Silicon Valley thinks journalists shouldn’t talk to Nigel Farage, by Brendan O’Neill.

Last week … big players at Google, Twitter and Spotify wrote to Campaign, the UK-based global magazine that covers advertising and marketing, to chastise it for daring to carry a cover story on Nigel Farage. This article ‘was a step in the wrong direction’, the social-media giants decreed in their astonishingly arrogant letter to Campaign. If you needed any further proof that the tech elite has gotten rather too big for its boots, here it was. …

Apparently Farage and the Brexit Party do one ‘simple’ thing – ‘identify people who look different, mobilise anger against them and hold them up as the people everyone else should blame’. And thus it was outrageous for Campaign to talk to him.

This infantile, sixth-former view of the Brexit Party is not only insulting to Farage — it’s also insulting to the millions of people who voted for the Brexit Party just a couple of months before Campaign wisely thought that Farage would be worth talking to and working out. …

It is politically incorrect to mention this man favorably

Amazingly, things got worse: Campaign’s reaction to the letter was as mad as the letter itself. It completely buckled. Instead of standing up for its editorial right to speak with all sorts of people who are doing interesting things in the realms of messaging and influence, it cravenly begged for the big-hitters’ forgiveness. ‘We made mistakes in our approach. And we’re sorry’, the editor-in-chief Claire Beale said. Worse, she promised essentially to cleanse Campaign of the culture that allowed the Farage profile to happen. …

This little-discussed case will definitely embolden the social-media and advertising elites who think they have the right to shape political discussion itself. Do you think Campaign will ever speak to a Brexity person again? Of course it won’t.