{"id":25575,"date":"2021-01-18T12:03:59","date_gmt":"2021-01-18T12:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/?p=25575"},"modified":"2021-01-18T12:22:13","modified_gmt":"2021-01-18T12:22:13","slug":"uk-internet-censorship-damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/index.php\/2021\/01\/uk-internet-censorship-damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont.html","title":{"rendered":"UK Internet Censorship – Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prompted by Donald Trump’s ban from social media, calls are once again growing from politicians for internet sites to be held liable if they remove lawful content and users. Soon it may be a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, as the future approach toward protecting freedom of speech risks doing the opposite.<\/p>\n

Over the past decade we\u2019ve seen and heard a lot of examples concerning how user generated internet content has been used to spread hate speech (racism, bullying etc.), terrorism and a variety of other perhaps unwelcome traits of negative human thought.<\/p>\n

However, the recent decision to ban the former (soon to be) U.S President, Donald Trump<\/strong>, from many social media sites, which contentiously occurred after he appeared to incite violence and continued to promote unsubstantiated claims of mass voter fraud, also appears to be catalysing another side of the argument.<\/p>\n

Over the past few weeks\u2019 a number of politicians, including some well-known world leaders of major democracies and even opponents of Trump, have suggested that it was wrong to ban him. Some countries (e.g. Poland) are now even proposing (here<\/a>) that the removal of lawful content should also be against the law, regardless of whether or not that occurs on private websites. On the surface this seems like a perfectly sensible thing to say, but such things are rarely so simple.<\/p>\n

Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s Prime Minister, said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not, there can be no consent to censorship. Censorship of free speech, which is the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now returning in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Similarly, politicians in the UK have begun to question whether the decision to censor or remove users from social media also turns such “platforms<\/em>” into “publishers<\/em>” by virtue of them curating, editorialising and removing such people (i.e. potentially exposing websites to another set of laws and regulations).. or bots, since these days it’s becoming harder to know if somebody posting a comment online is actually human.<\/p>\n

Never mind the fact that the main reason why social media has taken such action is precisely because of pressure and new rules, often coming from those same politicians, to take action against hate speech, bullying etc. Many may thus ask, is it one rule for politicians (i.e. protect them from removal) and another rule for everybody else? Or can only politicians enjoy a full array of free speech, including the right to cause offence?<\/p>\n

Oliver Dowden, UK Secretary of State for Culture (DCMS), said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Iran\u2019s Ayatollah has a Twitter account, whilst the elected President of the United States is permanently suspended from holding one. Trump\u2019s supporters have labeled that move censorship; the other half of the country has asked what took so long.<\/p>\n

Norway\u2019s Prime Minister has had posts defending freedom of expression deleted on Facebook because they contained the iconic \u201cNapalm Girl\u201d photo – an unintentional violation of the site\u2019s child nudity policy – whilst in Myanmar, the same platform has been used to whip up hatred towards Rohingya Muslims.<\/p>\n

Those facts alone should make anyone who loves democracy pause for thought. The idea that free speech can be switched off with the click of a button in California is unsettling even for the people with their hands on the mouse.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

In reality, neither the passive \u201cplatform\u201d nor the editorialised \u201cpublisher\u201d truly hit the mark. Holding companies liable for every piece of content – for 500 hours a minute of uploads on YouTube alone – would break social media. But equally, when these companies are curating, editorialising, and in some cases removing users, they can no longer claim to be bystanders with no responsibility whatsoever.<\/p>\n

However we categorise social media, one thing is clear: as with other forms of mass communication, democratically elected governments must play a role in regulating it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In simple terms, we now have a climate where websites that allow public input (social media, comments, reviews etc.) – that’s most of them on some level – are increasingly being required by politicians to do something that seems unworkable. On the one hand laws are being created to punish sites for failing or being slow to act against often ambiguous definitions of “harmful<\/em>” speech (Online Safety Bill<\/strong><\/a>), while on the other we have the threat of new laws to protect “good<\/em>” or “lawful<\/em>” speech.<\/p>\n

Between the two aspects of this debate is the question of where you define the line and then how that line can realistically be judged (context is three dimensional and often you can\u2019t see one or more of those dimensions). The risk is that, in the feverish pursuit of trying to control and define the expression of human thought in minute detail, we risk putting internet content providers into an unworkable position for moderation.<\/p>\n

The focus on tackling hate speech, which on big sites occurs too often for manual moderation alone to be fully effective, has resulted in the rise of automated filtering systems. In keeping with that there\u2019s the age-old problem of how you define things like bullying or hate speech in the first place and then separate that from related content or context, which may include criticism of the same subject, as well as satire (e.g. people joking about blowing up a city in a video game vs actual terrorists), the right to cause offence, political free speech and so forth. Automated filters rarely get this stuff right or understand context properly, which leads to wrongful censorship.<\/p>\n

However, the potential addition of laws to act against unfair removal adds another layer of cost and liability that will be hard for any website, both big and small alike, to bear. Put another way, it\u2019s the damned if you do, damned if you don’t outcome. You’d need a moderator to watch almost every single user (economically unworkable online) and even humans can make mistakes or misunderstand context.<\/p>\n

But then where does it stop? Will every newspaper have to publish every “letter to the editor<\/em>” regardless? What about email servers that accidentally block legitimate messages via their anti-spam filters, are they to be classed as suppressing free speech too and the operator sued? In the end the only way for websites and online content platforms to avoid such a mass of chilling liability is not to allow any freedom of speech at all or to suppress it. For some leaders, that may even be the goal.<\/p>\n

Certainly, some change may be needed, but finding the right balance so that government’s don’t end up forcing websites to close off user submitted content completely is easier said than done.<\/p>\n

NOTE:<\/strong> The economic models for internet content are radically different from the offline world. Many websites, for example, can be written by just one person or a few people and yet be read by millions, despite running off a shoestring budget (this is how the internet works and remains one of its core appeals). Forcing such sites to implement unaffordable measures, which will also need to work across lots of different software, or requiring them to take on an impossible level of liability, is likely to be unworkable.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prompted by Donald Trump’s ban from social media, calls are once again growing from politicians for internet sites to be held liable if they remove lawful content and users. Soon it may be a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, as the future approach toward protecting freedom of speech risks doing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[473,38,479],"class_list":["post-25575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uk_isp_news","tag-censorship","tag-politics","tag-security"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"yoast_head":"\nUK Internet Censorship - Damned if you do, Damned if you don't - ISPreview UK<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Prompted by Donald Trump's ban from social media, calls are once again growing from politicians for internet sites to be held liable if they remove lawful\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/index.php\/2021\/01\/uk-internet-censorship-damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"UK Internet Censorship - 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