David Cameron threatens to block social media in Britain

[mogster]

In about 1970 my father (who worked in Defence aerospace engineering) took me into his factory to show me his new top of the range computer.

It took up the whole space of a small bedroom!

Amazing to think our phones are more powerful that all of that technology!

[sv-wolf]

Britain's prime minister David Cameron is threatening to respond to the recent riots in London and other cities by blocking individuals' access to Twitter, Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger, and other social media. Speaking to the House of Commons on Thursday, where the MPs had been dragged back from their summer vacations, Cameron said: "Everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.
So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality. I have also asked the police if they need any other new powers."

LOL. During his Oxford University days, David Cameron was famously a member of the Bullingdon Club. This is an exclusive club for sons of the disgustingly rich, whose main passtime seems to be getting totally pissed and smashing up restaurants, sometimes quite spectacularly. Members usually get away with it or ostenatiously pay for the damage in high denomination notes.

I guess the recent rioters were very far from disgustingly rich and therefore deserve to have their social networking toys taken away from them.

Like Mogster I don't think this will go through, but I wouldn't put it past Cameron to try. After the all-out assault on the incomes and lifestyles of working class people over the last forty years, this just seems like more of the same. At the very least, politicians and their spaniels, the media are treating this as a moral issue (not a little hypocritically, I'm thinking). Their daily pronouncements are full of wind and bombast; nobody is attempting to find out what really happened or why. That's not at all surprising, of course, when the capitalist class is raking in the dough and everyone else is losing their homes, incomes and statutory services. It's all of a piece with the coalition's well-established policy of making the poor pay while the rich keep on eating. But then, that's what politicians of whatever political colour are there for - so what would you expect?