The internet has changed radically in the past decade or so. Where social-media giants once boasted about being ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’, in recent years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms have become increasingly censorious, cracking down on dissenting views and offensive speech. Big Tech has relished this role as the unofficial arbiter of acceptable thought. But while the likes of Facebook may have severely wounded free speech online, it could be the UK government that deals the killer blow.
This week the long-awaited Online Safety Bill was published, which aims to make the UK the ‘safest place to be online in the world’ – in other words, the country with the most strictly regulated and censored internet of any liberal democracy. This mammoth piece of legislation was five years in the making, and those five years show. The bill is vast in scope, and terrifying in its implications for free speech.
Most significant is the ‘duty of care’ the bill imposes on social-media firms. Tech platforms will be legally required to prevent users from seeing both illegal content and ‘legal but harmful content’.
What actually constitutes ‘harmful content’ has yet to be revealed. If the Online Harms White Paper (published in 2020) is any guide, then this is likely to include content which might cause psychological harm, disinformation and trolling or harassment. Of course, all of these ‘harms’ are subjective. ‘Trolling’ can extend from playful banter to persistent harassment. Which views tech firms consider to be ‘disinformation’ has less to do with lies and truth than political expediency.
Once this list of harms is approved by parliament, the culture secretary will have the power to add more categories of harm, and firms will be required to report new ‘emerging harms’ to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. So we should expect the bill’s censorious remit to expand over time.
Firms which fail to comply with the new duty-of-care requirements, or are obstructive or provide false information to Ofcom, can be fined up to 10 per cent of their annual worldwide revenue, and platform executives can be sentenced to up to two years in jail. These severe penalties have allowed UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries to claim that she is taking on Big Tech, and that she is holding Silicon Valley firms ‘accountable’. But it is not Big Tech firms that suffer when free speech is curtailed online. Indeed, they have already demonstrated their indifference to free speech.
After all, it is not Facebook, Twitter or Google that produce the ‘harmful’ content the government wants to eliminate. It is us, the users of social media, the deplorable, unruly citizens, who are saying things that our political masters would rather we did not say. It is our ability to express ourselves that will be curtailed by this legislation, not theirs. And this is why this bill is so troubling.
Keep reading
Hellbound and Down 
You must be logged in to post a comment.