Over the last four or five years, there has been a greater effort to collapse ‘hate’ into the remit of extremism and terrorism, and in turn tackle ‘hate crime’ through a counter-extremism framework which relies on monitoring and disruption powers.

A recent article in Tribune pointed to the new regulations being proposed by the Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE) and the Home Secretary to bolster practices on managing hate crime online and in real life. This follows a drive over the last decade to regulate and manage social media and the online space more thoroughly. And now the publication of the Online Harms Bill looms near, which will introduce a comprehensive framework of regulation for internet providers to give the British state the unprecedented ability to assert its control over social media.

Co-authored by CCE lead Sara Khan and former Terrorism Chief Mark Rowley, the report Operating with Impunity points to what it calls a ‘gaping chasm’ in legislation for material which stirs up hatred but is not directly abusive or threatening to any one individual – which they term ‘hateful extremism’. The report aims to lobby for the expansion of the Online Harms framework and introduce new policies which allow for the state to outlaw groups and target individuals with even greater ease under this broad category of ‘hateful extremism’.

Embedded within the Online Harms framework are greater measures to coax social media companies into compliance, and a greater ability to step in and shut down accounts.

Big Tech and social media companies are certainly no friend to the Left – but handing control over to our government to determine the boundaries of acceptable activity online will extinguish any discussion about the need to democratise the online space or establish proper means of accountability on social media companies.

There has been a growing tension over the control of social media between governments like ours, on the one hand, and the likes of Facebook, on the other – forcing social media companies to over-perform their commitment to tackling ‘hate’. The most high-profile—and in all likelihood, least sympathetic—example of this was ex-president Donald Trump, whose social media accounts were summarily banned in the wake of the Capitol Hill attacks to much applause, including from the centre and Left.

Yet if an individual with one of the largest democratic mandates in the world has his public-facing communication removed, how much safer does that leave the rest of us? Moreover, what’s to stop companies exercising those powers arbitrarily?

The conversation on the dangers of social media censorship need not centre Trump, nor remain in the realm of libertarian excess. Every single campaigner even vaguely on the Left will have experienced, or know someone or group who has experienced, inexplicable, unjust, and heavy-handed censorship online – whether it was masses of Occupy activists accounts removed from Twitter or liberal Facebook pages closed in the lead up to the 2020 US Election, or, on an individual level, the many times Twitter accounts are blocked or limited after coordinated complaints.

The repression of the Palestine solidarity movement over the past five years has been the most visible, and visceral, case of the manifold ways in which political activism is policed – including by being recast as ‘hateful’ and antisemitic, and therefore alleged to be adjacent to extremism. The goalposts on ‘hate’ and ‘extremism’ will forever be changing, and the online space remains central to managing these. And as complicated as our relationship with social media might be, allowing the government to grant itself increased powers to manipulate and manage these goalposts really is digging our own graves.

Since the Brexit referendum, we have seen an explosion in discourse around hate crime. Yet, like our understanding of racism, leaving these within the realm of interpersonal interactions divorces them from the wider political context. We have seen the government response to racism and xenophobic hate crime not just absolve of responsibility those institutions ultimately culpable for them—the police, the state, the media, the powerful—but vest within some of those very institutions the ability to police hate. Indeed, the Online Harms framework would be regulated by Ofcom – soon to be chaired by none other than Paul Dacre, former editor of the British press’ voice of reason, the Daily Mail.

The proposals being introduced to regulate online content will never be used to punch upwards, where the most disastrous forms of hate occur. The state and its agents are the largest perpetrators of hate, whether through surveillance at home or devastation abroad. Handing struggles against racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and all oppression over to them would be drilling a hole in our own lifeboats.

Make no mistake, this government doesn’t care about hate crime – it cares about control. The cynical approach of using relatively low-hanging fruit, against whom few would instinctively challenge, is a consistent theme of this government. Recently, news reports covered measures to tackle child sexual abuse in the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill – what wasn’t covered in as much detail was the raft of new police powers to disrupt protests and vehicles, and to capture surveillance without consent.

Hidden behind the headlines was an increase to the sentence for damaging a memorial from three months to ten years, and a disastrous approach to youth violence modelled on the Islamophobic ‘Prevent’ programme – which will undoubtedly lead to swathes of racialised youth being introduced to the criminal justice system. The legislation also makes it more difficult to escape the vicious cycle of the criminal justice system, entrenching inequality which means more poor, racialised people will be introduced to the horror of prisons even younger, and for even longer.

Hate crime has become a Trojan horse for new policing powers, greater surveillance, and the targeting of critics of power. The state can’t protect you from hate crime. We only have each other.