Now remember... your right to free speech is being removed for YOUR safety

Government Online Safety Bill poses a greater threat to freedom of speech in the UK than any other law in living memory

By Jasmine Birtles

HOW grateful we must all be that our Government has our online safety at heart.

The new Online Safety Bill, published this week, thoughtfully includes all sorts of proposals that will curb our ability to express facts and ideas online, will squash all opinions but the official ones and help us to keep off the internet altogether by insisting on our presenting a digital ID to use it.

Yes, you will be thrilled to know that this Bill:

• enables the Government to force the censorship of lawful expression.

• encourages IDs for the internet (you will remember that ministers said we wouldn’t have vaccine passports but they are now attempting to bring in the same basic product through the back door with internet passports).

• criminalises speech that is deemed to be “distressing” – deemed, that is, by one of the ‘helpful’ organisations that have done such a great job of restricting free speech in every aspect of our lives over the last two years such as that free and fair arbiter of all things media, Ofcom and, everyone’s favourite, the Silicon Valley giants.

Baroness Claire Fox, among others, is not happy about the contents of this new Bill, to put it mildly.

The founder of the Academy of Ideas says that, for a start, the Bill itself is not necessary as we already have legislation that could deal with genuine online harms.

“It’s a very vast piece of legislation,” she says. “Of course it’s reasonable to want to deal with suicide sites or any of the other grim activities you see online but, as it happens, the legislation to deal with much of this already exists and we could just tweak it, or the Government could have proposed very discreet laws to deal with the new problems especially associated with protecting children.

“However, this Bill is not targeted to deal with certain very specific problems. It has become much more dangerous by being so all-encompassing. In fact I suspect that the real issues that actually need to be addressed will end up getting neglected because we’ll be drowning in all the other, more political, issues.”

Fox points out that, although some of the more egregious elements of the proposed Bill have been watered down, and the Government has responded to criticism by adding a commitment to free speech, the legitimacy of removing legal but harmful material undermines that. There is still a fundamental danger in the continuous assumption that there is one side only that should decide what is harmful and what is not.

“You can see in the Bill that there’s a prior decision as to which views are harmful and that’s a big issue for democracy” she says. “Harm is now very broadly defined as a way of saying certain information is acceptable and other information is not…and that’s problematic.

“Even the word ‘harm’ with its association with Covid means we get to a situation where speech itself is seen as dangerous. With Covid, we’ve already had the idea that if you listen to ‘those forms of speech over there’ you might get ill and that could kill you. And prior to that, we had a kind of ‘safe spaces’ mentality instituted in universities where people would say ;if I hear certain things it will give me mental health problems’.

“So we’re at a stage now where the virtues of free speech itself are being undermined by making it seem risky and dangerous and that’s what I see in the Bill itself as particularly frightening – it consolidates that idea into the law.”

And who will decide what is ‘harmful’ and what is not? Ultimately, the Regulator, Ofcom, which was set up by the Blair Government in 2003 to monitor and control what is broadcast and published.

“If you’re sceptical of Ofcom, it’s now a mere tadpole compared to the monster it’s going to become,” says Fox. “It’s going to become the most powerful institution in Britain if this legislation goes through because it will even be able to determine tweets and it will have the power to pursue organisations and individuals for ‘truth crimes’.”

Specifically, the plan is that Ofcom will be able to fine companies (such as broadcasters, social media platforms, blog platforms and more) £18million or up to 10 per cent of their annual global turnover if they fail to comply.  The Bill even goes so far as to suggest that executives who fail to cooperate with Ofcom could face jail, although it is unclear how they would enforce it.

The Bill adds “social media platforms will only be required to tackle ‘legal but harmful’ content, such as exposure to self-harm, harassment and eating disorders, set by the Government and approved by Parliament.” Link

But the actual subjects and supposedly ‘legal but harmful’ views that would have to be removed cover a much wider scope than those articulated.

“It’s the chilling effect and delegitimising of certain views by calling it misinformation that is particularly harmful,” adds Fox. “The idea that certain things are fake news – decided by Government or Ofcom – and a lot more pressure put on Big Tech to remove it. Now you might think that this is already happening, and it is, but this is legislation that will demand that they do that. So inevitably there will be a larger range of issues that could find you censored by the platforms because they will be nervous.”

The whole proposal is fraught with problems. For example, when a topic is not yet settled, what will Parliament rule on what can be legally said or not said? Take, for instance, the wide difference between what Big Pharma executives, CDC officials and FDA employees said, versus their own official documentation of evidence?

Legal documents lay out precisely what the evidence showed when decisions were made to issue an Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Yet these very same experts went on social media platforms and contradicted their own documents to some extent. Were they lying, misinforming, disinforming the general public?

Would Ofcom be required to fine Big Tech for promoting an experimental injection when faced with the lack of efficacy according to Big Pharma’s own documents? Or if Ofcom ruled that it would be harmful to mention alternative treatments, would Parliament hold it to account if years later the evidence proved to the contrary?

In this one example it is clear that no one institution or body is capable of defining what is misinformation and what is not. However, this is essentially what the Bill advocates.

Another issue is which news and information outlets would actually be allowed to operate and which, under the proposed new rules, would be verboten? Two years ago it would have been incredible even to suggest that news outlets run by qualified and experienced journalists – or even by citizen journalists – would be closed down, but this Bill thinks the unthinkable in this area too.

Nadine Dorries MP has said that ‘recognised’ news organisations will still be free to report. But who defines ‘recognised’? Will it only be those outlets that toe the party line and, as in the time of Covid, acted largely as mouthpieces for Government policy? All the excellent alternatives from here and the US would be blocked…including News Uncut. Under the new rules this article might never be allowed to be published and our newsletter banned from being sent to you.

Mark Johnson, Legal and Policy Officer at Big Brother Watch, says the Bill poses a greater threat to freedom of speech in the UK than any other law in living memory. Like Baroness Fox he says that it will do very little to remove genuinely harmful content but “will force social media companies to suppress lawful content which is controversial, counter-cultural or offensive. These new rules will leave us with two tiers of speech, where speech that’s permitted on the street is not allowed online.”

“Freedom is risky,” says Claire Fox. “It allows people to have all sorts of views, but then that’s been the argument of every authoritarian: that freedom is risky and people have to be controlled for their own safety.”

What can you do?

Write to your MP (however useless and myopic they may seem). Claire Fox points out that MPs need to know that what they are doing is being watched and monitored by their electorate and they do take notice of communications from constituents. Many genuinely don’t know the contents of the Online Safety Bill, so they need to have the main, harmful issues pointed out to them. Find your local MP here

Sign the Big Brother Watch petition here

Read their analysis of the Bill here

Get outside and march against this Bill. Notices of freedom marches are posted on Telegram groups such as this one