Mark Johnson

The UK risks becoming a world leader in online censorship

The emergence of a free and open internet was one of the greatest achievements of liberal democracies. The creation of a decentralised web allowed ordinary citizens in countries all over the world to share and receive information. Now, fears about crime and moral panics about disinformation mean that many liberal democracies are making the web a smaller place for everyone.

On Wednesday, the Government published its Online Safety Bill, a piece of legislation designed to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online, and the best place to start and grow a digital business.’ Omitted from this description is that the proposed Bill would also make the UK a world leader amongst democracies when it comes to censorship and state control.

The legislation forces large social media companies to act on any content which risks ‘having, or indirectly having, a significant adverse physical or psychological impact on an adult.’ Such a vague duty will no doubt lead to sites doubling down on controversial or offensive views, which have always been protected as an inherent part of freedom of speech. With a threat of penalties for a failure to remove posts of this nature, online platforms will be forced to snoop on users more and will be quicker to take content down. An entrenchment of surveillance capitalism beckons, only this Bill would make it state backed.

One particularly pernicious element of the wider proposals is the government’s intention to clamp down on what they refer to as ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ online – terms undefined in the Bill. How such concepts could be accurately defined and restricted without censoring the lawful expression of internet users is not clear. Over the course of the last year, posts by academics on Facebook on Twitter which have questioned the efficacy of masks have fallen foul of the platforms’ broad rules on misinformation.

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