There has been an unexpected but welcome win for freedom of speech in Britain recently. This came about when You Tube refused, despite pressure from Islamic grievance mongers such as Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation, to ban human rights activist Tommy Robinson from the YouTube platform. This is a welcome defeat for the censors or would be censors who want to restrict what Britons say both online and in the wider public arena.

The censors and those who want desperately to be censors and close down inconvenient discussion about the ideology of Islam must be seriously disappointed today. I can imagine that Mohammed Shafiq, who allegedly played a major part in getting Mr Robinson banned from Facebook and Instagram, cannot be all that happy at the moment, after all he was arrogantly boasting that he was going to meet with You Tube executives in order to push them to remove Mr Robinson from the YouTube platform. I can also imagine that there is also considerable wailing and gnashing of teeth in some other ‘Islamophobia’ snake oil salesman organisations as well. Some of them have set great store in their ability to bully and pressure social media platforms, sometimes using the threat of UK government power being used against them, but on this occasion it seems that YouTube have told such organisations to sod right off and continue to sod off until they can sod off no more.

The Guardian is also a bit flustered by this move, as they most surely would be what with being an outlet that sees nothing wrong with having the voices of the Left being untrammelled yet seem to be less than enthusiastic about allowing others to have the same rights to speak. In the absence of any YouTube ban for Mr Robinson, The Guardian has been reduced to celebrating the recent demonetisation of Mr Robinson’s content on the YouTube platform. This in my view, is a hollow celebration as Mr Robinson and his team are already doing their best to replace income lost by this earnings ban.

Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian article with my comments. As is the usual policy for this blog the original text from the Guardian is in italics whereas my comments on the article in plain text.

The Guardian said:

YouTube has defended its decision to keep Tommy Robinson on its platform, arguing that the far-right activist’s content on its site is fundamentally different from the posts that led Facebook and Instagram to delete his account last week.

This might be the case but it also might be true that YouTube is sensitive to accusations of censorship. They are already coming under heavy criticism for removing the comment facility from thousands of relatively innocuous videos merely because of some moral panic, that may or may not be true, about paedophiles bookmarking videos that nonces may find of interest. You Tube’s response to this panic has been to shut down the comment facility, in a scattergun way, of a huge number of channels without thought to whether the channels be iffy or wholesome. This has caused a lot of criticism to flow YouTube’s way. The very last thing that YouTube need at the moment is another censorship scandal especially as there are both established and up alternatives to YouTube in the form of Vimeo, LiveLeak and in particular Bitchute which markets itself as a free speech platform.

Additionally, Amazon has removed one of Robinson’s books, Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam, from sale. His autobiography remains on the site. The company confirmed its decision to the Guardian, saying that “we reserve the right not to sell certain inappropriate content”.

This has severely backfired on Amazon. Not only is the co-author of ‘Mohammed’s Koran’ stating that the books are becoming wildly popular since the Amazon ban, many people are pointing out that far more hateful books, such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ and the Koran itself are freely available on Amazon. According to Peter McLaughlin the co-author with Mr Robinson of Mohammed’s Koran, book sales have shot up from two books per hour to one book per minute. Yet again the censors have shot themselves in the foot.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, posts live streams to YouTube about once or twice a week, sent with a feature that lets users pay to have their comments highlighted in live chat threads – revenue which is kept by YouTube, after the company “demonetised” Robinson’s videos in January.

As I said earlier in this piece, boasting about the demonetisaiton is a hollow boast. If previous attempts to shut down Mr Robinson’s access to funds are anything to do by, Mr Robinson’s fans will donate to him and buy his merchandise via other routes. Even the Guardian themselves admit this when they said:

Instead, a substantial source of income is the money donated directly to Robinson on his personal website, to which he has been directing fans following Facebook’s decision last week. There, a donation form powered by US startup Donorbox solicits donations from £5 to £100.

It seems that Donorbox at first got the collywobbles, probably from Leftist and Islamist whining, about Mr Robinson and dropped him from their platform but Donorbox subsequently reinstated Mr Robinson to the platform. The Guardian is most perturbed about Donorbox allowing Mr Robinson back on and Donorbox have so far refused to answer any question put to them by the Guardian. Personally I agree with Donorbox, I wouldn’t want to answer questions put to me by the middle class lefty twats of the Guardian myself.

The battle for Britons freedom of speech is a long and hard one and the enemies of such freedoms are legion. There have been a number of setbacks and reverses in this area but those who believe in freedom of speech can for the moment claim a minor victory. I wonder if the growth in Alt-Tech and commenting tools such as Dissenter (a product of the Gab team) has started to worry even a silicon valley giant like YouTube? After all, it’s not really a good look is it for YouTube to ban a non violent political commentator who if banned will take himself and his thousands upon thousands of motivated followers to somewhere else, somewhere like Bitchute for example? I’m both pleased and surprised about YouTube’s refusal to be bullied by Islamic and Leftist activists and British politicians and I hope that at least some mainstream social media platforms are still more respectful of the concept of free speech than some other platforms are. This has been a one-nil victory in the battle of free speech vs censorship, but the war for our free speech rights is not yet over, there is still a very long way to go but I will welcome any victory for this cause when it comes along.