The Telegraph – The Online Safety Bill revives ditched censorship plan

The Online Safety Bill, dubbed the “Censor’s Charter”, has undergone yet another reinvention, thankfully stripping out plans to invent the concept of “legal but harmful” speech that must be suppressed. This is to be welcomed.

But, between the grave, disappointed tones on rolling news coverage about this so-called “safety” measure being “axed” from the Bill, and the casual pro-censorship commentary about the “harm” free speech causes, the most disturbing aspect of this reinvention has been totally overlooked. Sunak’s government is reviving ditched plans for state regulators to punish social media companies if they don’t enforce their terms and conditions consistently.

This might sound uncontroversial, banal, or obvious even – companies should of course stick to their promises. But when their promises are to ban people who misgender, censor photos of people with scars, and remove light-hearted comments such as “men are idiots” under the banner of combatting “hate speech”, a state requirement to enforce those policies creates a serious problem.

Consider too the policies social media companies enforced over the past couple of years – terms under which Big Tech companies prohibited journalists questioning the origins of Covid, branded academics’ work as “false” if it contradicted WHO orthodoxy, and on occasion even censored MPs who advocated against vaccine IDs. Under the new plans, it would be the role of our government to ensure those British voices are silenced consistently online.

What if those Silicon Valley rules mean an office-holding head of government can be banned from online platforms, as was the case with (then) President Trump? Will we see Ofcom require the companies to take that action? Could Ofcom pull the digital rug from a future Prime Minister’s feet?

It is an unthinkable proposal to capitulate our long fought-for free speech standards, enshrined in human rights frameworks, to the corporatised policies of foreign companies. These are policies designed to protect tech companies’ financial and political interests and they change with the fast-moving winds of febrile American politics. Far from “reining Big Tech in”, as the carousel of Culture Secretaries has promised over recent years, the reinvented Online Safety Bill hands Big Tech companies the reins over Britons’ right to free speech and offers an extra whip.

We have already seen how readily our government will whip social media companies to remove lawful speech. During the pandemic, politicians successfully lobbied social media sites to remove protest pages and even set up government units to pressure tech companies with “daily” extrajudicial requests to remove “misinformation”. Almost invariably, they complied.

The ease with which this cultural and now legal devaluing of one of the most important democratic rights we have is disturbing. The erosion of our free speech culture in Britain is now ebbing away at the bedrock of our free speech legal standards and making way for a disturbing confluence of power between state and Silicon Valley censors.

You might even think the Left would have a problem with the corporatisation of speech standards, and the erosion of a democratic right that has been relied on for every rights movement of the past century – but you’d be sorely mistaken. Labour’s response to the new online safety plans claimed that “an emphasis on free speech undermines the very purpose of this Bill, and will embolden abusers, Covid deniers, hoaxers, who will feel encouraged to thrive online”. In this new landscape, a generation of Brits is being conditioned to attune to Silicon Valley speech standards and to think it is acceptable – a moral and legal duty, even – to suppress free speech according to the political trends of the day.

Authoritarians often attempt to invoke a state of exceptionalism, where the old rules must be supplanted by new ones, and that is no different in the raging debate about speech and privacy standards online. All kinds of dreadful social, psychological and even electoral ills have been attributed as the products of an evil, Wild West internet. Whilst many pro-censorship lobbyists still treat the internet as some distinct realm where speech standards must be reinvented, in reality, the internet is seamlessly weaved into modern life. To regulate the internet, as the Online Safety Bill seeks to, is to shape the contemporary world and the democratic rights we have within it. If we diverge from our long-protected free speech standards in the Online Safety Bill, we will consign them to history.

The Telegraph – The battle for free speech is still far from over

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