UK’s Controversial Online Safety Bill Reaches Parliament

Undated stock photo of a person using a laptop. (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

The UK government’s updated legislation on regulating online spaces, which would be the first major set of regulations for the internet anywhere in the world, was introduced in Parliament on March 17.

Social media platforms are expected to be forced to remove content that is deemed harmful in the ambitious Online Safety Bill, as well as protect freedom of speech.

Ofcom will be the new regulator of online platforms, with powers to fine companies or block access to sites that fail to comply with the new rules.

Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Nadine Dorries said the bill is about bringing “some accountability to Silicon Valley” and protecting the vulnerable, but critics have said the bill is “an incoherent mess” and fails to “strike the right balance between protecting users from illegal content and protecting the freedom of expression.”

Updates From Previous Draft

As the updated bill is yet to be published, the government has confirmed a number of changes, including the power to hold company executives criminally liable if they fail to comply with Ofcom information requests just two months after the bill becomes law, rather than the two years previously drafted.

In addition, company managers will now be held criminally liable for destroying evidence, failing to attend or providing false information in interviews with Ofcom, and obstructing the regulator when it enters company offices.

The revised bill has also changed its approach to so-called “legal but harmful” content.

Under the updated bill, the biggest social media platforms must carry out risk assessments on the types of harms that could appear on their services and how they plan to address it, setting out how they will do this in their terms of service.

But the agreed categories of legal but harmful content will now be set out in secondary legislation approved by Parliament, which the government says will not leave harmful content debates in the hands of social media executives or cause them to over-remove content over fears of being sanctioned.

Other updates include a new requirement to report child sexual abuse to the National Crime Agency.

UK Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Nadine Dorries, in an undated file photo. (James Manning/PA)

The government has also said news content will be exempt from any of the regulations as part of efforts to protect free speech.

A new amendment expected to be added to the bill will require online platforms to notify the publisher if they intend to remove posts of news content and not remove any content until after an appeal is heard.

A number of other recently announced changes to the draft bill include bringing paid-for scam adverts into scope; requiring sites that host pornography to ensure their users are 18 or over; criminalising “cyber-flashing;” and widening the scope of “most harmful illegal content and criminal activity” to include “revenge porn, hate crime, fraud, the sale of illegal drugs or weapons, the promotion or facilitation of suicide, people smuggling, and sexual exploitation.”

In an article published in The Telegraph on Thursday, Dorries said the bill will “hold platforms to account” in “protecting children and the vulnerable” by urgently removing illegal content; enforcing “their own terms and conditions against racism, misogny, anti-Semitism, and other forms of toxic abuse;” and protecting “free speech and journalism online.”

Rights Group: New Bill a ‘Censor’s Charter’

However, critics lambasted the bill over its potential to hamper freedom of speech.

Matthew Lesh, head of public policy at free-market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, called the bill “an incoherent mess that will seriously undermine free speech and privacy,” and the proposed rules on “legal but harmful” speech a “recipe for disaster.”

He disagreed that parliamentary oversight will prevent “overzealous removals” of the so-called “legal but harmful” content.

“Big Tech will still be forced to censor legal speech, and take a cautious approach to anything that could potentially be unlawful, or else face massive fines,” he said, adding, “The planned new communications offences will force platforms to remove speech merely on the suspicion that it could cause psychological harm.”

Lesh also criticised other aspects of the bill.

“The bill will give Ofcom the power to force platforms to use tools to automatically censor speech. Age gating and the ‘porn block’ will undermine user privacy. The bill also creates extraordinary regulatory burdens on start-ups that will scare away investment and cement the power of Big Tech,“ he said, adding that the ”focus on criminal sanctions for tech bosses, during a free speech clampdown in Russia, is frankly horrifying.”

Toby Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, labeled the bill a “censors’ charter,” arguing it failed to “strike the right balance between the need to protect users from illegal content and the right to freedom of expression.”

The bill “includes some free speech protections, but the penalty for ignoring them will not be nearly as great as the penalties for failing to comply with the new safety duties,” he said. “No social media company executive is going to be sent to jail for failing to uphold free speech. In the absence of more robust speech protections, this bill is a censors’ charter.”

In an email to The Epoch Times, a spokesperson for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport said: “The misleading statements by these groups were issued before the bill was even published suggesting they had already made up their minds without seeing its contents. They also do not offer any solutions to the abuse perpetrated on a daily basis on unregulated online platforms.

“They should be clear: Nothing in the bill will stop people accessing or posting legal content, and it will boost free speech online by putting legal duties on companies and Ofcom to protect people’s right to free expression, access to journalism and content of democratic importance.”

PA Media contributed to this report.