British Government Adds ‘Hostile State Disinformation’ Amendment to Online Safety Bill

The government is to table an amendment which will make "foreign interference" a designated priority offence under the Online Safety Bill. (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

Social media platforms will have to proactively look for and remove “disinformation” from foreign state actors under a proposed amendment to upcoming online safety laws. Foreign Interference will also be made a designated priority offence.

In a statement on Tuesday, the government wrote that it will table an amendment to link the National Security Bill with the Online Safety Bill.

However, the Free Speech Union, an organisation dedicated to upholding free speech in Britain, said that the difficulty is “first defining misinformation and second determining whether it’s state-backed.”

Foreign States or Their Puppets

Digital Secretary Nadine Dorries said that the “invasion of Ukraine has yet again shown how readily Russia can and will weaponise social media to spread disinformation and lies about its barbaric actions, often targeting the very victims of its aggression.”

“We cannot allow foreign states or their puppets to use the internet to conduct hostile online warfare unimpeded,” said Dorries.

“That’s why we are strengthening our new internet safety protections to make sure social media firms identify and root out state-backed disinformation,” she added.

The Foreign Interference Offence created by the National Security Bill will be added to the list of priority offences in the Online Safety Bill. The upcoming bill on regulating online spaces, which would be the first major set of regulations for the Internet anywhere in the world, was introduced by the Conservatives in Parliament on March 17.

In May, Home Secretary Priti Patel introduced the National Security Bill, formerly known as the Counter State Threats Bill, to reform existing espionage laws. New offences include tackling state-backed sabotage and foreign interference.

State-Linked Disinformation

With the new amendment, the government said that this means that “social media platforms, search engines, and other apps and websites allowing people to post their own content will have a legal duty to take proactive, preventative action to identify and minimise people’s exposure to state-sponsored or state-linked disinformation aimed at interfering with the UK.”

The government added that firms failing to tackle online interference by rogue states face huge fines or being blocked.

In June Conservative Minister Chris Philp told Parliament that the government had established a counter-disinformation unit within Department for Digital, Culture, Media (DCMS) whose remit is to identify misinformation and work with social media firms to get it taken down.

On the Foreign Interference Offence, Security Minister Damian Hinds said that online information operations “are now a core part of state threats activity.”

“The aim can be variously to spread untruths, confuse, undermine confidence in democracy, or sow division in society,” he added.

“Disinformation is often seeded by multiple fake personas, with the aim of getting real users, unwittingly, then to ‘share’ it. We need the big online platforms to do more to identify and disrupt this sort of coordinated inauthentic behaviour. That is what this proposed change in the law is about,” said Hinds.

The Foreign Interference Offence will “make it illegal for a person to engage in conduct for, on behalf of or with intent to benefit a foreign power in a way which interferes in UK rights, discredits our democratic intuitions, manipulates people’s participation in them and undermines the safety or interests of the UK.”

It also includes conduct that “involves making false or misleading misrepresentations, including using information which is true but presented in a misleading way or misrepresenting a person’s identity.”

British Government Propaganda

“The difficulty with trying to prohibit state-backed misinformation is first defining misinformation and second determining whether it’s state-backed,” said Toby Young, director-general of the Free Speech Union.

“For instance, would British Government propaganda wildly overestimating the risk of asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 fall foul of this new rule? Obviously not. I suspect that, like other rules prohibiting online misinformation, it will be invoked selectively to censor opinions the authorities disapprove of,” he added.

In June, a trio of top-level former frontbenchers warned that the upcoming Online Safety Bill handed “unprecedented censorship powers” to the secretary of state and Ofcom, the UK’s regulator of communications services.

“While the Government no doubt has good intentions, in its current form, the Bill could end up being one of the most significant accidental infringements on free speech in modern times,” said David Davis MP.

A DCMS spokesperson said, “Despite what is repeatedly and incorrectly stated by its opponents, the Bill will not force online platforms to remove legal free speech.

“This amendment tackles online disinformation that is deliberately sent by individuals or groups acting on behalf of foreign states to undermine UK society and democracy.

“Under the Foreign Interference Offence, this activity will be made illegal and should not be on the internet.”