Government Hints at Climbdown Over UK Online Safety Bill

The UK Government’s new Culture Secretary, Michelle Donelan, has signalled that the mess of complex and confusing legislation that is the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which seeks to tackle “harmful” internet content (i.e. via website blocks by broadband ISPs, fines and other sanctions), is likely to be softened before it returns to parliament.

The idea of creating a law to tackle some of the worst aspects of internet content is a noble one and long overdue (e.g. terrorist content, bullying, racism and hate speech, child abuse, self-harm, suicide imagery and conspiracy theories that incite violence etc.). At present, far too much of this slips through the cracks of the weak self-regulatory approach, as aptly demonstrated so many times via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. (they were slow to stop ISIS, dangerous conspiracy theories and political leaders inciting violence).

However, the reality of trying to actually achieve such an outcome, and then extending that to tackle vague areas like “legal but harmful” content, ended up creating an ugly and bloated mess of overbearing legislation. Over the past year, the bill has become somewhat of a Frankenstein’s monster. It’s huge, it’s complex, it tries to do too much, and it places a massive administrative and legal burden on even smaller sites.

Faced with such a hefty level of liability and the threat of harsh punishments (possibly even arrest), many sites and content platforms will simply play it safe and censor what people say by default via automated filters (these often get things wrong) or remove user input entirely. Put another way, the OSB failed to strike the right balance between preserving Freedom of Expression and fostering outright Censorship.

This is of course what happens when you attempt to police the common and highly subjective public display of negative human thought, while trying to balance that against complex issues of context (e.g. people joking about blowing up a city in a video game vs actual terrorists), parody and political speech – all of which is a monumentally difficult task. Humans often get it wrong, and automated systems are even worse.

What’s Changing in the Online Safety Bill?

At present we don’t know the details, but the BBC reports that the Culture Secretary intends to alter part of the OSB before “quickly” bringing it back to parliament to become law “as soon as possible to protect children“. The focus seems to be on the most contentious area of their legislation, which deals with the convoluted rules for tackling so-called “legal but harmful” material. The area this covers is due to form part of secondary legislation.

Ms Donelan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

“My clear objective is to get this bill back to the House quickly, to edit the bit that we’ve been very upfront that we’re editing and to make sure that we get it into law. That element is in relation to adults – the bits in relation to children and online safety will not be changing.”

However, this does create somewhat of a dilemma, since most websites cannot identify who is visiting their pages (adult or child), at least not without first age verifying all users. Age verification is already a part of the OSB, but enforcing it – and the huge privacy implications that would entail – is an extremely difficult problem to solve and not one that most regular websites would be able to apply due to obstacles of cost and technical or legal feasibility.

The strong suspicion is that it will take significantly more than a few government tweaks to fix the OSB, since right now you’d probably need to be a lawyer to fully understand how its implementation would work in a particular setting and most people are not lawyers, nor could many smaller sites afford to hire one for such a tedious task.