Read all about it — as long as the news suits the purposes of the thought police in Big Tech

Covid sceptics will soon find that their posts on Facebook and Twitter may be deleted. Picture: AFP

Think yourselves lucky. I had intended to write about an issue that surfaced in the New York Post last week, headlined: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad”. It concerned Joe Biden’s involvement in Ukraine and seemed to implicate him in some sort of scandal that involved his son, large amounts of money, a gas company called Burisma and lots of people with names that I would probably spell wrong.

A painful and complex process, then — for me, for our sub-editors and for you, because there’d be precious few jokes involved.

Luckily, Nick Clegg has saved the day. Our former deputy prime minister now has a very lucrative sinecure at Facebook where, among other things, he advises the company about stuff such as “false news”. Facebook concluded of the New York Post story that there were “questions about its validity” and prevented people sharing it. The story was censored.

That’s good enough for me. We all sometimes worry about what we should and should not believe and — probably much the same as you — at times like those I yearn for guidance from Nick Clegg, for his sheer brilliance and his absence of political bias.

Facebook was not alone in censoring the story. Twitter banned everybody from posting links to it — the first time this has happened regarding a mainstream news publication. Interestingly, the Democratic nominee Mr Biden made no denial that the email in question had been sent to his son. (I have seen the email, by the way. Christ, it’s boring.)

Facebook's vice president Nick Clegg. Picture: AFP

As a well-informed observer of current affairs, I have noticed that an election will shortly take place in America. It couldn’t possibly be that those two progressive institutions, Twitter and Facebook, were deliberately suppressing stories hostile to the Democrats, could it?

Having junked the Biden yarn, then, I wondered if perhaps I should write about the Great Barrington Declaration. This was a statement signed by thousands and thousands of scientists, epidemiologists, health experts and so on, doubting the efficacy of our (by which I mean the world’s) policies regarding the control of Covid-19. In short, they think the cure is more damaging than the virus. The founders of the declaration are professors from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford.

Luckily you can now read the declaration on Google — but for a long while you would have been hard-pressed to find it. Instead you would be directed to items denigrating the declaration, including several which insisted that it was funded by flesh-eating goblins (or, as they preferred to put it, rightwingers). Nor could it be found on the discussion site Reddit.

It got scant coverage all round. There was a debate on the BBC Today program between one of the signatories, Professor Sunetra Gupta, and a member of the government’s Sage committee, Professor Susan Michie. Michie later complained, via Twitter, that she had been assured by the BBC that “this would not be held as an even-handed debate” — in other words, Gupta was to be presented as a bit of a loony.

This all abides by Ofcom’s instruction to broadcasters that “Covid sceptics” should be given short shrift and not allowed too much time to peddle their idiocies. An odd way of handling a debate, though, isn’t it?

Those Covid sceptics will also find that their posts on Facebook and Twitter may be deleted. The same goes for videos uploaded to YouTube. I have seen posts from friends removed merely because they doubted the usefulness of wearing a mask. But then, even away from this wretched virus, the trend is towards ever more control of what people can and can’t say. What began as, on the face of it, a well-meaning attempt to remove something called “hate speech” from social media sites is starting to spiral a little out of control. It is becoming just the teensiest bit … um ... Soviet.

The problem being that hate speech, for a certain section of the right-on left, has what we might call a very broad ambit. In the end it tends to mean simply people saying stuff with which they disagree. But such is their tenacity that companies such as YouTube and Twitter, anxious to be seen as right-on, comply with their demands. And Covid is now part of these culture wars.

The Biden thing? Oh, an email allegedly from a senior bloke in Burisma to Biden’s son, Hunter, thanking him for an offer to introduce him to his somnambulant dad. Joe has been accused of getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired because he was hostile to the company his son worked for. Nothing you’d really want to read about, on the eve of an election. And mercifully, you are spared from doing so.

Joe Biden and sons Hunter, left, and Beau in 2009. Picture: AFP

Should Malala Yousafzai be deported from this country? The winner of the Nobel Peace prize and feminist icon was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for revealing the living conditions under those Islamist lunatics in Pakistan. She graduated from Oxford University in June.

Now calls for her deportation and other vile abuse have been posted on social media. Comments included “so my hate for her all this time wasn’t unprovoked” and “my gut had a feeling about her and your gut is never wrong”.

Malala’s crime? She asked students to vote for her friend in a student union election. Her friend is a Conservative.

For some reason the opinion polls still suggest that, by a large majority, people want more stringent restrictions on our movement than even Chris Whitty is envisaging.

It makes me wonder if the pollsters phrased the question thus: “Do you want another lockdown — or do you want to kill your own grandmother, you selfish bastard?” Because I can’t find anybody who agrees with the current government policy.

Perhaps there are legions of Brits out there — almost certainly liberals, working in the public sector — who believe it is a human right never to die and never to have to work. It may even be new Labour Party policy that, racists aside, nobody should be allowed to die of anything, ever, and that being paid a lot of money for not working is the “new normal”, to use that horrible phrase.

Andy Burnham — a decent politician, for whom I voted when he was standing for the leadership of the Labour Party — and the rest of the metro mayors are screaming for cash. But from where is this money supposed to come, given that we are not doing anything any more? There is a certain blindness to reality at work, I think.

The first lockdown, in March, was surely right. We had to do what we could to protect the population from a virus about which we knew very little. We know a lot more now, both about how to treat the virus and indeed about its remarkable ineffectuality — its kindly determination not to discommode the vast majority of those who catch it.

Perhaps the polls are as they are because — as I suggested in May — people rather enjoy lockdown. Not just the not-working bit, but all the rest of it too. A holiday from reality.

The Sunday Times