The Online Safety Bill Risks Making Nicola Sturgeon the Content Moderator For the Whole of the U.K.
I’ve written a blog post for the Critic in which I identify one of the many shortcomings in the Online Safety Bill which the Government needs to address as well as removing the clause dealing with content that’s ‘legal but harmful’ to adults.
There is a little-known flaw in the Bill that risks making Nicola Sturgeon the content moderator for the whole of the UK.
I highlighted this flaw in the bill in discussions with Chris Philp, then the Digital Minister, earlier this year — and all credit to Graham Smith, an IT lawyer, for first pointing it out. The definition of illegal content in clause 52 (12) of the bill says the content social media platforms will have a legal duty to remove in every part of the UK will be content that’s illegal in any part of the UK (“offence means any offence under the law of any part of the United Kingdom”). Failure to remove such content could result in those platforms being fined up to 10% of their annual global turnover.
The obvious difficulty with that is it means the big social media companies like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter would have to remove something it’s unlawful to say in Scotland in every part of the U.K., effectively appointing Nicola Sturgeon the content moderator for the entire population. That’s a particular concern because last year the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act received Royal Assent. Among other things, the Hate Crime Act makes it a criminal offence, punishable by up to seven years in prison, for a person to behave in a threatening or abusive manner or communicate material that is considered threatening or abusive to another person with the intention of “stirring up hatred” against people on the grounds of: age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or variations in sex characteristics (intersex) (my emphasis).
In effect, if a feminist says in Scotland that she doesn’t think transwomen are women, she could be prosecuted for stirring up hatred. And because of the clause in the Online Safety Bill saying “offence means any offence under the law or any part of the United Kingdom”, the big social media platforms would have to remove any such content across the whole of the U.K.
As I make clear in my article, the Boris Johnson Government, having been made aware of this problem, tried to address it with an amendment last July, but the amendment doesn’t quite solve the problem.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: For a summary of what else is wrong with the Bill, see this excellent piece by the IEA’s Matthew Lesh in the Spectator.
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The fundamental problem, of course, is that it has already been conceded that online content needs to be regulated in a special way.
How we gave that up so quickly I don’t know.
Do we demand that the post send no illegal information? Do we demand that phone companies ensure no illegal conversations take place? What about Whatsapp?
The fundamental premise is all wrong. There is no real need to create a new law to regulate online content. The laws we have suffice.
Exactly. While I commend the efforts of TY and others to make this thing slightly less dangerous, it’s largely a rearguard action. As usual, trying to appear “moderate” and trying to meet the rabid left (or whatever we want to call the enemy) half way just means we’re helping dig our own hole.
If a law is required, it’s one to force big tech/social media firms over a certain size to publish everything without exception or have their licenses to operate revoked.
We’ve just seen 2 police officers gaoled and dismissed for being part of a WhatsApp group with Wayne Couzens. This group was private and the material at issue was not public. I regard this as another example of legal overreach with overly broad controls on what is sent over a public telecommunications network despite the content being encrypted in transit.
Marvellous. I can’t think of a better way to enrage the English than letting them know that they are under Krankie’s yoke.
Argh. A picture of this cretin is bad enough at the best of times, but TWICE in ONE DAY? Have a care, DS!
Once again this raises the question of how in god’s name did the sensible people that are the Scots give their votes to the madwoman that is fish face?
They turned to the SNP because they were the only other bunch of Socialist left after they got peeved with New Labour. Plus she knows all the anti English and anti Tory punch lines that go down well with those in Scotland who still to this day harp on about Thatcher. It is quite bizarre that some Scots (about half) still think they need to be in the EU with laws made in Brussels and a Central Bank in Frankfurt and then are thick enough to think that somehow that can be classed as “Independence”. They think that people in Estonia Lithuania Portugal Hungary and Poland care more about Scots than people in Scunthorpe do. —-Weird
I was in Aberdeen from 1965 -68 (long before oil came into the equation). One of the people I met through friends was an early member of the SNP. When I asked how an independent Scotland would be funded his answer was all the tax revenues from the sale of Scotch. It seems their their economic thinking hasn’t develped a lot since then.
The internet is by its nature global. Something you publish “in England” (whatever that means) can be read in Scotland. As indeed can something that you publish in the USA. You can only impose regional restrictions on what is said on the internet by balkanising the net, so that for example British people could not read US websites. Even that can be got around with a VPN, and geolocation is imperfect anyway.
If I sitting in England write an offensive post on a website sitting on a server in the United States, have I published that “in England”?
The whole debate on this bill is living in cloud cuckoo land. The British government cannot control what is seen on the UK internet, except via draconian controls imposed via our internet service providers plus a legal ban on VPN’s. Without, in other words, imposing something like China’s “great firewall”.
Yes, true up to a point. However: RT can’t be seen in UK other than via VPN, as far as I know, Govts can and do threaten to fine ISPs and other major players on the Internet, and anyone who steps out of line risks being demonetized, boycotted by advertisers and payment systems. So the control is imperfect but without much effort can be ramped up to cover a lot of the internet, leaving nutjob conspiracy theorists like us in little pockets, talking to each other and hardly anyone else.
So what we actually need are laws preventing the above.