Online Safety Bill latest; what can we expect to happen next?

The Online Safety Bill has been delayed and may only be picked up again once the new Prime Minister takes office. As the race to lead the country reaches its conclusion, many concerned about the threat this censor’s charter poses to our free speech are wondering what to expect in the autumn. The legislation has featured in debates throughout the contest with both candidates expressing concerns about the impact on our civil liberties. So, where are we with the Online Safety Bill, and what can we expect next?

If unchanged, the Online Safety Bill will have a catastrophic impact on freedom of speech and the right to privacy in the UK. The legislation not only encourages but mandates that private online companies become arbiters of truth and the law. Unless materially altered, the Bill also compels these arbiters to be guided by the Secretary of State, opening up opportunities for the government to directly intervene with what can be said and what can’t be.

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the two leadership candidates, have expressed a need to revisit the Bill, particularly the ‘legal but harmful’ section. According to Sunak ‘the challenge is whether [the Bill] strays into the territory of suppressing free speech … what exactly does [legal but harmful] mean? … it’s fair that people have raised some concerns about … its impact on free speech.’ Truss has expressed similar opinions and noted ‘the fundamental principle is [that the] rules should be the same online as they are in real life. I think that’s a fundamental principle, and that’s what I will make sure I apply.’

We welcome the concerns the two candidates have expressed. We invite them to take on board three key recommendations that’ll help safeguard our fundamental rights.

Our first recommendation is for the government to drop provisions which target free speech designated as ‘harmful’. Clause 13 of the Bill states that popular social media platforms with a broad reach (for example, Facebook and Twitter) will have a duty to address lawful expression deemed ‘harmful to adults’. This could be by taking it down, restricting access, or limiting its recommendation. In the face of legal and personal liabilities, companies may be incentivised to over-censor and err on the side of caution. This might result in censorship of perfectly lawful speech just because the platforms determined it to be ‘psychologically harmful’, regardless of the intention behind the content. Such wide-reaching obligations are bound to increase companies’ dependency on flawed and biased algorithms that already over-censor our speech, often arbitrarily. Besides, private companies must not be designated as the arbiters of our online speech by the state.

Secondly, to protect our right to privacy, we urge the government to drop plans to compel companies to breach end-to-end encryption on our private messaging apps by forcing them to scan our messages en masse. This encryption technology is key to how we keep our private messages private. The Bill will urge companies to use technology to circumvent this encryption to scan for certain types of illegal content without a requirement for these orders to be targeted or based on suspicion. Not only does this threaten the privacy and security of millions who rely on end-to-end encrypted services, but nothing keeps such technology from being used for other purposes. Once these scanning bugs are installed on our devices, the state could effectively censor political, democratic and lawful content by adding a few keywords and hashes to the list of ‘malicious content’. This leaves potentially millions of citizens’ devices compromised, to not just domestic but wide-scale international attacks.

Lastly, the Secretary of State’s powers that allow them to define limitations of online speech must be removed from the Bill. Throughout the Bill, certain executive powers have been afforded to the Secretary of State, allowing them to add to the list of potentially censored content through secondary legislation. Additionally, the Secretary of State can direct Ofcom to modify their codes of practice to reflect “public policy”. Such wide-reaching powers granted to one politician would be detrimental to the independence of Ofcom and would encourage undue politicisation of Ofcom’s operations and the political censorship of our speech.

We call on the new Prime Minister to put their words into action, critically assess these provisions in the Bill and prevent the UK from becoming a digitally censored state. At a minimum, clauses allowing the government and private entities to censor legal but harmful content and invade our privacy must simply be removed from the face of the Bill.

Unless these changes are made in the legislation, we gravely risk our rights to speech and privacy being chipped away slowly but surely.

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