United Kingdom

They actually did it.

The discussion of illegal immigration is now verboten. Seems like an odd thing to include in that list.

This isn't going to get abused at all.

surprise surprise, Fishy Sunak reveals his true colours and sends out his lunatic generals to spin the news. The measures we need are already not good enough, now hes messing about with jobs and investment in order to find something to hit Labour with. Pathetic spineless wankers

Ofcom has found that a GB News show presented by two Tory MPs breached its impartiality rules. However, the regulator only scalded the far-right media outlet over it not airing differing views. Ofcom failed to rule against the fact that two sitting Conservative MPs were posing as journalists interviewing a sitting Conservative minister.

The problem here isn’t the fact GB News is a screeching, far-right foghorn amplifier. At the Canary we’ve never claimed to be impartial. They and we are private entities, and that’s our right in the UK. However, while GB News can present its programming with whatever ideological stand point it wishes, it should not be allowing sitting politicians to do it.

The UK’s democracy is already a shambolic farce, which has become increasingly worse in recent years. Allowing sitting MPs to present news programmes is the thin end of the wedge. Ofcom, with all the might of a drain fly, is failing to act quickly enough to stop this practice before even more damage is done.

winderful.uk

Or in other words "Megacorp reminds you that it can and will decide to ~~pocket~~ cut your income based on the court of public opinion".

This is not a discussion about the allegations against him, this is about the fact that Google have decided to ~~pocket the income they would otherwise be giving him (not taking down the videos, oh no, they're probably bringing in even more ad revenue now!) without any convictions or similar~~. Not that Google is an employer (I'm sure they consider payments they make to video uploaders to be some kind of generous untaxable gift), but should an employer have the power to take away a source of income based on allegations, no matter how heinous?

Edit: seems they're actually not putting ads on his videos at all now, which was a surprise to me

The report sent to the then home secretary by the former chair of the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs highlighted a number of serious concerns around criminalising drug use. It is the only ACMD report not to have been published.

It said there was “little consistent international evidence that the criminalisation for possession of drugs for personal use is effective in reducing drug use”, that the UK was not required to criminalise drug use under its treaty obligations, and that criminalisation harmed people’s educational and employment prospects.

Since then, Brand’s reach has exploded. His YouTube channel now has 6.6 million subscribers, his X account more than 11 million followers. But his anti-establishment message has morphed, from a broader, almost coherent response to the politics of fiscal austerity that shaped the UK after the 2008 financial crisis to a series of cultish, conspiracy-driven narratives that draw in Covid denialism, Russian disinformation, and the far-right-inspired “Great Reset” theory, united by the meta-conspiracy that the mainstream—the “elites”—have darker agendas based on control.

...

One of Brand’s alleged victims, speaking on the BBC, called his statement “insulting” and “laughable.” But within the alt-media, there was a show of support from figures including Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer who is awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking in Romania, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News anchor, who now runs a conspiracy-inflected show on X, and Alex Jones, fined $1.5 billion for lies about the victims of a school shooting. X’s owner, Elon Musk, posted underneath Brand’s video: “Of course. They don’t like competition”—referring, apparently, to those same dark forces referenced by the comedian. The camaraderie between conspiracy theorists, the alt-right, and the “manosphere,” is grimly predictable. Their shared narrative is one of alienation from the mainstream, outsiderdom, and dark forces massing to thwart them. “Opposite day, but with real consequences for people,” as Marc Owen Jones, an expert on disinformation and social media at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar, puts it.

It’s also their audience strategy and the foundation of their business model. Conspiracy influencers are content producers. Moments that generate intense emotions—even if the content producer is, themself, the focus of the scandal—are fantastic for engagement, and they feed the grim economics of the conspiracy business.

Brand’s YouTube channel is a compendium of contemporary bullshit. Covid lockdowns were exercises in social control. The US has “biolabs” in Ukraine; the West’s support for Ukraine is capitalist imperialism. Central bank digital currencies are the government’s attempts to control your money. Evolving gender norms are causing a “crisis in masculinity” and declines in fertility. There are routine crossovers between Brand’s content and the wider conspiracy cinematic universe, with clips on his channels of conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Junior, far-right Hungarian president Viktor Orban, and Carlson, who recorded an interview with Brand in August.

“I think Russell Brand’s a particularly interesting case,” Joe Ondrack, head of investigations at Logically, a misinformation tracking company, says. “He follows a lot of the ostensibly health yoga retreat, kind of left-leaning, anti-capitalist figures who got really suckered into Covid skepticism, Covid denialism, and anti-vax, and then spat out of the Great Reset at the other end.”

Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Theresa May are among the Conservative MPs who have accepted more than £275,000 in donations-in-kind from airport operators, while Conservative Party HQ has also taken more than £13,500 in donations from airport operators. It comes as the government signals its backing for airport expansions, in contrast with advice from its own climate advisers that adding runways to Heathrow and Gatwick would be incompatible with the UK’s net zero goals.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/3552643