. And we where we felt that there
was bias or inaccuracies. We, we appealed against that to the newspapers and also to the bodies that, that, that, that oversaw the, the BBC, the television companies, advertising companies and so forth. So we were reasonably successful at that. And then Arab Media Watch closed. It was, it had funding from from various Arab governments who a lot of them, like Saudi Arabia, for example, then started their
own media influencing groups. So they, so they stopped funding us and that that closed down and then and then and then the, the war began in in Yemen. And that was when I looked at story selection in particular, what made the media select one story as opposed to another story. Then I then sort of had a gap because I thought that was the end of my research days. But at the start of COVID, I
think that for two reasons. One, because I had worked for The Who and I knew all of the guidelines relating to infectious diseases because that was the bread and butter of my work. I everyday I managed media and the control of infections and that was what I did. And I could see that it wasn't as it should be.
I actually could see that big from my previous work on the media that they were using techniques that were propaganda techniques like using short phrases, reporting over all different sorts of media, the same phrases were being used. So it looked like a propaganda exercise.
And that was when I I joined Panda and started to do research there, which I'm not so much linked to Panda now I'm more independent, but I'm trying to write up all of the research that I, that I undertook when I was in Panda. So it's it's been very exciting. That is, that's very exciting and very interesting. And it's it kind of reminded me a bit of my own PhD, which was actually called news photography
image retrieval practises. And one of the things that I was looking at as someone doing a PhD in library and information science and informatics, the questions that I wanted to ask these news photographers was about how they worked with their photo archives and how they worked at the time. It was kind of when we were transitioning from from print to digital images. And so some of the historical images they still had in print in the photo library, in the
newspapers. These are some major newspapers and some of them were freelance photographers that I spoke with. But the the issue of switching to prints to digital and what did they, what were they doing with indexing and archiving their images that they needed, you know, for immediate use as
well As for historical purposes. But one of the things that they wanted to talk to me the most about was manipulation and how privately they were concerned that their work was being used to manipulate the public and spread propaganda to the point to where the photo editors that were choosing the images were manipulating the images to make the public believe something
else. And it was interesting that she mentioned the Iraq war because one example that stuck out to me was a photographer who covered the invasion of Iraq in 2003 Baghdad. And what the one of his famous images from covering that war would look like a sandstorm where there's, you know, sort of all the sand blowing around and it looks very dystopian, apocalyptic. But what he actually told me was that they had manipulated that photo to make the sand look red, when actually it was more like
a, a brown colour. And that wasn't his choice. That was the photo editor. And it was just a very, it ended up being a very interesting exploration into understanding what they do with the, the visual images and how they want to use this for, you know, the propaganda purposes. And then of course, there's, you know, like you said, the, the, the words in, in COVID, like the hands, face space and the stay tuned metres apart and all of those, these things that we were
told over and over again. But the imagery was just as bad in COVID. All of the red everywhere, all of the fear, right? This is scary red colour. Everything is red coloured. Here's the arrows, the one way arrows in them. Supermarkets were red in some cases, you know, all of these things that they used to make us try to be as afraid as possible. And, and so that that's a really
interesting thing. And I'm curious now with what's going on between Israel, Iran and everything happening in the Middle East. Have you been watching any of the recent developments and and have you had any thoughts on that? I haven't been exploring that from an academic point of view or, or I haven't done research on it in any to any great extent. I did do some research earlier on AF PS fact cheques of the, of the, the, the initial assault on Gaza in I think in the first
three months. And what was quite interesting was how they, instead of exploring the main issues, they were fact checking trivia. Like, for example, some people alleged that Palestinians were acting parts and a lot of the ones that they actually investigated were false and they
weren't sort of accurate. But there's no, there was no indication as to who posted those false pictures saying that they were incidents in Gaza and they were actually from a completely different war or from from a long time ago. Of course, that might have been, for example, people who weren't sympathetic to the Palestinians because at that time there were a lot of images that were available coming out of Gaza itself. And those weren't the ones that
they were fact checking. They were thought fact checking the ones that that were that that were false. So it so I found that quite interesting that they were always looking at trivial issues. I mean, for example, at that time they were, there was already talk of, of genocide and of South Africa taking this to the ICJ and they didn't Fact Check whether it was likely that, that, that what was happening in, in Gaza met the criteria of genocide. It was the, it was the trivia
that they were fact checking. And I think that's the only academic research that have done. But, but certainly recently you do see a lot of stories on Facebook and from doctors who, European and American who are going to Gaza in order to help out with the medical situation. And they describe what's happening. And that isn't what you see in the mainstream media or the OR
the main or the broadcast media. Although I do think that recently there have been one or two articles by quite surprising people like Friedman in the New York Times has actually questioned whether what Israeli is doing now is, is, is is positive in terms of America. So, so I think that there are some moves in the media recently.
I think just because everything is is so absolutely terrible, you know, like people queuing for food and then being shot at according to first hand accounts that that I've heard from there. But but but so I think that there is sort of a bit more concern amongst the media. Certainly there was letter sent by I think about 200 BBC employees to say that.
I think this was in the last few days to say that that they were forced to comply with an Israeli narrative instead of, you know, making up their own minds as to, as to what was the most relevant things to report about what's going on in Gaza. And so I, I think it's, it is a very challenging situation to try to get stories out of Gaza. But I think maybe the tide is turning a little because things are getting so atrocious.
Yeah, that's true. We're very lucky to have Vanessa Beeley here at UK Column. In terms of UK column, what I have noticed is that a lot of people, I've tried to refer them to UK column because I think that your coverage of the of the Middle East conflict on UK column is one of the best. I'm not saying that because you're there, but I do actually
think it's one of the best. So I have said that some Palestine solidarity groups and you should listen to UK column, especially on a Wednesday. Although other people have have covered things relating to to UK column as well, relating to the Palestine Israeli issue as well. But people have actually said to me, oh, they only do that because they're anti Semitic. And and then they sort of send me a hope not hate or some, some
of their organising. That's that's said that that UK column is is an anti Semitic organisation to prove what they're saying. And then it's very difficult because I can say to them, well, that isn't my view. Personally, I've listened to UK column for many years.
I obviously don't agree with everything that UK column says, but but in terms of the of the coverage of the Middle East, I have, I don't think it's anti Semitic And I think it's accurate, but but people just, they aren't prepared to listen. They've got this fixed view from from some website. So I think that makes it difficult for for people to to look at independent media. I mean, not only UK column, but there's other independent media sources that are very good, like
Declassified, for example. There's a lot of good stories but but it's just very difficult to persuade people to look at them because of the smearing of the independent media. No, it's something that we face constantly, obviously, just it's a constant battle. And, you know, Vanessa Beeley and Mike Robinson had been doing a Syria podcast, you know, after what happened in Syria. And Vanessa, of course, had to leave Syria and is now in Lebanon.
And they started doing a podcast for a few weeks to kind of get into the issues because they're so complex and there's so much that's happened and continues to happen. And it's difficult for us in the West maybe to understand because it's, it's so different from our reality. But that that podcast series got taken down off our YouTube channel. And, and so now Vanessa is writing a weekly blog for us, which of course I'm, I'm learning a lot from as the commissioning editor and the
copy editor. So I have to read and, and edit all of it. And, and it's interesting that we've had so far the as of today, this will be the third week that we'll have a blog, but has to stay on our own website to make sure that someone else doesn't run away with it.
So we can't, you know, put any more of these YouTube videos on because she's really uncovering and getting really into what's going on. I think the visuals are difficult because she's been including maps to help us understand which parts of Syria are being controlled by what factions and is doing what. And that does help quite a bit because it's all, it's all just so different from kind of a Western reality. And of course the language is different and and the motivations are different.
So it's all it's all quite complex. So you can't narrow all that complexity down to the two minute BBC News clip where they're told that to say you won't possibly be able to understand it.
And I think that's probably part of the reason why we have these issues with people not wanting to listen to independent media is because the BBC and the other mainstream sources have just trained us to just believe the two the 22nd clips of whatever they tell us. And then we're just supposed to go about our day and, and believe it and not question anymore. And then people get uncomfortable when you ask them to go further into it.
So I, I think we, you know, we're up against a lot, but I also think that people are starting to wake up and they're starting to pay more attention to what independent media are doing because they're starting to see through. Maybe there's more going on here than what we're actually being told on the surface by the the big channels. So I guess that brings me into what we wanted to talk about today, kind of the the main part of our interview, which is
censorship. So you got, I know we've talked before, but you got in touch with me recently about some work that you had done and published on your sub stack. So maybe if you want to summarise that work a little bit for the viewers, then we can talk about it. Well, what I've been doing on my sub stack, I've been looking at at the legislation in different countries of which UK is one of the most intrusive and censoring systems in the world I think.
And and looking at legislation in other countries. Sometimes it's very difficult to find background legislation because of language difficulties. Like for example, if when I'm looking at legislation in India, I can't read any local legislation. So I have to sort of like pick up little bits from from English speaking websites that are evaluating that.
But, but in, in other situations in, in Europe, I can get a good hang of the, of legislation as it exists, for example, and, and America and, and, and in UK. And I'm just currently writing up about South Africa, which was South America, which is something I haven't actually looked at before. And it's really interesting how the media is being controlled there. But then I'm also looking at the Fact Check industry, which is absolutely vast. It's in every single country in the world.
Well, there's fact checking platforms and where we haven't got English speaking Fact Check platforms because they're not allowed in like for example in Russia and Azerbaijan, you, you, they actually have Fact Check platforms around about that
country. Like, for example, in Russia, there's, there's Fact Check platforms in, in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the, the countries that, that surround Russia, that Fact Check on behalf of, of, of intelligence and, and, and, and Facebook and social media. So, so, but there's no country and no language in the world. They advertise in minority languages, for example, for, for fact checkers and what they, they do Fact Check.
It's absolutely true that they Fact Check, but what they Fact Check is not against truth or not against a range of opinions. They Fact Check against one particular narrative and that is the approved narrative. So, so say for example on on climate, for example, they will only look at at the narrative of the IPCC and they, and then sometimes the documents of the IPCC are quite good. They are quite open and, and and, and and give it a sort of like quite a diverse picture.
But then the summaries of the IPCC reports are all saying that, you know, human activity is causing global change and it's going to be irreversible soon. But they always go to those sorts of narratives. They, they go to experts that, that agree with, with their positions and they quote the fact that most climate scientists agree with this narrative. Now, which of course is true because the ones that in but didn't agree with with, with the mainstream narrative.
People like for example, Willie Soon, who was at Harvard, He, he, he didn't, he didn't agree with the fact that humans are the total cause of, of, of global warming. He thought that the sun had a very big impact. So of course he had to leave Harvard and he was very heavily smeared as people were saying he took money from huge of money from, from fossil fuel industry. And that's what what persuaded
him to do as he did. And and it's a bit rich from the from, from the Fact Check industry to say that because it's actually, I was very reluctant until recently to say that it's a billion dollar industry. But then information was released to say that Biden was funding, that Biden's administration was funding the fact checked industry by by billions of pounds, 1.4 billion
a year or something. And so therefore I can now say that if I've got that, if I know that that just one small portion of the, of the Fact Check industry is over a billion pounds, I can actually now openly say it's a billion # industry and the Fact Check platforms. But if, if there wasn't any censorship, they wouldn't have a job. They, you can, you can pass legislation like for example, that they were all on legislation like the DSA, the OSA in UK.
You can have moves that like for example, the BBC initiative, the trusted news initiative, But, but you have to check that there's compliance with, with those legislations and, and with those initiatives as they call them. And so you can only do that if you have a number of sort of thousands of people situated all over the world that can use algorithms and that usually it's a human machine interface to, to, to check that nobody is overstepping the mark.
And then they apply penalties because if people keep to the approved line, then they can get things like advertising revenue. Whereas if they don't, then then they are, they're denied advertising revenue. So therefore it encourages people to keep to the line. Then there was an investigation done in Fact Check platforms in Indonesia.
And some of the editors in, they said things like, well, we're actually colonised by Google. We have, we, we have to do what Google says, you know, so, so they actually use the word colonisation in, in the, in the research that was done into, into the media industry in, in Indonesia. And I'm sure that that occurs all over the world as well.
So it's it's it's essential and in order to get the global governments, you can see the effect of that because what the issues I know that you've been investigating Diane on gender, they're actually being introduced everywhere. They have been interested to see how this comprehensive sex education is being implemented in in South America recently.
And, and of course, it's occurring everywhere else, climate, COVID in exactly the same timescale across countries that some are rich, some are poor, some some are Democrat crises, some are autocracies. But the same policies have been implemented across very different countries all over the world in exactly the same time frame. Or that can only be done if you've got global governments. And you can only have global governments if you've got this system of people who can check everywhere.
So, and, but, but what I sort of like was specifically looking at, I recently did a comparison between the censorship in the United States and the censorship in Europe. But I think I sent you a copy of that and that, that was very different because it looked on the faces of it as if there was a real dichotomy. Because with the, the DSA and the Online Safety Act in UK, the OSA is exactly the same.
The, the, the actual act of censorship is, is given to the very large online, online search engines and the very large online platforms like Google, Facebook and so on. So they have the, the, they're tasked with actually doing the censorship and the, both the OSA and the DSA are very vague. I mean, what I would say is that they're engineered to be vague so that it's very difficult for, for someone like Facebook to be aware exactly where the, the line is.
So I can say this, but I can't say that because everything is, is so vague in the legislation. And then to make it worse, um, uh, the, uh, the, in your, in the EU and, um, the UK government, um, then they, uh, employ their own, um, police and courts and you know, everything is employed by, by the persons who've made the legislation. Mean in UK, for example, it's Ofcom in, in, in Europe, it's, it's more diverse.
But all of the people who check the, the, whether the DSA is being applied properly are actually appointed by the EU itself. There is no means to go to actually have lawyers fighting your case and saying actually this should be allowed or shouldn't be allowed. It's totally policed and judged and sentences passed by people appointed by the EU. And so therefore what the EU says is censorship has to be censored.
And, and So what that then means is that companies like for example, Facebook and Twitter and Google and all of the others, they have to be very, very careful on how they monitor the media because social media and the media. Because if they make any errors, then then they themselves will have to pay 6% of their global turnover, not their global profits, but 6% of their global turnover. Which obviously is is a huge penalty.
And it makes people very be overprotective of their of their own company and and and censor more than perhaps they need to in order to make sure that they don't incur these penalties. That's interesting because I, I follow a lot of different Facebook accounts of mainstream media organisations and a lot of them are, I guess that you would call them local news, but they're not local news, right? Because they're all kind of owned by the same big companies or maybe even 1.
So things like your Plymouth Live and your Glasgow Live and your Yorkshire Live and you know this, they're all owned by the same company. And because I followed them on my Facebook and I share them a lot on my Facebook, because a lot of UK column viewers will see these and kind of laugh along with me because a lot of them, they repeat something, but they make it sound so absolutely ridiculous.
I've done news segments on this before where it's like we've been told now by the government, don't hang your washing outside because that's dangerous. And then you see this so ridiculous, right? Like why can we not hang our washing outside? And then you read it and then it says, well, you might get, you know, pollen in your clothing that will cause you to have hay fever. It is just, but they make it sound so ridiculous. Or, you know, keep your keep your curtains closed all day.
Or, you know, the one I saw a couple days ago was, was pour boiling water into your rubbish bins. Like, so you know, why do these not count as, as, as untruths, right? Because these are not necessarily things that we want to do or should be doing. But they get repeated all over the country. And it's, they make it just scary enough for people to believe that maybe they should comply with whatever it is, however ridiculous it is that people will do it.
But those are all over Facebook. So is my, I don't know, my feeling is that probably they can get away with it because they are owned by these big companies that are then controlled by the, you know, whoever the powers are above them, that's stable. This is what we're going to tell everyone. There's global boiling. So stay in your house and close the curtains. Don't go outside because, you know, God forbid you enjoy the three days of summer that we have in the UK, right?
So it's, it's interesting to see how that happens. And what do you think are the forces behind that? Is that these sort of the globalist governments? Is that the UN and the WEFWHO telling everyone to do this? Well, the difficulty with Fact Check platforms or who are doing all of this content moderation or censorship or whatever you want to call it is that they only exist the censor. They don't produce a product. All that they do is is moderate
content. They might actually produce goods that help with content moderation that they can sell. Like for example, they might manufacture content moderation tools, but everything that they do is related to censorship. And so therefore, and, and some of these jobs, you know, are quite high paid for fat, for example, pays more to it's, it's, it's executives and the people who do fact checking. Then journalists get to work in main in the mainstream media.
So therefore they've got they've got good, well paid jobs, they've got mortgages. And of course, then when you go to countries like for example, Africa, where there's a graduate, it's actually find it very difficult to find employment. And then they get a job with them with a Fact Check platform. And, and it's, it's a job of prestige. It's a job with, with a good wage where they sit in, you know, maybe a nice office or sometimes they can do the work from home.
And so, so, so this is, is a very attractive job for them. And so therefore they, they're all always likely to toe the line. I, I, I have sometimes thought, do they actually really believe everything that they're fact checking? Or do they believe, well, I've got to do this in order to pay the bills? Because some of the things that they Fact Check are quite
extraordinary. But, but what I haven't noticed is when you have a major sort of a story, like for example, COVID, then everybody cheques the COVID. And when you look at the Fact Check platforms, it's COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. Now then you get past sort of like these hot button issues and and you get through a period of a relative calm, like you could say at the moment, because although there are major issues like Ukraine and Gaza, they're, they're not appearing on Fact Check sites.
Then they Fact Check quite trivial things like, for example, are you, are you if you cover your door with a wet sheet, does it act like air conditioning, for example? And other sorts of like trivial things that they're fact checked, like on one Fact Check platform it said something like if, if you will, you become I'll if you eat milk and and fish
together. And then other things that I think are quite trivial, like does did this footballer loses sponsorship, They're all things that aren't of don't aren't of great significance and which people could themselves look up and that they don't need the Fact Check platforms to do it. But when you look through the content of Fact Check platforms, a lot of them are these are these trivia.
Some of them are local issues which I can't make any comments on because the name of somebody in Africa or India or South America doesn't mean anything to me. So I, I can't Fact Check on the on the local issues, but there are issues that I can Fact Check on. And I find that that, that these trivia.
And it's as if the Fact Check platforms have to keep on fact checking during, you know, the lean times when there isn't a hot button issue to Fact Check. So they go into these trivia modes and of course you've seen I can say this is happening in the USA. The USA is Donald Trump did an executive order to say that the terms misinformation, disinformation, malinformation shouldn't be used and that people wouldn't be funded if they if, if they Fact Check so
or, or censor. So I actually had a look at some Fact Check platforms in America and I found now they've stopped using terms like Mal information and disinformation and they, they're using different terms to evaluate the, their, their,
their fact cheques. So, so that and some of them quite imaginative, but the different terms and the term disinformation, malinformation and and and miss dismissing Mal information very rarely used now use never used in terms of the valuation and a lot of the fact cheques that they're doing a very trivial in my account, I actually wrote that they didn't didn't do any fact cheques on for example, the situation in Gaza. But what they did Fact Check was
whether one particular brand of ice creams had a pro Palestinian message on the carton and said it didn't. But in effect, whether they'd said it did or whether they said it didn't is irrelevant. It's, it's a trivial issue to Fact Check. It's it, it, it's something that that wasn't, that wasn't important to Fact Check. You know, people would either get that on their on their ice
cream carton or they wouldn't. And and if they saw it on a carton and they didn't want to buy it, then they needn't buy it. But it's but it's so irrelevant and so trivial. And also I noticed that although I would say that the fact cheques were marginally not in favour of Trump, but in general the fact cheques there might have been some of them were actually supporting Trump, some of them were critical, critical of Trump.
And on balance, I would say that they were slightly critical of Trump, but these censorship of, of right wing, if there is such a thing as right wing of, of populist policies in the United States, which I have read sort of like a book. And I wanted to research episodes that seem to indicate that the populist policies, Trump and his followers were being censored far more than Biden and his and his his policies before that. I don't think you can say that's
happening. But the significant thing is the Fact Check platforms are still there. They're not going away. So that means that they when when they're when Trump leaves office, they can then move into their original mode. They they can, they can move back and they can continue fact checking as they were. And so, so of course, the win would be the Fact Check platforms worldwide were dismantled and had.
Zuckerberg being able to dismantle his censorship programme, which he actually called the censorship programme. He he said that checking had overstepped the mark and was censorship I think in January 2025. Since then he hasn't made a statement, but he said that he was going to dismantle the third party fact checking programme.
Now I think that the matter via its third party fact checking programme was actually funding at least 50% of the money that was going into these global fact checking platforms. So had that collapsed, I think that a lot of the Fact Check industry would have also had to collapse.
But they're still there. And, and of course there has been research into this and what they're saying is that really platforms like Twitter and Facebook, in the end, they will have to comply with with rules in countries like UK and, and, and Europe. And of course, there was a situation in in Brazil where X was told it had to take platforms down that that supported the ex president Bolsonaro. He tried to say that he wouldn't
do that. And in consequence, X was banned from Brazil. And ultimately Musk had to go back and do exactly as he was told by by the authorities in Brazil, legal authorities as it happened. And also we paid the 5.2 million fine. I think it's a large fly in anyway. Well, it would be large for me. I don't suppose it's large for him, but he had to pay a fine and in order to sort of get back into into Brazil and continue hosting his ex platform.
So I think that exactly the same will happen in with Musk in in Europe is currently challenging some of the things on the the DSA. He's been investigated by the DSA. I suspect he'll get a fine and he'll have to start doing exactly the same as Facebook is doing and complying with the DSA requirements.
Yeah, yeah. We've covered some different fact checking organisations on UK column quite extensively, especially Full Fact and of course Mariana Spring, who's one of our favourites to cover from the. And if you go back into Mariana Springs history and CV, she didn't, you could do some fact checking on her CV. I'll just say that to make sure that what she says on her CV is actually what happened in her past.
But it is interesting to think that, you know, these fact checking organisations around the world, I believe are in somewhat in lockstep because they all have, as you've said, similar agendas. A few weeks ago, and I covered this briefly on the news a few weeks ago, I went to an event at the University of York, which was from their Festival of Ideas conference and there was a panel about misinformation or disinformation or whatever you want to call it.
I think they were mostly using word disinformation. And the panel was a Guardian journalist, some academics from politics from the UK, and Jessica Cecil herself, who is the head of the trusted news initiatives on the panel. And at the end of it, I asked them the question and they all really staggered and stammered and didn't really know what to say because I said, you have used the word far right. I don't know how many times in this whole discussion and and
criticise Trump and populism. And what about the far left is is there a far left? Why have you not talked about them? And, you know, if you if the point of the panel, which which is it was advertised to be something where we would talk about how to end kind of the bifurcation of people of having, you know, one side or the other side. And how can we have civil discourse if we're all just going to be on one side or the
other side. And they got really defensive in their replies to me because they all just said, oh, well, you know, yeah, we talked about far right, but of course there's a left. But none of them really owned the fact that they were all just kind of attacking, as you've said, that the populist in the Trump side and just ignoring the other side. And I'm not saying that I prescribe to one side or the other because I actually don't.
I'm completely independent when it comes to any sort of political parties, as I think that is generally the case for most of us at UK column, because we think that they're all just a UNI party here in the UK, as Brian Garish calls at the UNI party where they're all just doing all the same page, right? So there's really no point in choosing because they're all going to mess up, mess up our lives regardless.
But that's what I've seen with this the, the, the looking at the different fact checking organisations is that they have their facts that they like that they're happy with, which push the narratives that they want to push. And then that's what that's what we get is as a response. Well, this is, this is right and this is wrong. And that's not always the case when you actually look at the
content of of their results. So when you were looking at these different perspectives in Europe and the US and, and other places that you've been looking at, did you find this this most recent work that you've published? Did you, can you talk a little bit about the differences that you noticed or the similarities amongst the different countries? I think that there was a big difference in as much as the DSA said that if you didn't censor, you were going to be fine.
And then this new executive order signed by Trump said that if you do censor, you're going to be fined. And of course, that puts a particular burden onto groups that were that that had to do the censorship activities in Europe because they were going to be running to sort of like
completely different systems. And obviously people like Americans could post something in America which could which, which would be illegal in in Europe, even though they, they posted that post on American soil. It's quite interesting because there's a researcher called Mike Benz who he is an advocacy of free speech and is against censorship. He's done quite a lot of research. He's got a abject platform called Foundation for Freedom Online and has done quite a lot
of research. And he said that that in effect, the the US government, because of the 1st Amendment, because it couldn't actively say that it was censoring Americans, it actually put pressure on other countries, like for example, the DSA and in Europe and the USA and UK and also other countries in the world to pass legislation that would operate in such a way that Americans would be censored.
And also on the Twitter Files, the which was this investigation into the, the communications between the Biden government and social media platforms. But there was some correspondence there between between America and and Europe released in the Twitter Files that actually demonstrated that pressure had been put on Europe. And in terms of, of, of laying out the Digital Services Act in such a way that it would
interfere with American rights. Because as you know, the the 1st Amendment in America stops the US government from interfering with free speech, but it doesn't, for example, stop American companies interfering with free speech and it doesn't stop foreign governments from interfering with Americans free speech. So it's the the onus is only on
on the American government. So therefore, there was pressure put on and on to the governments, for example, to write their legislation in a ways that it was likely to curtail the free expression of Americans. I don't know whether you know, but I couldn't, I looked a long time, I couldn't find anything in Europe, but of course it might have been written in different languages.
But but I did find that 2 American platforms have have withdrawn from UK because of the OSA, because they just think that the legislation is too onerous to to to be certain that they're not overstepping the mark bit. Shoot, and, and Gab, I think they were, and also there's one American who's been told that he's going to be prosecuted under the OSA in UK for, for what he's posted on on the Internet. So, so, so therefore this legislation is working to sort of like censor American free
speech. So far nothing has been done about it, although the American administration has said that it will follow up on this, but nothing has been done so far. But so therefore it's it seems as if the the Digital Service Act is, if you like, a back door to censor, censoring American
opinions when they're online. No, that's, that's really interesting because you know, the, I went to a conference years ago of I think this was 2008 around governance of the Internet. And that was one of the questions that we were kind of trying to explore was who owns the Internet really? Nobody, right.
So the idea is that, for example, if this one of the things that we sort of defaulted to over the years is that, for example, if servers for the website that you're using, so say it's Facebook and it's Zuckerberg and the servers are based in California. Then if something happens, if, whether it's censored or whether it's, you know, somebody is inciting violence or whatever it is they want to try to get people in trouble for, then that is based on that jurisdiction of
that country in America, regardless of whether or not the person was in the UK or America or somewhere else. But it seems like the legislation, as you're saying here has, has been changing to make things a little bit more complicated. I know we've talked well, especially Mike Robinson has talked extensively and covered the Online Safety Act in the UK in recent times. What can you tell us about that? Do you know anything about that from your perspective in your research?
Well, the Online Safety Act, it was, they were talking about passing this act for some time, but in the end they didn't get round to passing it until just after the DSA was passed in Europe. And some people think that that was purposeful, that what they were trying to do was to make sure that the, that the conditions imposed on by the Online Safety Act and the Digital Services Act were broadly similar. And, and they are broadly similar. It's, they're almost like carbon
copies. So, so, so the people who were saying that may well have been right, although I've not got evidence of that, but it looks as if that's, that's a strong possibility. And I think that most people are like a completely unaware of the of, of the, the extent that the Online Safety Act can actually affect ordinary people. And of course they are arresting a number of people.
I think it's 30 a day, according to the Free Speech Union or detaining, if not arresting for, for their online content in Uki mean it's it's, it's phenomenal. And there's somebody that said that did a tweet, which she sent out a tweet. She realised it was a horrible tweet. So within 15 minutes she deleted it. But but now she's in, she's a young mother with young children and she's imprisoned for 31 months for this tweet, which she
agrees. She's she, she, she doesn't disagree that it was an offensive tweet. She, she absolutely says that it was offensive. But but the but as this she herself realised this and and erase this tweet so quickly. It just seems incredible that she's got a 31 month sentence, which of course is not only a sentence for her, but it's also a sentence for her children who are deprived of them mother for that time, which of course is a very difficult thing for children.
So so I think that people in UK aren't aware of the extent of it. Also. The other thing is that it, it makes a lot of both, I think the DSA and the on the Online Safety Act, they, they make a lot of issue about this media literacy, which on the face of it, media literacy sounds a good thing because people need to be stay safe online, especially children, but even adults are subject to fraud and things like this online. So on, on the face of it, it seems like a sensible thing.
And this Ofcom is in charge of that. And just to give you an extent of the size of it, I could only find about half a dozen Fact Check platforms in UK. OK, but I found something like 170 media literacy groups in UK. It's much, much bigger than fact checking. And what it it's just the form of, of, of brainwashing. I mean, I've done quite a lot of media literacy courses myself just to try them out and see what what happens.
I've done media literacy courses for children, for adults, for seniors and so forth, some for journalists as well and online. And so, so I should be completely brainwashed now, but but the children's ones, they're very sort of like captivating in cartoons. And for example, the, the person in who does the game, he thinks that he's, he's a sort of like an evil person who wants to spread this information.
He's always an evil person. So he does these various things for money and for fame and glory and whatever in order to try to sort of like win people over to his way of thinking.
And then of course, children who have done these media literacy courses then start thinking that anybody who's says anything online that's different to what the government says or what the teacher says or whatever are doing it because they're going to get famous or because they're going to people are going to like them or because they're going to get lots of money.
So they don't. So, so then for example, you get many doctors, for example, supported the COVID narrative, but also many doctors didn't support the COVID narrative. But then if anybody hears the doctor that didn't support the COVID narrative, then they think that maybe he's he's a quack or not a real doctor or he's or he's trying to, to get famous. They don't think of him as as a person who's trying to get
across a message. But when you look at the Fact Check platforms for adults, they always refer you to sources such as The Who, the governments and mainstream media. And, and then they, they sort of like they tell you to do this, these searches. So if you find the name of somebody like for example, yourself, I might, you might say something. And I think, oh, that sounds pretty sensible, But if I was and looked up your name, I haven't done it, but so I'm just assuming.
So if I looked up your name, what it would what would happen is that various stories would come up first telling me that you're a conspiracy theorist and that you've been that you've you were forced to leave your job as in the university and you know, things that actually smear you. So that then I would look at a, the article that you've read or the, the, the video that you've made for the speech that I've heard in, in the context of the fact that you weren't a very good person.
And that would make me want to think maybe I won't believe this thing that Diane says after all. So it's, so it's it, it's, it's the way that they teach you to do searches is, is, is is in itself likely to influence your position. So say, for example, they're talking this, they're talking about alternative news platforms at one point on several courses that have done. And then they say, oh, they look like as if they're real platforms.
They look as if they're, you know, the real thing and that and that that they're really going to offer you a good source of news. But, but, but this is a way of of sort of fooling you into, into sort of like listening to what they've got to say. So they sort of so, so they discredit sort of alternative media sites. So it, it, it really is a very problematic sort of issue, Diane, getting these, getting your story out.
And of course, I mean, the, the ironic thing of all is that Facebook have told me that that anything that I post won't be disseminated. So because I'm writing about censorship, Facebook have completely censored me.
So there you go. And so I, I, I don't post any of UK column things anymore, except that sometimes I'm say, if it's something that you've done about the Gaza issue, I might post it onto a, a site like, for example, a Palestine solidarity group, a local Palestine solidarity group. But apart from that, I, I just don't, there's no point in me sharing anything because you know, it, Facebook have told me that my posts go nowhere now. So so it's mainly very
disinterested in social media. Yeah, what what's happened to me on my Facebook and X platforms is the more UK column viewers that have followed me or sent me friend requests is. It actually has helped me a bit because even if they they wanted to censor the content, I am getting probably not as many likes and comments as I would if I were posting mainstream content, but because. People know my name now and they know they know that I'm on the platform here at UK Column.
So when I share things, what happens is on X, all of my followers are at least I would say, affiliated with our way of seeing things on Facebook. I have a combination of people from my former life as an academic and UK Column viewers. So my Facebook friends get into some really good debates sometimes that I don't even participate in. I just let them do it, right? Because all of the academics bought into the COVID narrative. I didn't. I'm one of the rare few who didn't.
But then all of the UK column viewers know what happened. And then there's this back and forth about, what do you mean? The reason that there's so many excess deaths is because of all the unvaccinated people that died of COVID without actually knowing what they're talking about. And then you have the other side coming in and yelling at them.
And so it's a very, very interesting thing to watch happen between the very large range of different types of people that I now have following me on Facebook. And I'm really surprised that the academics have not unfollowed me or unfriended me at this point because they just get angry at what I post now, which is really kind of funny. I know we're just about out of time here, unfortunately. This has been a great discussion.
Is there anything else that you would like to add that you haven't had a chance to say already? The only thing that I would like to add is that I've been very disappointed recently in, in the way that Trump and Vance have implemented their executive order in the USA, because what they're doing is increasing surveillance massively, for example, at airports. And, and also they're building
these new tech tech labs. They're actually having feared with, with free speech of journalists who say things that they don't want to say. And of course they've done a lot of censorship of the, of the Israel Palestine conflict. So, so I, I, I just think that you might hear a speech that you really like, like the JD Vance speech, but you really need, you still have to stay on high alert.
Even if somebody's saying what you think you want to hear, you have to stay on high alert because on both sides there are sort of people who, who mislead you.
And I think that the most important thing of all, Diane, is for people to, who have diverse viewpoints to be able to sit down respectfully and talk to each other in without, without using derogatory terms like conspiracy theorists or sheeple or whatever, without using any derogatory terms and to listen respectfully to what the other side says. Because that's if you like the people who want to rule the world, the most important thing for them is to keep us divided.
But, but we need to, to be able to communicate. And unfortunately, legislation is, is, is trying to hinder us from doing that. But, but nonetheless, we must find ways of communicating with people who've got the opposite viewpoint and and to listen to them, maybe modify our own views and and then maybe they will also modify their views because it's only by us working together that we're going to overcome this, this global governments which is being fast installed
all over the world. Couldn't agree more with you and all of that. What I will say about Trump and Vance, and I said this from the beginning, when they started issuing these executive orders, that it was all a distraction anyway. That they, they put out executive orders that they knew that their voters would like to hear about with the, you know, ending the DEI and ending the
gender stuff. And, but in the background, what's happened now, you know, all of the, the deals that's going on with the Israeli government and everything else that we've been covering in recent weeks, that those were the things that I believe that they were distracting us from. But it's, it's all a lot of myths cause confusion, distraction, breakdown of society, all of these things
that we talked about. But you're absolutely right that if we, we have to have conversations and they're making it, trying to make it as impossible as they can to make sure that we don't talk to each other. And then it creates division. Then, you know, some people are, are worrying about is there going to be civil war in the US, civil war in the UK Because, you know, our governments are attacking us, we're attacking the other side. We're, we're picking fights and calling names.
But you're right, that's absolutely what they want. And that's why I like to come here and have open conversations, things that are always well sourced as you do as well that we know the importance of sourcing and, and that you can actually track back and see that no, we're, we're not making stuff up. This is all here. This is all accurate and that's very important to us.
That UK column, and for me in particular as the, I'll call myself the Mariana Spring, if you can call them, I hope that doesn't spread because I like to be the one that, you know, makes, makes sure as the librarian that works for us, that we're all sourcing things, especially in the written content that I'm not responsible for as our commissioning editor. But thank you again today for such a great conversation.
I hope that this will inspire some people to potentially reach out and at least be respectful of people who don't see things the same way. I think that by preventing free speech from happening, especially in some cases, the speech that the governments don't like, I think unfortunately are the ones who tend to be the targets.
But we have to be above that. And it has to start with us individually and with the groups that we associate with and who we talk to and how we choose to talk to them. So I really want to support you on that point, and I hope that this will inspire our viewers to do the same, even if some days it might not feel like that's what you want to do. But thank you again for your time today. Again, this is Diane Rasmussen Mckelly with UK column News.
I've just had a wonderful conversation here with Doctor Judith Brown. And thank you again, Judith, for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Diane. Thank you. Thank you for your time. I've really enjoyed the interview.