The UK Government has confirmed the mess of confusing legislation that is the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which attempts to clampdown on “harmful” internet content (i.e. via fines, website blocks by broadband ISPs and other sanctions), will return to Parliament “next week” (5th Dec) with some key changes.
At present, far too much harmful internet content – from racism to dangerous conspiracy theories, child abuse, self-harm, suicide imagery and more – slips through the cracks of the existing self-regulatory approach, as aptly demonstrated so many times before via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. The idea of creating a law to tackle some of this is thus a noble one and long overdue.
However, the reality of trying to actually clear up such content, while also extending that to tackle incredibly vague areas like “legal but harmful” content, ended up turning the OSB into an ugly and bloated mess of overbearing legislation – a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that risked placing a massive administrative and legal burden on even smaller sites. The word “unworkable” has often been coined by critics.
Naturally, any site facing such a hefty level of legal liability and the threat of harsh punishments (possibly even arrest), will simply opt to play it safe and censor what people say by default via automated filters (these often get things wrong = over-blocking) or remove user input entirely. Put another way, the OSB failed to strike the right balance between preserving Freedom of Expression and fostering outright Censorship.
This is of course what happens when you attempt to police the common and highly subjective public display of negative human thought, while at the same time trying to balance that against complex issues of context (e.g. people joking about blowing up a city or celebrity vs actual terrorists), parody and political speech – all of which is a monumentally difficult task. Humans often get it wrong, and automated systems are even worse.
In case anybody has forgotten, the OSB was due to complete its first passage through the House of Commons before the Summer recess, but it ended up being pulled amid the chaos over Boris Johnson’s final days in power and criticism over the legislation itself.
At the time the Government also signalled that, before bringing the bill back, it would be edited to soften the “legal but harmful” aspects that related to adult content, while “the bits in relation to children and online safety will not be changing,” said the Culture Secretary, Michelle Donelan.
The Government has tonight confirmed that the Bill is due to return to Parliament next week. The first amendments have been tabled to the Bill in the Commons for Report Stage on Monday 5th December 2022. Further amendments will be made at later stages of the Bill’s passage.
Summary of Key OSB Changes
➤ Legal but harmful provisions – related to content accessed by adults – have been replaced by new duties under a “consumer-friendly ‘triple shield’“. Firms will still need to protect children and remove content that is illegal or prohibited in their terms of service, however the Bill will no longer define specific types of legal content that companies must address.
NOTE: To retain protections for victims of abuse, the government will no longer repeal elements of the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act offences, which means the criminal law will continue to protect people from harmful communications, including racist, sexist and misogynistic abuse. But other new offences on false and threatening communications will remain in the OSB.
➤ The so-called “triple shield” means that social media firms will be legally required to remove “illegal content“, take down material in breach of their own terms of service, and provide adults with greater choice over the content they see and engage with. On that last point, if users are likely to encounter certain types of content – such as the glorification of eating disorders, racism, anti-semitism or misogyny not meeting the criminal threshold – internet companies “will have to offer adults tools to help them avoid it” (e.g. human moderation, blocking content flagged by other users or sensitivity and warning screens).
➤ The Bill will introduce new measures to make significant changes to the UK’s criminal law to increase protections for vulnerable people online by criminalising the encouragement of self-harm and the sharing of people’s intimate images without their consent. Another set of amendments will boost protections for women and girls online by adding the criminal offence of controlling or coercive behaviour to the list of priority offences in the Bill.
➤ Tech firms will be “forced” to publish more information about the risks their platforms pose to children, so people can see what dangers sites really hold (e.g. they’ll need to show how they enforce their user age limits to stop kids circumventing authentication methods, and they will have to publish details of when the regulator Ofcom has taken action against them).
➤ The bill adds free speech requirements to “major online platforms” (aka – Category 1 firms) to make them more accountable for their policies. It will explicitly prohibit them from removing or restricting user-generated content, or suspending or banning users, where this does not breach their terms of service or the law. In addition, firms will need to have clear, easy to understand and consistently enforced terms of service.
➤ The Victim’s Commissioner, Domestic Abuse Commissioner and Children’s Commissioner will be added as statutory consultees in the Bill, meaning Ofcom must consult with each when drafting the codes tech firms must follow to comply with the Bill.
➤ Ministers have already made changes to ensure all pornography providers prevent children’s access (e.g. age assurance measures) to comply with their duties. A further amendment will make platforms’ responsibilities to provide age appropriate protections for children clearer. Where platforms specify a minimum age for users, they will now have to clearly set out and explain in their terms of service the measures they use to enforce this, such as age verification technology.
In general, there’s good and bad news, although it remains unclear how the Government will balance the risks from enforced Age Verification Systems (AVS). Most websites cannot identify who is visiting their pages (adult or child), but AVS’ tend to come with huge privacy implications (nobody likes sharing their private personal data with such systems), as well as the various cost and technical challenges of implementation.
The government also claims its changes mean that “any incentives” for social media firms and internet content providers to “over-remove people’s legal online content [have been] taken out of the Online Safety Bill“. But it seems to us as though the new free speech requirements will put major platforms between a rock and a hard place when it comes to moderation decisions (i.e. they’re required to remove content which breaks the law and must NOT remove content that doesn’t break the law, with no involvement of the courts – that’s not always an easy thing to balance, even for lawyers).
Some platforms may simply tackle the above issue by creating even stricter terms to reduce the threat of legal liability / sanctions, which could still stifle speech. But others will find they also need to hire many more human moderators, which could put their economic models at risk (it’s normal for even big websites to be run by just a handful of people, or even individuals, on a shoestring budget – the economics don’t stretch). Faced with that, we still see a high risk of user engagement on some sites being switched off entirely.
Digital Secretary, Michelle Donelan, said:
“Unregulated social media has damaged our children for too long and it must end.
I will bring a strengthened Online Safety Bill back to Parliament which will allow parents to see and act on the dangers sites pose to young people. It is also freed from any threat that tech firms or future governments could use the laws as a licence to censor legitimate views.
Young people will be safeguarded, criminality stamped out and adults given control over what they see and engage with online. We now have a binary choice: to get these measures into law and improve things or squabble in the status quo and leave more young lives at risk.”
Dr Monica Horten, Policy Manager at the Open Rights Group (ORG), said:
“The Government is scrambling to solve a host of problems with draconian regulation.
From age-gating popular social media sites to monitoring all our private messages the Government appears to taking an approach more akin to Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China.
Global providers such as WhatsApp could pull their services from the UK rather than comply with demands to scan their customer’s private communications.
What Government wants to be responsible for driving away the apps we use to keep in touch with friends and family?.”
The reference to WhatsApp above relates to the government’s previously expressed, and incredibly controversial idea, of scanning private messages in internet messaging services. At present, most such platforms use end-to-end encryption, which makes network-level content scanning effectively impossible as not even the provider can read such messages.
The only way to make such a scanning system work is to ban such encryption on internet messaging apps (not a new idea), which risks making them less secure (easier for hackers and state sponsored snoops to crack). Users would most likely move to a different platform – one further outside the government’s reach.
End-to-end encryption is a common security method that can be added to any online communication service – you’re using it now as you visit this very website via HTTPS or pay for something online with your credit card. Put another way, any attempt to completely prevent its use on such systems seems likely to require a lot of exclusions to avoid unintended consequences and may be doomed to fail.
At the end of the day, the revised OSB has made some sensible improvements and a few tedious ones. But question marks remain over the workability of its approach, and Ofcom will still be hard-pressed to find enough resources to adequately police such a large industry.
On top of that, it increasingly feels like website owners will need to hire expensive lawyers in order to fully grasp the implementation challenges of the new law, which is not something that smaller fish will be able to afford. But at the time of writing, we haven’t yet been able to see the revised text, so it’s a little tricky to effectively judge the changes until we have the full context.
UPDATE 9:24am
The amendments list for the revised bill is now online (here), but at 77 pages it’s quite a tedious read.
Bin it. We don’t need it.
The country doesn’t need more bad laws, written by a bunch of jobsworths in London, that fuel the continuous cycle of legislating the life out of us.
Reminder that questioning the lockdowns was being labeled as misinformation and people were getting arrested in Australia and having their money frozen in Canada. If people haven’t revolted over that then will they revolt when their doors are being welded?
This bill is a complete erosion of the fundamental human right to free speech and needs to be completely scrapped. Anyone pushing for it should not only be voted out but serve jail time. It’s insane there are no repercussions for these clown politicians
This isn’t going to work.
But the people in Westminster are a bunch of thickheaded cnuts.
This post by “anon” is a classic example of the problems with this intended law.
It talks about “people in Westminster” -accuracy – I doubt that most folk who live and work in the Westminster area make or propose laws.
The statement that all are “thickheaded” is probably inaccurate.
“cnuts” – might be a deliberate misspelling of an obscene word to fool blocker software, or it might be a clever reference to King Knut (Canute) who is alleged to have tried to stop the tide.
The poster is probably trying to say something like – “The governing class at Westminster are ignoring rational objections to the objections to the bill”.
@Martin Was there a point to your post other that wowing us all with your literacy?
You know very well what the OP was trying to say. To misconstrue “the people of Westminster passing laws” as “the residents and workers of the Westminster area” is being deliberately obtuse.Same goes with the use of “cnuts”.
You may have misgivings with anonymous posting on the Internet (as do I, mostly due to how nasty people can become when they’re unaccountable) but this may not be the best way of making your point.
Anonimity is important in online discourse, especially in a time where someone’s opinion can not only paint his employer in a bad light but even worse get the individual fired.
As an example there is a certain “something”speed employee who defends his company here in these comments by twisting facts. He may be wrong but we should not live in a society where being wrong should destroy people’s livelihoods. As a bigger example there’s Elon Musk smoking a legal joint in Joe Rogan podcast and Tesla stock going down 10%. Anonimity is important for discourse because the most innocent gesture can have dire consequences
Accountability is also important in regular daily discourse.
Fine balancing act and this authoritarian nonsense takes it way too far.
As far as careers go social media policy should be in people’s contracts, as should a clear line between personal speech and what may reflect on the employer.
Really complicated and difficult thing to balance. Government should really keep out of it.
The point I was trying to make is that anon’s post could well conflict with many of the potential provisions of this law. Even a misspelling of a swear word might have been an attempt at satire, rather than an attempt to get round a filter on swear words. Who is to be the judge on that one?
I do appreciate that anonymous posting is essential, especially for those that work in the industry. Too often, it is used by those who specialise in bad language to attack those they disagree with.
Accountability already exists in the law. If something is illegal then it is pointless to make it more illegal. If something is subjectively bad but not illegal like men cannot be women then nothing should be done about it
No, John, people are accountable to way more than just the state and the law.
>I do appreciate that anonymous posting is essential […]
Evidently you do not. So which is it?
This is just the first step before the site blocking starts.
Site blocking? If only that.
This is the first step to an isolated Chinese like internet, where the govt is free to silence and censor opposing views. There’s literally a world economic forum video where they say that censorship is “necessary” in order to impose the system they want us peasants to live in
Already happens.
The WEF nonsense makes my eyes roll back in my head so hard that I feel I need a crowbar to get them back facing forward, however there is a legitimate concern over successive UK governments’ desire to regulate and control Internet activity.
The privacy dial is pointing in the wrong direction and with this and upcoming plans it’s getting worse.
They literally tell you to your face that they are proud of penetrating world cabinets and how the world needs a great reset and you literally see the founder Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates openly participating in the summit with all the world leaders. We had a democratic vote to elect our PM but that vote was ignored and they still installed their guy
https://www.weforum.org/people/rishi-sunak
But keep thinking it’s nonsense
Will do. Thank you for the permission.
Given all the claims would have thought you’d do better than a picture of Sunak with his job description as evidence in the links but whatever: innuendo works, right?
That you don’t know how democracy works here, you seem to think we directly elect our PM, speaks volumes. The ruling party’s MPs and members elect the PM: no-one else. We vote for our MP and that’s all.
The idea that Johnson or Truss are in any way less amenable to the ‘globalist WEF’ is laughable. Johnson as the PM we apparently elected is on the site: https://www.weforum.org/people/Boris-Johnson as is the PM the wider population without question didn’t elect, Liz Truss: https://www.weforum.org/people/liz-truss.
So given you seem to be using that Rishi Sunak is on the website as an example of WEF enforcing PMs on us contrary to democracy to ensure a great reset is obvious nonsense it seems fair to judge your other claims in the same light.
So I’ll keep thinking it’s nonsense given 5 minutes on Google made a mockery of your post.
The members have voted for Truss, maybe you are not a member but the PM was by all definitions of the word, “elected”. That voted was scrapped, because people getting empowered is a bad thing, and the one that better embodies the cause was installed.
Rishi Sunak has been promoting CBDCs that his company has been rolling out in China. Klaus Schwab has literally said a week ago that the CCP is a role model for the entire world. Rishi has also keeping the fracking ban in a time when the country is struggling for energy as ordained by the WEF. Taxes raised including the globalist business tax which is more of the communist poverty agenda. The only nonsense here ignoring facts but XGS always with the poor takes
This is more about controlling the agenda and taking away freedoms than saving lives.
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Softened Online UK Internet Censorship Bill Returns to Parliament – ISPreview.co.uk
Posted under Cibercommunity, Technology On By James Steward