After today’s King’s Speech, This Writer has written to Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for Digital, Science and Technology, with a simple message: “Dear Digital Secretary: save our businesses!”

Vox Political is a campaigning site at its heart. The site has most notably won victories over the Department for Work and Pensions over its mistreatment of people on sickness and disability benefits, among others.

But I can’t achieve anything if hardly anybody is reading my words – and VP is among many sites suffering suppression by social media platforms.

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This is a huge threat, not only to free speech but to the UK’s economic prosperity. How many other online businesses are being penalised? I don’t know – but I would certainly hope that anybody who is suffering in the same way will get in touch ([email protected]) to join me in lobbying the government for action.

Here’s what I have sent to Peter Kyle:

Dear Secretary of State,

In his speech at the State Opening of Parliament, the King said, “My Government will prioritise wealth creation for all.” I am writing to request that you investigate and end a particularly pernicious form of wealth suppression that has plagued my business and others like it since at least 2020.

I refer to the suppression of businesses that rely on publicity on the internet and in particular via social media platforms.

I run a political news and commentary website called Vox Political, which takes a centre-left stance and is therefore likely to be broadly supportive of your government’s policies (although I reserve the right to be critical where I believe you deserve it). I write and publish up to six articles per day, and publicise these on platforms including Facebook, X (the former Twitter), and others.

Occasionally I post queries on these websites to check that people are seeing these posts and the most common response is that these queries are the first things people have seen from me in a long time – often months.

The reason, as far as I and other social media-reliant website owners can tell, is that these platforms use algorithms – processes or sets of rules that are followed when handling posts by users – to push links to sites like mine down users’ newsfeeds (the lists of posts they see from other users, pages or groups they have indicated they want to see) to prevent them from being seen.

We do not know why social media platforms do this. Perhaps they are being paid by the so-called mainstream media to suppress us and promote them. Perhaps they want us to spend money advertising our output (although, if so, they are charging far too much; a recent message from Facebook suggested that I should spend £42 to get 1,000 extra views – which is clearly an admission that views are being restricted, but 1,000 extra readers would not generate the extra revenue for my site that would cover the cost of paying for them, so it would be commercial insanity for me to spend that money).

Perhaps these platforms are simply run by people whose politics are right-wing, and they want our sites to fail.

Before these algorithms were introduced, my presence on Facebook (for example) grew rapidly, my posts were seen by tens of thousands of people at a time, and my website’s popularity approached a million hits per month. This meant I was able to earn a relatively comfortable living.

Now, my presence on that platform has stagnated, my posts are often seen by fewer than 100 people and my website struggles to get 1,000 hits a day.

That hasn’t happened because public tastes have changed; it is a result of direct interference.

And my site is just one of many. There are thousands – maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands – of small businesspeople like me and I have no doubt that many, most or all of them have been penalised in the same way – by monopolies that are abusing their power over us (in my opinion).

When you think of the damage to the UK economy that this could represent, the consequences may be staggering.

So I appeal to you: will you please launch an investigation into what is happening to businesses like mine, why it is happening, and how we can be freed to return to profit again? And will you then take the appropriate steps to free the online economy to make the potentially huge contribution to the UK’s prosperity that it should?

I am willing to provide further information and assistance if needed, and I am sure my colleagues who suffer similar suppression will also be happy to do the same.

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