Will Starmer make the Online Safety Act even worse?

Good God, there’s a lot of guff being talked about the Online Safety Act. This was a piece of legislation passed by the previous government to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online’. To free speech advocates like me, that sounded ominous, given that ‘safety’ is always invoked by authoritarian regimes to clamp down on free speech. But after we raised the alarm, the government stripped out the most draconian clauses and put in some protections for freedom of expression, so even though it’s bad, it’s not quite as awful as it could have been.

Step forward Sir Keir Starmer. In the wake of the riots, the PM has dropped heavy hints that his government will toughen up the Act if social media companies, whom he blames for whipping up violence, don’t do more to remove supposedly harmful content from their platforms. But it’s unclear how he’d amend the Act or why his political comrades think it’s ‘not fit for purpose’ (Sadiq Khan).

Are the Act’s critics claiming the duties it imposes on companies to remove illegal content – stirring up racial hatred, for instance, or inciting people to commit crimes – are being ignored because the penalties aren’t severe enough? That would be an odd thing to argue since Ofcom, which has been given the job of enforcing the new rules, is still consulting about these duties and they won’t come into force until next year. When they do, failure to comply could result in a fine of up to 10 per cent of annual global turnover – which for Facebook would be more than £10 billion – and jail sentences for ‘senior managers’.