Are you worried about the Online Safety Bill?
Are you worried about the Online Safety Bill? Well, you should be. It will further erode Britain's civil liberties by policing what can be said on line. Specifically, the draft Online Safety Bill would make Ofcom responsible for regulating social media platforms and search engines. They would be liable for material that is "harmful", although it is legal, as described in this briefing from the Free Speech Union:
"A major shortcoming of the Bill is that it creates a new legal duty to protect adult users from content which is lawful but which might cause ‘harm’. Social media companies would be obliged to remove content that is legal but, in some way, ‘psychologically harmful’ (to adults, not just children). That would mean speech that is lawful offline would become prohibited online, with social media companies facing heavy fines from Ofcom if they failed to remove it. This would inevitably lead to Google, Facebook and Twitter removing vast swathes of lawful content, either voluntarily or at the behest of politically motivated complainants claiming to speak on behalf of vulnerable groups."
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said “This Government said it would legislate to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online while enshrining free speech, and that’s exactly what we are going to do", and the bill would be a “notice to the online platforms to say here it is, we’re letting you know what it is now, so start doing what you need to do.”
That is what they mean by "safe" and "free speech". In this context, it seems to mean either "having opinions limited to those approved by state censors" or "self-censoring and wary of prosecution." Ella Whelan in the Spiked podcast describes when an ordinary person has the long arm of the law come round to check their thinking:
"It gets underplayed how big a deal it is to have the police involved in your life. You do not want the police involved in your life. The police come into your house - as happened to the lady who had these stickers - .... to have the police come to her house, riffle through her bookshelves and pick out a book on the transgender issue, and take that away ... people use the word trauma too often, but it's a pretty big deal. It's frightening. You think, what's going on? The police shouldn't be involved in your life in things like that. ... They shouldn't be there to police every day behaviour and to police politics. ... If you don't like what someone is saying, you get the police to investigate them."
Annabel Denham raised her concerns in the Spectator:
"Few people in Britain will have heard of the draft Online Safety Bill. Fewer still will oppose it....we are tying ourselves in knots over a draft Bill so complex that its core aims are unclear. It will substantially reimagine the role of the state with respect to 'safety', handing extraordinary powers to Ofcom, yet will require censorship of online speech that would be lawful offline.
She points out that there is nothing inevitable about making the state responsible for protecting people from psychological harm:
"In truth there aren’t any obvious policy solutions that can make the internet (or real life) entirely safe from bad actors. In the offline world, we expect adults to drive safely and reliably oversee children in public spaces... There is no reason why we cannot apply the same logic around individual responsibility or good old-fashioned parenting online as we do in the real world.
"We’ve lost sight of how online communications, especially in social media, have long been home to liberal principles of toleration and voluntary association. Free speech and (virtual) assembly have flourished and opinions have been expressed, unrestricted by state-sanctioned views of decency or suitability. As a result, knowledge has been advanced, providing a bulwark against tyranny."
Anyone who thinks that the powers in the bill won't be used against politically inconvenient people has not been paying attention in the last two years.