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Hello, and London to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots.

I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and Damien Collins, chair of the Joint Select Committee on the Online Safety Bill. And let's talk about that online safety bill. In the telegraph this week,

Fraser, you write that it's going to make Nick Clegg the most powerful man in Britain and that this is not a good thing. Tell us why.

On the face of it, this online safety bill doesn't really look controversial. The politicians are saying, look, we basically want to make it an offence for Facebook or Google or YouTube to promote criminality,

to promote, for example, self-harm, vile forms of pornography. You know, you can take some

pretty gruesome examples and nobody could really argue with the fact that if it would be

offence to publish it to the newspaper, it should be an offence to publish it online too.

But what they're doing goes way, way, way further than that.

And I do think that the politicians are being rather naive about the unintended consequences of what they're about to do.

We are now living in an age of censorship, of automatic algorithm-driven

censorship. It's happening already. It's happening to what the spectator produces. It isn't yet

happening to these podcasts, but if we were having this discussion on YouTube, then what would

happen is that YouTube would be scanning the audio, it would work out that we're having a

conversation on a controversial topic. Now, what's happened to a spectator in the past is if we

were discussing lockdown policies and we had somebody who was questioning lockdown policies,

then it would get flagged up by an automatic bot on YouTube and it might be taken down completely

or it might be removed from YouTube's

recommendations. In other words, hardly anybody would see the content, even if it wasn't deleted.

Now, this is a very strange censorship system and it's happening all the time.

There's another forum as well, which I find to be the most egregious.

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