Sunak drops ‘legal but harmful’ censorship clause

For some time now, The Spectator has been highlighting the danger posed by the so-called Online Safety Bill which would order social media firms to censor content regarded as ‘legal but harmful’. This was, in effect, a censorship diktat. Rather than have Orwellian figures employed by the government to censor articles, the Online Safety Bill would use the Chinese method of censorship-by-proxy and order digital giants to do this instead. A radical threat to free speech – but one only a handful of politicians spoke out against. One of them was Rishi Sunak.

A new version of the Online Safety Bill is soon to be published, and we’re told it will be shorn of obligations over ‘legal but harmful’ content that will be seen by adults. The devil always is in the legal detail but at first glance, Sunak has been as good as his word. The notion of ‘legal but harmful’ – and the regime of legally mandated censorship that it would have entailed – is set to vanish. If it does, Sunak will have delivered. Liberty-loving Liz Truss, let’s remember, never gave a commitment on this – always saying that she hadn’t read the bill and didn’t know the detail.

It’s worth reflecting on how close we came to censorship in the UK. Legal but harmful could have meant anything the Secretary of State wanted it to mean: former culture secretary Nadine Dorries even suggested Jimmy Carr’s jokes could qualify. With no certainty, Silicon Valley’s censorship bots – which decide what to promote and what to shadow ban – would have taken out anything that stood even a 2 per cent chance of falling foul of the rules. The fine was 10 per cent of their global revenue. Would that be too crazy to happen? I’d caution anyone from thinking anything in UK politics is too crazy to happen: the state is desperate and about to launch raids via windfall taxes. A pretext to rinse Big Tech would probably taken. So a real, palpable risk. And the reward? Big Tech makes no money from publishing political debate and analysis: it would happily close it all down, if it could, as it represents a regulatory risk.

A trigger-happy bot censorship regime has already begun, in anticipation of the Bill. For example:

• David Davis’s speech against vaccine passports was removed by YouTube
• Socialist Workers Party page was removed by Facebook
• Novara Media’s YouTube was taken down.
• Professor Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson’s analysis of face mask data was labelled ‘false information’ by Facebook.

The Online Safety Bill would have applied rocket boosters to this already deplorable trend. Politicians didn’t know or care about it. Dorries went so far as to say that her censorship act would protect free speech (a frequent claim of censors). The prospect of having political control over what is said digitally was intoxicating for many, but some politicians spoke up over it. Kemi Badenoch went studs-up against the Online Safety Bill (and Dorries), which may have stiffened Sunak’s resolve. As with the Royal Charter Leveson vote, there were just a handful of MPs speaking out for free speech. 

This is Sunak’s second major contribution to the survival of the free press: as chancellor, he also cut VAT for digital publications. As an editor, I can tell you the cash this released allowed for further investment – the industry bagged it without much of a thank you. As you’d expect. But I now have young staff being trained at The Spectator who would not have been here otherwise. This small stuff matters. It’s one of the reasons that The Spectator returned our furlough money: we ask for freedom to engage with our readers, and the ability to raise from them (not from the taxpayer) the cash we need. Sunak’s tax cut made it possible for us to keep our financial independence, and it is our commitment to this independence that meant we returned the furlough cash. (It actually took ages, because the Treasury had no mechanism for returning it – no one had done or asked about this manoeuvre and they could not compute the wish to do so.)

I didn’t support Sunak either of the times he ran for No. 10 and I still have reservations about him as Prime Minister. But it would be churlish those of us who have been campaigning to stop the ‘legal but harmful’ definition not to recognise that something major has happened today. The potential for harm was huge: these algorithms have more power over what people read than anyone realises. More people now get their news from Facebook than any newspaper, but the news Facebook shows is decided by algorithm. If SpectatorTV gets a big audience, it’s down to being recommended by YouTube algorithms: he who controls these algorithms has more power over the free press than a Hearst, Beaverbrook or Murdoch. It’s weird to explain, but fundamental. If government gives itself power to tweak the news algorithm, we no longer have a free press.

One final point. Much of the newspaper industry was actively preparing to settle for a shameful clause that would have exempted journalists from the new censorship regime. The Spectator rejected this compromise as disgusting: why should journalists have a free speech protection not extended to others? Isn’t the press supposed to campaign for free speech as a universal right? 

There is a trend in newspapers to see Big Tech as basically evil, and to back anything that makes its life difficult. This makes publishers liable to lobby for or support any regulation that would screw Big Tech ­– especially if we publishers are granted a sneaky exemption. I gave evidence to a House of Lords commission a while ago when they asked about laws that would take cash from Big Tech and give it to publishers: would I back that? Absolutely not, I said: we just ask to be left alone. To stand or fall on our ability to serve our readers.

The rise of news-by-algorithm has created a gargantuan power. There will be more attempts to grab that power by having the state tweak the algorithm ­– which would mean the end of the free press. So next time, newspaper groups should stand by Big Tech. The difference between us, anyway, is moot nowadays. Without YouTube there would be no SpectatorTV: its brilliant, free tech has allowed us to create a show using kit I picked up on eBay. We get a third our traffic from social media referrals. The Spectator website has expanded our audience from tens of thousands to millions. 

There is no ‘us’ and ‘them’ in print and digital: we are becoming them. And here’s the thing: press freedom means freedom for everyone. The ‘press’, now, is made up of long-established publications, individual bloggers, lone academics, Mumsnet, Guido, Novara, the Blasmaster – a rightly rowdy and unruly bunch. Any law that threatens the freedom of the lowliest commentator threatens us all. So next time there is an attack on the freedom to publish ­– and there certainly will be a next time – we ought to club together. 

It is annoying to have to do so: Silicon Valley didn’t ask to be a news source, doesn’t make much cash from it and doesn’t care about free speech. But the freedom is a universal right and if it isn’t robustly defended by the free press, it won’t be defended at all.

PS. If all of this does come to pass then an honourable mention should go to Oliver Downden, who as culture secretary recognised the danger posed by this Bill (which he inherited and introduced). The fear was that asking Big Tech to interpret what is acceptable would give woke Silicon Valley editorialists power to draw the line on UK debate. Dowden hoped this madness would perish in the long grass. But that was always a dangerous tactic as someone like Nadine Dorries could come along any time and force it through. Now in No. 10 as Rishi Sunak’s fixer, this would be the first hard example of Dowden sorting out things that could have been done earlier had Boris Johnson’s No. 10 been less chaotic.