My goodness, there’s a lot of nonsense being said about the Online Safety Act, a law passed by the previous government to make Britain the “safest place in the world to be active online”. To free speech advocates like me, this sounded ominous, as authoritarian regimes always cite “safety” as a reason to restrict free speech. But after we raised the alarm, the government removed the most draconian clauses and added some protections for free speech, so while it’s bad, it’s not quite as bad as it could have been.
And what about the BBC, which misrepresented several things in its coverage of an explosion in the parking lot of Al-Ahli Hospital in the Gaza Strip?
Step forward, Sir Keir Starmer. In the wake of the riots, the Prime Minister has clearly indicated that his government will toughen the law if the social media companies he blames for stoking violence do not do more to remove allegedly harmful content from their platforms. But it is unclear how he would change the law, or why his political comrades think it is “not fit for purpose” (Sadiq Khan).
Are critics of the law claiming that the obligations it imposes on companies to remove illegal content – such as content that incites racial hatred or incites people to commit crimes – are being ignored because the penalties are not severe enough? That would be a strange argument, given that Ofcom, the body charged with enforcing the new rules, is still deliberating on these obligations and they will not come into force until next year. When they come into force, failure to comply could result in a fine of up to 10 percent of annual global turnover – which for Facebook would be more than £10 billion – and jail sentences for “senior managers”. Isn’t that draconian enough?
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Or do they mean that one of the offences created by the Act – the miscommunication section 179 that came into force in January – only applies to disinformation, not misinformation? Last week Cheshire Police arrested a 55-year-old woman for falsely identifying the Southport attacker as a Muslim asylum seeker and held her in custody for 36 hours before releasing her pending further investigation. I am in contact with this woman, who is a member of the Free Speech Union, and while she may be guilty of spreading misinformation, it would be difficult to charge her under section 179 because one of the criteria is that “the message conveys information that the person knows to be false”, and that was not the case here. In her tweet she added “if that is true”, and when she found out it was not true she deleted it. I would be surprised if she was charged, but if she is, the Free Speech Union will pay for her defence.
Does Sir Keir want to expand this offence to catch people who spread dangerous misinformation? If so, would that include the health officials who in 2021 exaggerated the effectiveness of Covid vaccines and downplayed the harm? And what about the BBC, which got several things wrong in its coverage of an explosion in the car park of al-Ahli hospital in Gaza on October 17, overestimating the number of casualties and falsely blaming an Israeli airstrike? No doubt this was not deliberate – misinformation, not disinformation – but the report certainly did damage and contributed to the cancellation of a peace summit between Joe Biden and various Arab leaders.
Or perhaps critics of the bill are thinking of the last government’s removal of the so-called “legal but harmful” clause, even though – misinformation alert! – those words never appeared in the original bill. The part that I and others successfully lobbied to have removed was a clause that empowered the Secretary of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to make a statutory instrument setting out a list of legal content that social media companies must remove. We persuaded the government that this would be a gamble, given the risk that a Labour Secretary of State could put perfectly legitimate criticisms of public policy on that list – such as Ed Miliband’s push towards net zero.
Apparently we were right, because I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what Sir Keir had in mind when he tightened the law. And if this paragraph is reinstated, you can bet that the first list compiled by Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy will include allegedly harmful misinformation about climate change, as well as any posts that question critical race theory, gender identity ideology and immigration policy.
This gets to the heart of what is wrong with the government criminalising misinformation or forcing companies to remove it: misinformation is just a euphemism for any viewpoint the radical progressive left disagrees with. The Online Safety Act is authoritarian enough without the current administration making it worse.
