Check out Another Angry Voice on Substack

During the Another Angry Voice heyday I was getting huge amounts of traffic from Facebook and Twitter, but I've gradually been tuned down to such an extent that links I post to this blog are now virtually invisible to the 400,000 people who follow AAV across these platforms.

During the 2017 General Election Facebook virality made me the most shared political writer of the entire election campaign. Three of my articles achieved over a million hits each (the #1, #2, and #7 most shared articles of the entire campaign), and almost all the other articles easily passed 100,000.

These days AAV has been tuned down so much that it's a rarity when one of my increasingly rare blog posts beats 10,000 hits, which equates to a 90%+ collapse in visibility since 2017, despite my follower count continuing to rise slightly.

The Facebook algorithm has basically made AAV invisible to 97% of the people who follow the page, including many thousands who have explicitly asked for AAV to be prioritised in their feed via the "see first" option.

I've basically got no choice at this point but to try to diversify my social media presence, and creating a new AAV Substack seems like the logical pace to start.

Substack is like a blog host, social media account, fundraiser, and mailing list all rolled into one.

The main benefit is that there is no dodgy social media censorship algorithm between me and my Substack audience, deciding on their behalf that the majority of them no longer want to to see any of my content.

If you follow me on there, you'll get notifications every time I put up a new post, unless you decide to unsubscribe for yourself.

I'll aim to do around five posts per week to begin with to avoid overwhelming people with too much stuff.

I'll continue posting things on Facebook too, because I still have a huge audience there. But the new plan is to try to build Substack up as a kind of "inner circle" for my most supportive and enthusiastic readers.

I fully expect the majority of Substack subscribers to choose the free option, but if you can afford to sign up for a paid subscription you will be helping me out enormously, and supporting me to keep producing more content.

Here's the link:

Another Angry Voice on Substack

Thanks everyone,

Tom (Another Angry Voice)
 

The shocking truth about Saudi Arabia that Facebook doesn't want you to know

In March 2022 Facebook deleted one of my posts about the tyrannical government in Saudi Arabia, and accused me of "hate speech".

I was allowed to appeal, but only by clicking a button saying that I disagreed with their decision. There was absolutely no means of submitting evidence that what I'd said was true.

The deleted image, and
Facebook's warning

The deleted post made a number of claims about Saudi Arabia, which I will substantiate in this article.

"The Saudi tyranny just mass executed 81 people"

This is a completely uncontroversial statement of fact.

This barbaric mass execution was widely reported across scores of media sources, including the BBC, left-leaning outfits like Byline Times and hard-right broadcasters like GBNews (archived) It was also condemned by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. 

Saudi Arabia is "committing war crimes in Yemen"

Saudi Arabia's ongoing bombardment of Yemen hardly gets a fraction of the coverage of Putin's attack on Ukraine, but that doesn't mean that it isn't happening.

Human Rights Watch have documented multiple Saudi war crimes in Yemen, and it should be widespread knowledge that the Saudis have bombed all kinds of civilian targets from funeral gatherings, to children's school busses.

Saudi Arabia "fund and support terrorism"

In 2016 Hillary Clinton's leaked emails demonstrated that the US government were well aware that Saudi Arabia were funding terrorism in Syria.

Furthermore US President Joe Biden has openly admitted that Saudi Arabia provided "hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons" to Al Qaida's successor organisations in Syria.

Then there's Boris Johnson, who accused Saudi Arabia of "twisting Islam" and conducting proxy wars across the middle east.

Saudi Arabia have also provided funds to terrorist insurgencies in Afghanistan, which led to the creation of Al Qaida, and the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, in which 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis.

Saudi Arabia "brutally repress political opposition"

Saudi Arabia's repression of political opposition is well documented. Amnesty International reports that in Saudi Arabia freedom of expression, association, and assembly are all repressed.  

Their repression of political dissent is so extreme that they've even sentenced a 14 year old child to death for attending a pro-democracy march!

It's hardly hateful conduct to point out that one of the most tyrannical regimes on earth is politically repressive.

Saudi Arabia "dismember critical journalists"

This is clearly a reference to the Jamal Khashoggi assassination, where the Saudi regime lured him to the Saudi embassy in Turkey, where they tortured him, murdered him, dismembered his body, and dissolved it in acid. 

The murderers then reportedly took Khashoggi's severed fingers back to the Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salmen as a trophy, because he'd boasted that he'd cut off the fingers of any writer who criticised him.

Khashoggi was just one of the dissidents and critical journalists targeted for assassination by the so-called "Tiger Squad".

Saudi Arabia are "misogynists and homophobes"

Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive regimes on earth for women's rights, and they still have the death penalty for homosexuality.

Even when they don't condemn homosexuals to death, they dish out utterly barbaric punishments like public lashings, and long prison sentences.

Saudi Arabia "threaten terrorist attacks against western countries to get their own way"

The Saudi regime famously threatened terrorist attacks against Britain in order to get an investigation into corrupt arms deals shut down, and during a spat with Canada a verified Saudi Twitter account posted a photoshopped picture of a 9/11 style terrorist attack against Canada!

Boris Johnson went to Saudi Arabia to "grovel for more oil"

Johnson's grovelling trip to Saudi Arabia was widely reported. And the reason for his visit was repeatedly given as seeking an oil deal in an attempt to reduce reliance on Russian energy supplies.

Conclusion

I've substantiated every single assertion in the banned infographic, but the truth simply doesn't matter to Facebook.

They've set up reporting systems that are incredibly easy to game. Whether a post is true or not is completely irrelevant. The simple truth is that if the post gets mass reported, then it'll be deleted as hate speech, no matter how easy it is to substantiate literally all of the points.

What we're witnessing is an absurd weaponisation of liberal language in order to erase fact-based criticism of probably the most illiberal regime on earth.

Defenders of this disgusting regime are gaming Facebook's report functions, and using the language of anti-racism to pretend that truthful criticism of Saudi Arabia is racist hate speech.

And by going along with these tactics, Facebook are complicit in attacking the truth.

The deletion of my post came with a warning that the Another Angry Voice Facebook page is under threat of deletion, so if it does disappear, you'll know that one of the main reasons it was deleted out of existence was the fact that I chose to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia, and instead of standing up for the truth, Facebook stood with the tyrannical regime to attack me for telling the truth.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

8 ways to over-ride Facebook's censorship algorithm

As regular readers will know, the Another Angry Voice Facebook page has been having its posts hidden from its audience for over two months, based on ludicrous and unappealable accusations that links to facts and evidence constitute "spam".

Even before Facebook imposed these ridiculous and unjustifiable sanctions, the Facebook algorithm has been making Another Angry Voice, and a whole host of other independent left-leaning media sites, far less visible to their followers since 2018.

As a result of these changes to the algorithm, the vast majority of the 377,000 people who follow Another Angry Voice on Facebook never see a single post from it, from one month to the next.

Here are eight tips for trying to over-ride Facebook's censorship algorithm.

1. Weed: One very simple trick to improve your Facebook feed is to weed the pages that you follow. Go to your follow list and unfollow anything you’re not interested in any more.

2. Prioritise: Go into the "follow settings" on the Another Angry Voice page, and set it as one of your "favourites", this means you'll be much more likely to see AAV content in the future.

3. Reboot: (no need to do this if you did step 2). Go to your list of followed pages, then for any you particularly like Unfollow the page and immediately Follow again. This makes it look like the page is a ‘new interest’, which will give it priority in the algorithm.

4. Interact: Regularly interact with the Facebook pages that you particularly like (like, comment, share). The more you do this, the more you'll be shown their content in your Facebook feed. Even if it's just hitting the "like" button and leaving a one word/emoji comment on each post you see from them, this prioritises the page in your feed (I absolutely guarantee that no page owner is going to be annoyed at likes and/or one word/emoji replies).

5. Bookmark: Save the Another Angry Voice Facebook page as a bookmark in your usual web browser, and check in on it every now and then to see what the Facebook algorithm hasn't been showing you.

6. Backup: Follow the dormant AAV backup page Yet Another Angry Voice, which exists in case something happens to the main page.

7. Upgrade: Install the Facebook Purity add-on to your web browser. Then select the setting that over-rides the Facebook algorithm and allows you to see your news feed in chronological order. FB Purity is a truly excellent add-on, which dramatically upgrades the whole Facebook experience in multiple ways. There are a few other downloads that allow you to see your Facebook feed in chronological order too: Social Fixer is a browser add-on, and Friendly Browser is an app that works on mobile devices.

8.Diversify: Follow Another Angry Voice elsewhere (the blog and the Twitter account):

These tips also work for other Facebook pages that you particularly like. Add them as a 'favourite' in the page setting; interact regularly; bookmark them; follow their content on other platforms; and install an add-on to see your Facebook feed in chronological order.

I hope you find these tips useful.

If you have any other tips for over-riding the Facebook algorithm, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Tom (AAV)

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

How Facebook is systematically persecuting evidence-based debate

It's been obvious for a long time that misinformation has been a huge problem on social media, but Facebook's cack-handed efforts to counter it are massively counter-productive, because they're systematically punishing the pages that cite their sources, while letting the liars get off completely free!

Any social media site with the slightest sense of responsibility towards the standards of public discourse that they host on their platforms, would seek to actively encourage evidence-based debate, and discourage the spreading of outright lies.

But instead Facebook is systematically punishing pages that cite evidence via unappealable decisions that their evidence constitutes "spam", draconian distribution restrictions to dramatically reduce the audience of the evidence-citing pages, and even profoundly intimidating threats to delete the pages outright if they carry on trying to engage in evidence-based debate.

The draconian restrictions and threats against Another Angry Voice began on September 3rd 2021, with a supposed "spam" violation, which was actually an article on the independent left-wing media site Skwawkbox, posted to justify an assertion about the ongoing persecution of left-wing Jewish activists within the Labour Party.

The only previous "violation" of Facebook standards on record was one solitary algorithm glitch on a June 2020 post, which was absolutely hammering the Daily Mail for their support of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, where the algorithm somehow concluded that because the image contained a picture of Adolf Hitler, it must have constituted glorification of Nazism. The appeal against this ludicrous algorithm glitch was then ignored.

So just two so-called "violations" in well over a year, and the Another Angry Voice page gets hit with draconian reach restrictions, and intimidated with threats of outright deletion!

Since then, Facebook's "spam" algorithm has gone absolutely wild, with accusations that links to the following all constitute "spam":

• A link to an article about HGV driver shortages on the UK newspaper The Independent.

• A link to an article from the trade union Unite posted to counter an outright lie about what trade unions had been saying about Brexit (Facebook obviously took no action against the completely unsourced lie)

• A link to the website of the British Safety Council

• A link to the Another Angry Voice website, which has never even contained adverts, let alone "spam". There's obviously something seriously wrong with the system if the algorithm is flagging links as "spam" even when the link is from the website the page that posted it takes its name from!

Every single one of the these five links flagged as "spam" is from entities that have their own Facebook pages! (if they truly were spam-peddlers, why does Facebook allow them to have official presences on their platform?)

And every single appeal against these false accusations of "spam" has been met with a boilerplate notification that Facebook is too short-staffed to actually investigate the appeal, so it just stays on record as a "violation", adding more distribution restrictions, and edging the page ever closer to deletion.

Every single one of the links being punished as "spam" was either posted to justify a factual assertion, or to counter an outright lie with facts and evidence to prove it wrong, yet they're being used as the basis of draconian and unappealable punishments.

The strangling of the page via distribution restrictions is bad enough, but the threat of outright page deletion is a profoundly sinister attack on the concept of evidence-based debate.

If people think they're going to get their page deleted, just for backing up their assertions with facts and evidence, Facebook is actively making itself an anti-scientific forum, in which citing sources is punished, rather than rewarded.

Not only does this systematic persecution of evidence-sharing discourage the responsible practice of citing sources to justify assertions, it also gives succour to misinformation-peddlers by intimidating and dissuading those who would be inclined to counter their lies with links to facts and evidence.

If Facebook really wanted to counter misinformation on its platform, they wouldn't be systematically persecuting evidence-sharers, and restricting the visibility of their pages, they'd be rewarding them, and giving them priority over the misinformation peddlers, and over those who don't bother to evidence their claims.

But Facebook is a profit-seeking corporation, so their priority isn't the fostering of healthy evidence-based debate on their platform, it's whatever makes them the most profit in the short-term.

I'd argue that Facebook's best strategy for the long-term would be to introduce some kind of social peer review, via a gamefied feedback system designed to reward pages that provide verifiable information, and reduce the reach of those that promote lies, and also to reward users that provide accurate peer review feedback, and penalise those that try to game the system though malicious misreporting of links that they just don't like.

But as is always the case with capitalism, it comes down to the conflict between short-term profit and long-term gain.

It's obviously more profitable in the short-term for Facebook to allow the misinformation-peddlers to keep churning out content on their platform, whilst introducing cheap sticking plaster solutions (like appending automatically generated information warnings onto posts based only on keywords, and algorithmic solutions that end up systematically persecuting evidence-based debate).

But they really need to consider whether it's a good long-term branding strategy to run their site as a vast misinformation hub, where misinformation-peddlers spread their lies with impunity and those who approve of, and engage in, evidence-based debate are actively driven away onto other social media platforms.

I'd be more than happy to talk to someone at Facebook about these issues, but it's basically impossible to get hold of anyone there, even to get the false 'violations', distribution restrictions, and intimidating threats removed from my page, let alone to talk about better strategies for combating actual misinformation-peddlers on their platform.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Why are Twitter censoring criticism of Saudi Arabia?

With over 10,000 Tweets to my name I'd never been blocked by Twitter for 'misconduct' until today.

The offending Tweet I've been locked out of my account for was a sarcastic criticism of Donald Trump's sickeningly cosy relationship with the brutal, misogynistic, homophobic, head-chopping, terrorism-spreading, democracy-repressing, journalist-dismembering Saudi Arabia war criminals, putting it in contrast with the hate and lies he continually spreads about the socially liberal and progressive Muslim figure Ilhan Omar.

My Tweet was posted in reply to one by Medhi Hasan, which provides the context for my sarcastic reply.

And here's my response that Twitter have deemed to be so unacceptable that they've blocked me until I remove it:

I've already had one appeal rejected (they don't tell you why, just as they don't tell you what rule you've supposedly broken when they put you in Twitter purgatory in the first place). But I'm appealing again.

And suffering this Twitter censorship for the 'crime' of criticising Saudi Arabia has made me determined to redouble my efforts to criticise this disgusting regime, and the western politicians (like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Emmanuel Macron) who support them.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Sajid Javid is making technologically impossible demands

If you ever needed more proof that the Tory party is riddled with idiocy, consider the Tory Home Secretary Sajid Javid's latest demand that social media sites block child sex abuse images and videos before they've even been uploaded.

The problem here is obvious to anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of how the Internet actually works. Unless a file has been uploaded before, it's technologically impossible to know exactly what's being uploaded until it's actually uploaded, so threatening social media companies with fines and even shutdowns if they refuse to comply, is threatening to punish them for being incapable of doing the impossible.

This is the actual Home Secretary of the United Kingdom threatening sanctions against tech giants for refusal to comply with his technologically impossible demands!

If an image or file has been uploaded before, it is possible for social media sites to identify them by their SHA hash numbers, but this only works for images that have been previously uploaded and added to a database of forbidden content, and social media sites are already doing this kind of thing already os this can't be what Javid is on about.
 

Of course it would be possible for Javid to demand that the social media sites screen all uploaded content before it's published, but there a major issues with this interpretation because this post-upload pre-publication screening idea is clearly at odds with what Javid demanded, which is clearly screening before/during upload.

The only way it's possible to argue that he was calling for screening before publication, rather than screening before/during upload is to assume that he's so ignorant about the subject matter he's threatening to legislate on, that he literally doesn't understand the difference between uploading data, and publishing data.

Problems with pre-moderation

Even if we adopt the "good faith" interpretation of Javid's demand (that he's an ignorant buffoon who wants pre-screening of content before publication, but is too intellectually lazy to distinguish between the concept of uploading data to a server, and the concept of publishing data on a website) then there are still massive problems with what he's proposing.

Collective punishment

Is it really fair to collectively punish all UK citizens by subjecting them to lengthy pre-moderation of their Internet pictures, videos, and comments in an effort to clamp down on a small minority of criminals?

Why should people with no history of uploading criminal content be subjected to potentilly time-consuming screening procedures on all of their social media uploads?

Function creep

Once the infrastructure is in place to pre-moderate all social media uploads for criminality, surely those systems could be open to abuse.

Once you've established the principle that everything uploaded to the Internet needs to be pre-moderated before it gets published, surely it's only a matter of time before the state begins using these checks to screen for undesirable content such as critiques of government policy?

Even if function creep somehow doesn't occur in the UK, forcing the social media sites to develop pre-screening technology would surely hasten the decline of online freedoms elsewhere in the world. 

If Britain sets the precedent that social media companies can be forced to put the infrastructure in place to pre-moderate all social media uploads, surely tyrannical and authoritarian governments elsewhere would use this as a precedent to clamp down on what they define to be criminality (stuff like homosexuality, criticism of the government, discussion of forbidden topics, non-violent protest, calls for more democracy ...).

Time-lag

If UK-based journalists and political commentators are subjected to potentially time-consuming checks into the social media content they've uploaded, while journalists and commentators abroad are free to upload things automatically, surely this puts British people at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to leading the ever more rapid news cycle?

Should a political commentator based abroad really be given an artificial time advantage as political commentators based in Britain are subjected to pre-moderation of the content they've uploaded?

Algorithms

The idea that the social media giants could manually screen every single upload to their sites for elicit content before publication is almost the same scale of absurdity as the idea of screening content before it's even been uploaded.

Unless we envisage social media sites with tens of thousands of moderators manually trawling through everyone's uploads, it's clear that the vast bulk of Javid's pre-screenings would have to be undertaken by automated processes, which leaves us with the question of how much we trust algorithms to correctly identify child abuse text, images, videos. And how much we trust automatic processes when it comes to false positives.

How many completely innocent people getting censored, blocked, or banned from social media and falsely flagged as paedophiles would Javid consider acceptable?

What are Javid's proposals for redress and compensation for people who get falsely flagged as paedophiles because an algorithm mistook their children playing in the paddling pool or their beach pictures for child sex abuse images?

The Dark Web

Only the most incompetent of criminals would consider using social media netwerks like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to share child sex abuse images, or conduct criminal transactions.

Most of this illicit online behaviour happens on the Dark Web, so in seeking to clamp down on the social media giants Sajid Javid is either so incompetent that he's going after the wrong targets, or he's well aware that they're the wrong targets, but he's just cynically using the issue of child sex abuse as an excuse to assert right-wing authoritarian control systems over the major social media platforms.

Live streams

One of the other demands Sajid Javid made in his speech addresses the problem of live-streamed abuse, which is a serious issue. 

But instead of offering anything resembling an actual policy to deal with it, he says he wants social media companies to shut down the abuse live streams (without explaining how they're supposed to detect them) and offers a paltry £250,000 in funding to "support new ideas on how to detect and disrupt live streamed abuse".

So one of his "demands" is more like an idle wish that something be done about the problem than an actual demand.

Conclusion

Of course the government and social media sites should be working to combat child sex abuse and other online criminality, but such blatant Internet illiteracy from the Tory Home Secretary is deeply concerning.

If he doesn't even understand the absolute basics of how the Internet works, like the difference between uploading data to a website's servers and the website publishing that data, then how on earth can we expect him to do a competent job of policing the Internet?

Even if we try to ignore the Internet illiteracy of what Javid is proposing and try to make some sense of it, it's still either a display of abject incompetence (pretty much ignoring the Dark Web to focus resources on the wrong targets, and his pitiful wishful thinking when it comes to the live streaming of abuse) or it's the sickening use of child sex abuse as a smokescreen to obscure a right-wing authoritarian power grab aimed at installing the means of censoring the British public through pre-moderation of all uploaded content.

Whatever the case, one thing shines through more clearly than anything else. Sajid Javid is badly unsuited to the extremely important job he's been charged with.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The Facebook blackout 'glitch' censored independent media, but left the mainstream media untouched

Facebook has initiated a massive purge of independent media content. This blackout includes barring multiple independent media sites from posting links to their own site on their Facebook page, deleting independent media posts without warning or reason, marking independent media posts as spam so ordinary members of the public can't share them, and deleting ordinary people's posts without reason.

This issue has impacted multiple left-leaning independent media sites like Another Angry Voice, Evolve Politics, Vox Political, People's Campaign for Corbyn, EU Citizens for an Independent Scotland, and many others. With pages left unable to post links to their own articles.

Facebook have tried to dismiss the independent media blackout as a "glitch" but interestingly the Facebook pages of mainstream media outlets were unaffected by the "glitch". Mainstream media outlets that have been able to continue posting articles throughout the blackout include the Daily Mail, The S*n, Evening Standard, The Times and Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Spectator, Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Sky News, BBC News, and BBC Politics.

Additionally the hard-right Guido Fawkes blog was also allowed to continue posting links to their vile echo chamber of hate throughout the Facebook blackout.

The fact that a select few pages were allowed to continue posting throughout the Facebook blackout suggests that there's some kind of Facebook 'whitelist' protecting them from whatever measures they've been taking against independent media sources.

So a range of left-wing, pro-independence, anti-Tory, pro-Corbyn, anti-fracking independent media pages were barred from sharing links, while mainstream media outlets and hard-right blogs were completely unaffected.

Given that the mainstream media is overwhelmingly biased in favour of the Tory party and the permanent Westminster establishment class, and that independent media is often the only place that Labour, the Green Party, the SNP, and Plaid Cymru get a fair hearing, it's deeply concerning that Facebook is capable of basically shutting down independent media's ability to communicate, whilst allowing the mainstream media and hard-right smear-mongering operations like Guido Fawkes to continue posting links.

What's even more horrifying is the thought that Facebook could easily launch another independent media blackout like this in the middle of an election period.

We all know that super-viral independent media content played a significant role in the Labour surge at the 2017 General Election, so shutting down independent media's ability to communicate during an election period would clearly favour the Tories.

It's an extraordinary coincidence that Facebook launched a massive blackout of independent media pages on the very same day that Jeremy Corbyn announced new policies to promote independent media, democratise the BBC and fund it via a social media tax, and provide investigative journalists with much greater Freedom of Information powers.

Apparently there are actually no rules whatever to stop Facebook from interfering in British politics in this way, just as there were no rules in place to prevent them from making £millions by undermining democracy by targeting secretive and highly misleading political dark ads at the Facebook users deemed most liable to fall for them (during the EU referendum in 2016, and for the Tory party at the 2017 General Election).

Facebook have so many users that they've developed an ability to dramatically influence political discourse, from extremely positive aspects like allowing non-corporate writers, investigators, and journalists a means of promoting their work, to extremely negative aspects like targeted dark ads and independent media blackouts.

Either the British electoral authorities step in with new rules to ensure that Facebook provide a fair and level playing field (especially during election periods), or things will almost certainly get a lot worse.

Perhaps Jeremy Corbyn should add another proposal to his 'Change the Media' strategy to  ensure that social media platforms provide a fair and balanced arena for political debate, rather than launching targeted blackouts that somehow don't affect mainstream media and pro-Tory pages?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The extreme-right bookshop ambush couldn't have backfired more spectacularly

On Saturday August 4th 2018 a bunch of extreme-right thugs ambushed the left-wing bookshop Bookmarks, damaging property, intimidating staff, throwing books around, baselessly slandering shop workers as "paedophiles", and calling for the shop to be burned down.

In the week following this sinister extreme-right raid several of the perpetrators have been identified, largely thanks to the fact that they were idiotic enough to film themselves plotting and carrying out the ambush, and then actually upload it to the Internet!

Three of the attackers have been identified and suspended by UKIP for their involvement in the attack. 

Aside from getting themselves suspended from their right-wing political party, in attempting to silence and intimidate people for selling books they don't like (it's debatable whether people like this like reading any books at all) the attackers ended up massively increasing the profile of the bookshop.

All kinds of people expressed solidarity with the bookshop in the face of these extreme-right intimidation tactics, from lefties like Owen Jones, Michael Rosen and me, through to orthodox neoliberal 'centrists' like JK Rowling and Andrew Adonis.

It seems the imagery of Nazi book burning ceremonies are seared so strongly into the public consciousness that pretty much everyone has reacted with disgust at this bookshop raid, and the extremists who carried it out.

One week after the ambush the sheer scale of their idiocy has become clear, with the bookshop selling four times as many books as normal through the till, and their online shop taking an entire year's worth of orders in just seven days!

So this extreme-right attack on free speech has backfired so dramatically that literally thousands of people are reading left-wing books that they wouldn't have otherwise thought of buying had these extreme-right crackpots just left the shop in peace!

A bunch of right-wing thugs triggering a massive upsurge in left-wing book sales with their raid on a lefty bookshop really has to be one of the most fantastic examples of the Streisand effect ever.

Keep it going

Here's a link to the Bookmarks website in case you want to order a book for yourself, or to bookmark it for later to buy Christmas presents for your lefty friends.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Don't fall for extreme-right "freedom of speech" victimhood narratives

The extreme-right are once again programming their followers to wallow in victimhood narratives over the wild conspiracy-monger Alex Jones getting his InfoWars channel thrown off multiple free-to-use online media platforms for breaching their conditions of use.

Before InfoWars they were wailing persecution about the extreme-right gay-paedophilia advocate Milo getting thrown off Twitter for his abusive behaviour.

Before that they cried victimhood over the vile terrorism-promoting money-scamming Britain First hate chamber eventually getting chucked off Facebook for hosting an absolute festival of hate that made a total mockery of their community standards.

The extreme-right wail and cry as if being pushed off free-to-use online platforms is the modern equivalent of Nazi book burning, which it obviously isn't.

Back in the days before the Internet you couldn't just go around demanding that people print your book for free, and that they continue printing your books indefinitely, no matter how horrific the things you write in them.

Back in the days before the Internet you couldn't go around demanding that your local newspaper print every single crackpot hate-mongering letter you sent them about your ridiculous conspiracy theories either.

Of course nobody could stop you from writing your own book and submitting it to publishers, or sending batshit letters to your local paper, but when they rejected your manuscript or refused to print your letters, they weren't denying you free speech, they were protecting their own right to publish what they saw fit to.

That misattributed Voltaire quote says "I wholly disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it". 

It doesn't say "I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to demand other people continue publishing your views forever, free of charge".

Nobody is saying that Alex Jones, and Milo, and the Britain First hate mob can't continue spewing their venom elsewhere, they're just saying they can't take advantage of their free-to-use services to do it.

It's simply laughable to imagine that online media companies have some "free speech" obligation to provide a free platform to anyone, to say whatever they like, no matter how extreme, how defamatory, how dishonest, how dangerous, or how threatening to the very financial viability of the online media company itself.

Nobody reads the terms and conditions when they sign up as users of online media sites. Nobody carefully reads their "important updates" either. But if you actually do, you'll find that you've entered into a contract with them, and that they reserve the right to deny you access to their free services if they feel they are being misused.

Interestingly the traditional right-wing narratives have been completely reversed in regard to contracts to acommodate these "free speech" victimhood narratives.

It used to be that the political right would defend the sanctity of contractual agreements above absolutely anything else, including fundamental human welfare. But now we've got right-wingers bitterly railing against the contracts they voluntarily signed up to because they don't like the conditions!

Some might argue that Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple hoofing Alex Jones' conspiracy rambling off their free platforms is the thin edge of the wedge, and while I'm naturally sympathetic to this argument (as someone who relies heavily on social media to spread awareness of my work) it's simply incorrect.

I have absolutely no intention of ever posting malicious and defamatory diatribes, incitements to violence, grotesque conspiracy theories about the parents of murdered school children being 'fake crisis actors', calls for ethnic genocide, or hateful abuse - so I'm fairly confident they won't be coming after me with an outright ban.

What I'm afraid of is much more subtle: Tweaks to the algorithms (possibly as a result of government pressure) to dramatically curtail the reach of independent media sites.

One hopes that they wouldn't bend to such pressure, but knowledge of social media companies' history of collusion with spy agencies (as revealed by the Snowden leaks), and the staggering sums of money pumped into targeted ad campaigns by political parties that have never been keen on having their malice, corruption and incompetence uncovered by renegade independent journalists, it would be foolish to rule out the possibility entirely.

The real threat to freedom of speech isn't the upfront high-profile de-platforming of depraved extreme-right conspiracy-mongers for their outright contempt towards the terms of service contracts they all willingly signed up to.

The real threat is that independent sources of information are simply tuned out by the algorithms, with few people ever even noticing that independent non-conformist anti-establishment pages are disappearing from their social media feeds.

If they wanted to crack down on the true rebels (those who use facts, evidence and logic to build their cases rather than rhetoric, conspiracies, and abuse) then why would they use a sledgehammer, when they've got much simpler and subtler means at their disposal to crack nuts?

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