Trump takes on the British disinformation complex

President Trump is waging war on the great British disinformation complex. The White House is gearing up to revoke the visa of British citizen and chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Imran Ahmed, amid the Trump administration’s greater battle against the BBC.

By “countering digital hate,” the CCDH means censoring speech it disagrees with. The British campaign group, which has an office in Washington, has pushed for the deplatforming of Trump officials from social media and for greater restrictions on speech online generally. The CCDH advocated that Twitter/X remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s account for spreading anti-vaccine “disinformation,” and a whistleblower revealed last year that an internal memo had listed “kill Musk’s Twitter” as one of CCDH’s priorities.

The founder of the CCDH, Morgan McSweeney, left to work as chief of staff to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. McSweeney is considered one of the most, if not the most, influential figures on the British left. When the Labour government passed the UK Online Safety Act, which places restrictions on online speech, the CCDH claimed it was instrumental in passing the bill into law.

The White House has raised concerns about the Online Safety Act – not only because it dangerously and undemocratically stifles dissent against a failing political class, but because it has emboldened the UK’s online regulator Ofcom to pressure US companies to conform with the Act. Last month, the online messageboard 4chan was fined £20,000 by Ofcom. American companies could be fined by the UK for allowing American citizens to exercise their right to free speech. Where are those people who in 2016 were so concerned about foreign interference in our democracy?

The Trump administration has taken an interest in free speech in Britain as a cautionary tale of how the left’s obsession with policing “digital hate” and “misinformation” can lead to imprisonment for social media posts, as in the case of Lucy Connolly. The resignations over the weekend of two of the BBC’s highest executives, director-general Tim Davie and CEO Deborah Turness, are major victories in Trump’s war on Britain’s censorship complex.

Davie and Turness both resigned after revelations about the BBC’s bias against the President. Britain’s national broadcaster was exposed by the Telegraph for doctoring a speech Trump gave on January 6, 2021. The edited clip, which aired in a TV program a week before the 2024 election, made it sound like he was urging supporters to storm the Capitol, rather than telling them to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

The two snippets which were spliced into one – “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you” and “We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore” – occurred nearly an hour apart in the actual speech Trump gave. When BBC executives were presented with the now-leaked internal report, which voiced concerns about this program and other distortions in reporting, they ignored it.

“On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country,” the President wrote on Truth Social of Davie and Turness. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s warning that the US could revoke visas for foreign nationals engaged in censorship indicates that the US is ready to wage diplomatic war to protect the First Amendment at home, and even export it abroad. Not satisfied with the ​heads of Davie and Turness, Trump has sent a letter to the BBC threatening legal action and demanding the UK’s national broadcaster pay $1 billion in damages. Telegraph sources tell Cockburn that “spirits are high” at the paper after their shoutout from the Donald.

Karoline Leavitt called the doctored clip “purposefully dishonest” and evidence that the BBC are “total, 100% fake news.” In a nod to the Trump administration’s preference for smaller, scrappier “new media” – for example, the latest member of the Pentagon’s press corps, Laura Loomer – Leavitt gave her recommendation for Brits on how to avoid establishment brainwashing. She wrote on X that the BBC “is dying because they are anti-Trump Fake News. Everyone should watch @GBNEWS!” And read The Spectator, of course…