The Online Harms Bill still threatens free speech and privacy 

The Online Safety Bill became a lightning rod for criticism during the Conservative party leadership contest over the summer. A wide array of candidates, from Kemi Badenoch to Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, promised to take another look at how the legislation, and its attempt to crack down on online harms, could interfere with free speech. 

The ‘legal but harmful’ duties, now being removed, required the largest digital companies to address state-determined categories of legal speech – like ‘disinformation’ or ‘hate speech’ – in their terms and conditions. But in practice ‘legal but harmful’ was never the most problematic part of the proposed legislation. While the impetus was for more user content to be removed, technically the platforms could have opted to do nothing. And regardless, the provision only applied to the largest companies. 

The most concerning part of the Bill, perhaps counterintuitively, relates to illegal content. The Bill requires all digital platforms, from Twitter to Mumsnet, to proactively scan user speech for a wide array of prioritised content and censor it using automated systems.