2.16 Toby Young: The Free Speech Fightback

This week's guest on "So What You're Saying Is...", is journalist and education campaigner Toby Young. Toby is one of Britain's best-known journalists. Now writing for The Spectator and Quilette, he founded a magazine called The Modern Review and also wrote for Vanity Fair. His best--selling book, "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People", was later made into a film. He's also a champion for free schools and has founded 4 of them. His latest project is the Free Speech Union, a mass membership organisation dedicated to protecting free speech, which is increasingly under threat. The F.S.U. will be a mass membership organisation that stands up for the speech rights of its members and aims to create a more tolerant atmosphere on social media and other platforms. So if a member is targetted by a social media outrage mob for the inadvertent use of certain language, a taboo word or for dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy, the FSU will mobilise on social media and its members will come to their defence on social media. If they are accused of something, the member will be put through some form of due process to check the evidence so that they aren't just presumed to be guilty and cast out as Sir Roger Scruton was when George Eaton of The New Statesman passed incorrect information out via social media, which led to a campaign of hate against Scruton, ultimately resulting in Sir Roger losing his position as a Government adviser. The way in which veteran ITN journalist Alistair Stewart was treated & fired is another example -- as was Toby Young's own experience at the hands of a social media mob.