Josh Simons, newly elected MP for Makerfield and close ally of Starmer, is continuing his new campaign against Elon Musk’s Twitter. Simons complains that Musk’s tweets are too visible to people and claims that letting consumers who are disattisfied leave voluntarily is not enough:
“Waiting for Westminster to voluntarily quit X risks a very long wait… it’s a mistake to focus on individual choices… the question has to be: What do we expect of this platform?
Rising star Simons, who headed up Starmerite think tank Labour Together before his election and is now trying to get himself onto the Technology Select Committee, complained on Politics Live: “I do not want any man or woman to have that kind of power over our public debate.” Helpfully ignoring that Twitter closely managed reams of content before it was taken over by Musk…
He went on to spell out his personal dislike of Musk:
“Musk is a problem. I don’t like him. But Musk is symptomatic of the fact that he has this power… Think of the algorithm like a newspaper editor. Newspaper editors have values, they have standards, they have integrity. The people who build the algorithms should have the same values and integrity and professional standards.”
The key difference between a democratised social media and the legacy dead tree press is, of course, that editors and hacks operate in collusion with politicians. Now that information is no longer so closely controlled authoritarian politicians are itching to regulate a free social media to exctinction…
Speaking on Times Radio, former Home Secretary David Blunkett spoke about overdiagnosis of mental problems:
“Let’s distinguish those who are really severely mentally ill, diagnosed with things that require prolonged medical and diagnostic treatment. My wife and I talk about this a lot, because she’s a retired GP, about the fact that you can be sad without being ill. You can be momentarily depressed because your boyfriend or girlfriend’s just thrown you and you’re not mentally ill. You can even have mild issues, which can be dealt with with the right kind of support, but it doesn’t make you mentally ill. So we’ve got a real task, I think, to get the psychology, if you like, of this over. But there are things where you definitely need medical intervention, and there are other things where you need good friends, you need good connectivity, and you need a job.”