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Hello and welcome to the final spiked podcast of the year.

I'm Fraser Myers and joining me this week to look back on 2021,

we have Spikes editor Tom Slater and spike columnist Ella Wielen.

Hi. Coming up on the show we'll be looking at some of the key themes of the past year,

free speech, the culture wars, the environment and the COVID pandemic.

So 2021 kicked off with probably the most infamous act of big tech censorship of all time.

Donald Trump, who was sitting president, lest we forget at the time, in January,

was booted off Twitter and Facebook and a number of other social media

outlets. I mean some of this was this really you know set a very very dangerous

precedent in terms of free speech didn't it?

It did and you know we're almost at risk of forgetting it now it feels like a million years ago

yeah how fast things move these days and how slow at the same time with the pandemic but it was so

significant and as you were saying just in the

in the wake of the election which obviously kind of descended into this crazy

spectacle with Trump and his various outriders claiming that the election was stolen and it culminating in that demonstration and the storming of the capital and Trump effectively being kicked off of all of these different social media platforms being seen to kind of incite riot, incite violence and all the rest of it.

And I think the first thing to say about it because it's easy to forget is that just the case that they had for doing

...