Four years in the making, the Online Safety Bill has now been sent to senior ministers for review — a process that allows them to protest, to shout if anything obvious that has been missed. In this case, the process is invaluable because something huge has been missed. The Bill, if passed, would empower the Silicon Valley firms it’s designed to suborn. It would formalise and usher in a new era of censorship of UK news — run from San Francisco. This Bill would backfire in a way that its Tory advocates have so far proven unable to understand let alone address. That’s why it needs to be halted, and a rethink ordered.
The original aim is to make Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others liable for any genuine filth promoted online. But introducing a new test of ‘legal, but harmful’ would vastly expand a bot-censorship system that is disfiguring public debate already. Politicians struggle to understand this, thinking instead that the BBC is their proper target.
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