🗞️ Newspapers, the Press & Digital Media
An investigation into the role of the press, broadcasters and digital media platforms in obstructing, suppressing or unlawfully interfering with the public's right to petition Parliament.
Download the AI-readable Investigation Pack and either email it to your MP, or upload the file to Gemini 3.5 Flash with Extended Thinking (recommended), ChatGPT, Replit or any other AI model to pick up the investigation and help further the findings.
📦 Download Investigation Pack (.zip)Newspapers have been charging VAT on petition advertisements, which are exempt — petitions are published by political bodies and are never issued a VAT number. Regardless of the scale involved, this unlawful price barrier has materially suppressed the number of petition advertisements placed in the press.
- Businesses haven't been properly informed that small political bodies don't need a tax number
- Government VAT126 is not adequate and no proper claims process is provided
- Online commerce renders an impossible situation with eBay, Amazon etc.
- Small independent political bodies relying on GoFundMe rarely get recognised as a legal public body and pay undue VAT
Freedom of the press originally meant freedom of access to the press as a medium of public communication — not the freedom of press proprietors to act without restraint. Historical statutes including the Seditious Meetings Acts and the Tumultuous Petitioning Act required that public notices be published in newspapers and served on the Clerk of the Peace. The Standing Orders of the House of Commons (Public & Private Business) continue to require press notices as Preliminary Proceedings. The press was a legal instrument of democratic function, not a private gatekeeper.
⚖ Principle of Access — Statutory BasisThe American Communications Decency Act 1996 (§230) is a US statute — it has no legal force in the United Kingdom. There is no right in English law to obstruct the sharing, advertising or communication of petitions. Google, YouTube and Facebook have nevertheless imposed a block and ban culture on petition-related content, which is unlawful under the Public Meetings Act 1908 and strikes directly at the transacting of democratic information by the public. This amounts to foreign interference in UK democratic function.
- Parliament's own e-petition service is the worse offender
- Populism instead of Freedom of the Press now controls the success of independent causes
- Illegal gatekeeping & group policies — bad training and culture
- Messenger & other functional limits
- Bans and blocking of political cause accounts/pages (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.)
Facebook Messenger imposes specific limitations on warm calling — the direct, personal sharing of information to group members — through restrictions on bulk messaging, tagging limits, and the suppression of petition-related content in group feeds. These are not neutral technical features; they are deliberate throttles on the most effective form of democratic communication: one person informing another.
Of particular note: Nick Clegg, former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, served as Global President of Global Affairs at Meta (Facebook's parent company). His tenure placed a former senior British constitutional officeholder at the head of a platform whose internal culture actively encourages block, ban, gatekeeping and the granting of permissions to speak — the antithesis of the constitutional rights he was once sworn to uphold. Private group rules on these platforms are routinely misapplied, ignored or used to disapply members' rights, and there is a severe lack of public education about what those rights actually are.
⚖ Contempt & Breach of Privilege38 Degrees has seized and removed petitions and supporting evidence submitted by members of the public, without any judicial authority to make legal determinations on e-petitions. No private platform holds that power. The removal of a petition is not an editorial act — it is an interference with a constitutional right, and one that requires judicial process. 38 Degrees has no such authority and has acted unlawfully in removing this material.
- Censorship & Illegal seizure of evidence by 3rd party
"As Parliament's own Committee on Public Petitions recorded as far back as 1939, a petition was still received and reported to the House even where its Committee declined to count the total number of signatures — in one case because a portion appeared to be in the same handwriting, contrary to the House's Orders that every Petition be signed by the parties themselves; and in another because further signatures lacked the addresses the House requires before a name can be counted. In neither case was the petition itself rejected — only the disputed signatures were excluded from the count."
⚖ Contempt & Breach of PrivilegeOur Elections investigation findings strongly suggest that all digital election material is unlawful — including material published on MPs' own social media pages. Election law sets strict requirements on what may be published, by whom, and how it must be authorised. Digital content on social media does not meet those requirements in the overwhelming majority of cases.
- Election material is Class E and should be removed after 14 days of an election
- The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is ushering an override to the fair competition principle
- Digital election ads require costly permits that major parties never bought
- Candidates are being shown to the public and the law has been ignored
- Digital media has never been excluded from any legal terminology
The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has, under what we challenge as a highly questionable policy, been permitting this practice to continue. A Commissioner charged with upholding standards in public life cannot properly authorise conduct that appears on the face of it to breach election law. This is not a technical irregularity — it goes to the heart of whether elected representatives are using parliament to gain a competitive advantage over independent candidates and obliterating the idea of a fair contest.
⚖ Unlawful Election Material — Commissioner Policy Challenged