[Reason] U.K. Parliament member Lucy Powell of the Labour Party wants to use her government authority to ban your private online group discussions.
I'm not exaggerating here. Powell introduced legislation in the House of Commons this week that would ban secret, private, invite-only groups on Facebook. It would go so far as to hold moderators legally responsible for hate speech or defamation on the forums.
Powell believes that secret online groups are responsible for radicalization (rather than the more logical likelihood that radicalization prompts people to seek out private online outlets). And she has this strange idea that outrageous ideas presented on social media outlets simply don't get challenged. She writes in The Guardian:
Online echo chambers are normalising and allowing extremist views to go viral unchallenged. These views are spread as the cheap thrill of racking up Facebook likes drives behaviour and reinforces a binary worldview. Some people are being groomed unwittingly as unacceptable language is treated as the norm. Others have a more sinister motive.
While in the real world, alternative views would be challenged by voices of decency in the classroom, staffroom, or around the dining-room table, there are no societal norms in the dark crevices of the online world. The impact of these bubbles of hate can be seen, in extreme cases, in terror attacks from radicalised individuals. But we can also see it in the rise of the far right, with Tommy Robinson supporters rampaging through the streets this summer, or in increasing Islamophobia and antisemitism.
In fact, extremist views get challenged all the time, online and elsewhere, by people like Powell and by many, many others. But she doesn't really mean that these views aren't being "challenged." What she means is that these radical views aren't being punished.
Powell notes that allowing private groups to exist "locks out the police, intelligence services and charities that could otherwise engage with the groups and correct disinformation." By "correct disinformation" she actually means "prosecute people." She doesn't say as much in her Guardian column, but her motion for consideration of the bill explicitly says that too few people have been prosecuted under the United Kingdom's Communications Act, which criminalizes online hate speech. She makes it clear that she doesn't think enough people are being punished by the government for saying bad things. This is not about correcting disinformation at all:
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