British Censorship Unit Targets Big Tech
On February 27th, Politico revealed that the “top secret” Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee
On February 27th, Politico revealed that the “top secret” Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee - “Britain’s media censorship board” - is “trying to woo Big Tech.” This is a deeply disturbing but completely inevitable development, as London continues its unrelenting crusade to globally export its culture of state secrecy, the Western world’s most intensive and draconian, in the face of sharply rising dissent at home and abroad.
The DSMA Committee is a little-known, rarely discussed body, which has a devastating impact on what the British public is permitted to know. Under its auspices, representatives of London’s major media outlets and press associations meet with officials drawn from the security and intelligence services, military, and government, to discuss what subjects and events can be reported on, and how.
The Committee also regularly dispatches “D-notices” to editors and journalists, if a story has been published, or is about to break, which contains information the British government does not want in the public domain. As Politico notes, they are theoretically “advisory…requests for publications to voluntarily withhold details.” Yet, journalists know they could be prosecuted if they fail to comply. If not, they may at least be blacklisted, or lose access to on- and off-the-record briefings, interviews, and privileged information from officials.
Accordingly, D-notices are broken vanishingly rarely. A palpable example of the system’s brutal efficacy came in November 2010, when a D-notice was issued following WikiLeaks’ release of US State Department cables. The overwhelming majority of the British media resultantly ignored their explosive contents. The same thing happened in June 2013, when The Guardian began publishing stories based on material leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Not a single British newspaper, bar The Independent, mentioned the seismic global scandal.
Politico reports that in recent years, the Committee has “set its sights on luring Big Tech to the table,” and is “eager to somehow apply the D-notice regime to the wider internet…in recognition of a fast-evolving online news landscape.” Committee notice secretary and British Army veteran Geoffrey Dodds tells the outlet “we’ve been trying to break into the so-called tech giants,” and they have been engaged for some time in outreach efforts with companies including Google and Meta.
Presently, governments can request social media platforms to remove content if it violates local laws, or platform rules. The Committee wants to go much further, compelling tech firms to voluntarily monitor their platforms for content that might be covered by D-notices, and seek DSMA advice on whether to censor it. The reliably righteous TechDirt viciously slammed this proposal:
It’s certainly true US tech firms are a very different beast to British “journalists”, who, according to figures cited in Ian Cobain’s 2016 book The History Thieves, voluntarily submit 80 - 90% of stories they suspect could be of interest to the DSMA Committee for official examination, and potential state censorship, in advance of publication. Yet, as we shall see, the Committee is absolutely determined to bring US social media firms to heel, by hook or by crook.
‘Do Not Amplify’
The DSMA Committee has had its eye on social media giants for many years. Yet, in a bitter irony, its attempts to lure Facebook and Twitter et al into its censorship fold have so far failed miserably. Dodds lamented how tech giants “won’t have anything to do with us at the moment for their own reasons,” and expressed hope future state regulation of Big Tech “could create potential leverage” for the Committee to exploit:
“I suspect the UK government has got to come up with a grand bargain with the tech giants before they’ll come down to the types of security we’d advise. We’re waiting for that to happen…then hopefully, we’ll be able to get the tech giants back on board.”
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