For instance, the Expert Voices Together ‘toolkit’ will ‘offer a menu of options’ to journalists including the means to ‘monitor and report abuse’. Call me a deplorable if you must, but that sounds to me like the government is giving money to journalists to enable them to more effectively snitch on the public.

From the grant summary: ‘The system will comprise a secure, rapid-response technical platform, support from trained case managers and an intervention toolkit.’ Rapid response? Intervention? What does that mean in practice, exactly? If you call a journalist the c-word in the comments section, will one of the Expert Voices Together ‘team of scientists, technical specialists [or] psychologists’ give you a stern talking to? Will they push for social-media platforms to delete your content, or suspend or block your account? …

It’s bad enough that today’s coddled journalists feel ‘traumatised’ by the slightest whiff of online criticism. More alarming is that the Biden administration has intervened on their behalf.