Should you be able to call the members of an opposition political party stupid? This should be a very easy question to resolve unless you are some sort of fascist. However, in an exchange on X former MP Miriam Cates seemed somewhat disappointed that the answer was “yes of course” and not “yes… but there will be consequences”.
During the ugly years of peak woke, people would often resort to the phrase “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences,” as they sought to explain why they were calling up people’s employers in mobs to try to have them made redundant for making a joke. Of course, this wasn’t a justification for why people needed to be reprimanded by their employers for their online conduct, it was simply a shorthand to establish there needed to be consequences because the mob was angry. The firing was a punishment to pursue and would satisfy the call for blood. With a name and a location, it was easy enough to find the employer, who could be told the company’s reputation was under threat, and that the workplace was about to become a hostile environment for minorities because the caller was busy sending the offending joke to every employee of the company.
The recency of this environment is what makes it all the more concerning that Cates thinks there should be “serious professional repercussions” for calling her “braindead.”
Because the cancellation mob had been born as a political tool by the time I was in my mid-teens, I elected largely to use pen names or remain anonymous when talking about politics on the internet. It is actually bizarre and unnecessary to demand that people reveal their appearance, social rank and Christian name to you to discuss tax policy — the arguments can stand on their own merits. Further, we were all told not to put controversial things online at school because employers would look you up and you wouldn’t want them to see the pictures of you vomiting at a house party on Facebook, as was the fate of a few millennials with their careless early internet habits.
Cates, however, comes to the internet from the perspective of a concerned mother, not a teenager who wants to read about the world. Probably her keenest political focus is ensuring that no teenage boy in Britain can view pornographic material because it traumatises them and turns them into sex pests like Andrew Tate. I am not going to litigate the veracity of that pattern of events but it is probably true that unless teenage boys need an ID to access any part of the internet, some of them are going to find porn. If the porn causes the boys to become uncontrollable violent predators, then clearly it becomes society’s responsibility to keep this out of their hands. But if you take a milder view that the porn is only personally damaging, then this should surely be the responsibility of the parents to deal with in their own households? Alas this is impossible because every teenage boy has a phone their parents have given to them, and they will show each other the porn in school if there happens to be a child with feckless parents in class. As such there is no solution but age verification for anywhere on the internet one could find porn, which is any website that can host a JPEG. A handy totalising logic.
Unfortunately, this brings Cates’ interests necessarily into conflict with a law-abiding person who wishes to use a pseudonym. To ID all the children, you must also ID all the adults. One might object that they do not trust social media sites to keep their ID documents safe and they would be right to be worried: Discord has already managed to lose 70,000 IDs after strengthening age verification. Further, it would be laughably naïve to assume the UK’s rules on de-anonymisation will remain stable. A change of ownership of Twitter and the Labour government could start pestering the moderation and support teams for the IDs of random members of the public to give to Hope not Hate.
However, Cates has developed more extensive thinking, beyond a porn-addled logic trap, on why I need an ID to talk to her. This appears in a 2024 ConHome article where she outlines that free speech is not “the anonymous right to say whatever you wish to unlimited numbers of people anywhere in the world with no legal or social repercussions.” She notes that pre-internet anonymous communication was “cowardly and underhand,” and that “‘Poison pen’ letters, and even the famous anonymous pamphlets of the 18th century were illegal.” All this, she says, was a “safeguard for democracy” — the likes of which need to be restored to protect the system from anonymous trolls. As such the de-anonymisation becomes a feature and not just a by-product of her anti porn crusade.
In the 21st century, our mechanisms for imposing social pressures were much the same as Cates describes in her article and tweets: you lose social standing, face stigma, and may face professional consequences. Now, obviously, Yusuf will not face any professional consequences. Politics is the business of convincing voters that your opponent is an idiot, it would be ludicrous for anyone to tell Yusuf off for doing it. One suspects Cates really means she is unhappy because she intends to show up with a Reform rosette at some point and Yusuf knows what he is doing driving a wedge between her and the party. But for ordinary people, the social pressures and stigma attached to wrongthink have been the centre of the woke debate which has dominated politics for much of Cates’ time working in it. The battle over freedom of expression with employers is an important reason why her own (GB News) even exists.
Yusuf’s mention of China raises the question of what he is warning against. China has an extensive censorship network behind the firewall and while some of it does extend to jailing opposition and disappearing people, much more of the enforcement is done through the social credit system in which one’s prospects for elite jobs in any industry crater if you feel the need to be politically interesting. The party is embedded in major corporations and will reprimand people for deviating from the party line.
It is … completely unforgivable to be on the right while pursuing the conditions of 2020 censorship
This is not all that different to parts of the Western system for enforcing controls on speech if you force all the users to reveal their names and addresses. We have human resources departments to consider whether your online activities bring the company into disrepute, which is little more than considering whether it is socially acceptable to people of a woke disposition. These departments are also tasked with ensuring the company carries out its duties under equalities law correctly and setting up various initiatives for the promotion of diversity and equality. Clearly these cadres are not going to be friendly to anyone with conservative views.
The question is why Miriam Cates thinks that it is a good idea to increase the degree to which the sort of people who choose to work in HR should have more say over the career prospects of those on the right? As I have outlined, it is not simply that her campaign to prevent porn necessitates this, she is building a case why this outcome is good. It is, however, completely unforgivable to be on the right while pursuing the conditions of 2020 censorship because you are upset people are rude to you on the internet.
