Katie Price And Her Authoritarian Petition

Notice: This article was archived and has only gone through basic grammar correction.

Looking on the official UK parliament petition, I noticed a popular petition that took my attention for all the wrong reasons. The title of this petition was: Make online abuse a specific criminal offence and create a register of offenders, Katie Price created the petition.

In this blog post I will go over the contents of this petition and informing you why the ideas enclosed are absolutely terrible, point by point (Points only with filler removed aka I removed the parts that don’t make a political argument and are just trying to appeal to emotions):

1. Trolling is a major problem in this day and age.

Ah yes that buzzword, trolling which must be one of the most overused terms on the internet as the mainstream media has changed the meaning of the word. The word trolling is usually described online as annoying someone into reacting for fun, but the mainstream media uses the term to describe anything from just disagreeing with someone on twitter all the way to death threats.

One word being used to describe such a large range of interactions online is a terrible idea but personally I think that this is completely deliberate as it gives governments an excuse to pass laws that limit freedom of speech and the laws passed will probably have the power to censor anyone who disagrees with government policies aka limiting democracy just like what happened in Germany.

2. I have tried my best to expose people and even had two arrested, but nothing was done and there were no repercussions or penalties for this behaviour.

With the huge cuts that have been made the police even getting people arrested at all as the police are extremely overstretched meaning that crimes such as burglaries, dangerous driving and violent offenses are often not giving the attention they need. The issue with policing twitter is that resources are taken away from crimes that have a pretty high risk of people getting hurt or even killed if they don’t have a quick response time. This policing twitter is most likely caused by police officers who are trying to meet performance targets rather than the protecting the community.

They often do this to protect the feelings of people who can’t stand to have their feeling hurt.

3. This abuse includes racism, homophobia, body shaming, and a whole range of other hate speech.

And they will go the real reason Katie Price made this petition, not for stopping threats or even thing of that sort but for stopping so called “hate speech”. In fact, reading through the petition it appears to be a carefully crafty way of trying to stop people from being allowed to say things she does not like which is incredibly authoritarian. I find it funny how people claim that they are allowing free speech when they are censoring people who have opinions they find offensive. Free speech is meant to protect speech that is unpopular, popular speech does not need of protecting as people won’t be punished for thinking the same as most other people.

This becomes a far bigger issue when you consider the vast overuse of these terms by the moral authoritarians who use them to silence people who dare disagree with their political ideology. This includes the crazies like;

The people who think having boarders are racist, even tho most counties don’t control boarders based race.

The people who think it is homophobic to not like gay pride events even if your reasons for not liking them are the same as the reason you don’t like other types of pride events such as white or black pride, and that is it encourages people to only associate with people in their own groups.

The people who are overweight mostly on websites like Tumblr that go around telling people how it is really healthy to be obese and say that anyone who knows the real health effects of being obese, that it is really unhealthy for you and could send you to an early grave are body shaming.

4. Help me hammer home worldwide that bullying is unacceptable weather its face to face or in an online space.

One big problem, and that is you claim any buzzword to be consider abuse meaning it is not much about bullying unless you count disagreeing with someone to be bullying which a lot of moral authoritarians do as they often have extremely weak that will never stand a chance in the free exchange of ideas so they will want opinions to be censored. If you don’t want to communicate with someone online, you can just use the included block tools that you can use to stop receiving communication from that person.

This idea of protecting people’s feelings online takes away resources that could solve true bullying that happens in schools such as physical violence where schools will often ignore the issue rather than doing anything to solve it.

5. create a register of offenders

So you want a register to be created for anyone who you think is a; racist, homophobic or a fat shamer? As this sound like an incredibly dangerous idea, as many people who identify as being ‘anti fascist’ often just call people those names in order to [justify political violence][1]. Any list like this would be vulnerable to being leaked which would then be used by the so-called ‘anti-fascists’ to hunt down people their disagree with in order to cause physical harm to them and in extreme cases could lead to people being murdered.

Final thoughts:

This may not apply to Katie Price but I have noticed that many people who claim to be liberal will act extremely authoritarian when it comes to freedom of speech, I think this comes from people who think only their ideas are right and don’t want to debate them so they will just call their opponents names and use those names in order to make laws to limit freedom of speech taus limiting democracy.

This kind of thinks makes me extremely embarrassed to call myself a liberal even tho I heavily believe in individual freedoms.

Petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/190627

1: http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=8831

Published: 3rd April 2017