Somehow the "center"'s answer to the rise of right-wingers is stupid censorship, instead of fighting ideas with better ideas.
replyAlternatively, the center starts trying to attract right-wing voters by adopting right-wing ideas like anti-immigrant views or "well, we can sacrifice the climate a bit more" positions.
Keir Starmer is from a "left" party but his actions has shown him to be a centrist, Ursula von der Leyen is quite right. Then again, these are European positioning, as someone's said years ago, the European right-wing would be liberal in the US. And with the currently openly racist regime of the USA, even more so!
They will establish censorship laws to try to stem the tide only to be surprised Pikachu face when inevitably at some point in the future one of these right wingers will win and then use all these things against them. No one ever learns.
replyHow is that happening? In the UK fringe nationalist parties are typically given as much airtime on main stream media as the governing parties. They've also setup their own 'news' stations to further spread propaganda. Any notion that they're being censored in the UK is ludicrous. They're pandered to.
replyThis isn't an axis from freedom to control, with the country sitting at an identifiable point. All of these things are happening, antagonistically, at the same time. Right wing people set up a television station, government cracks down on the internet, courts protect people's rights to express philosophical beliefs, police record "non-crime hate incidents" for things written online. It's all chaotic.
replyBut there’s no evidence that the UK government is going to disproportionately censor right wing parties on the internet either. It’s just a false analysis to link this possible age gating of VPNs with censorship of the political right.
replyBanning under 16s from social media is de-facto censorship of political views outside of those promulgated by mainstream media, and as the mainstream media in this country tends to be urban-liberal in orientation, this will have an effect. Perhaps the people who set up GB News were prescient to do so.
replyAs other posters have pointed out, the mainstream media in the UK give Reform an incredibly easy time. Their leader is openly corrupt, but this barely merits a mention. Do you really think Keir Starmer is thrilled by the idea of young people getting their impression of him from current mainstream media reports? This just isn’t a plausible analysis.
reply(Also, it’s worth noting that the Conservatives support the same policy, and Reform support the principle while opposing the means.)