Dr David Cumin
Spokesperson
Free Speech Union
The UK government has introduced a draft “Online Safety Bill” which would force websites to clamp down on legal speech, and even block them if they don’t comply.
Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, said that the bill would “protect children on the internet, crackdown on racist abuse on social media and through new measures to safeguard our liberties, create a truly democratic digital age”
The bill creates a “duty of care” on websites to ensure that explicitly legal speech which has an “adverse psychological impact” is clamped down upon. This means that if the bill is passed, not only would there be a greater standard of what speech is acceptable online and offline, but the government themselves would pass the buck to that decision down initially to the Big Tech companies.
“The Online Safety Bill introduces state-backed censorship and monitoring on a scale never seen before in a liberal democracy,” said Mark Johnson, the Legal and Policy Officer at Big Brother Watch. “This Bill is disastrous for privacy rights and free expression online,” he added.
We’ll be following the UK Bill closely and are talking to MPs in New Zealand to introduce a similar framework here.
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