December 17, 2024 - 7:00am
The Online Safety Act introduced us to the slippery term “legal but harmful” — or, more colloquially, “lawful but awful”. Then-technology secretary Michelle Donelan declared that the online world was a “wild west of content” too dangerous for unsupervised adults, never mind children. The role of sheriff fell to Ofcom, which was empowered to recruit as deputies the very technology companies accused of creating this risky new world.
Now, Ofcom has published first-edition codes of practice and guidance, designed to turn the well-intentioned but sprawling principles of the Act into workable, enforceable regulation. The regulator claims that it is “putting managing risk of harm at the heart of decisions,” and demanding proportionate measures from service providers.
In one way, this risk-management approach is sensible. It was never going to be possible to make the online world, any more than the real world, perfectly safe. Services aimed at children should be regulated differently from what consenting adults get up to in digital privacy. Measures that are proportionate when tackling child sexual abuse or terrorism may not be justified against fraud or “hateful content”.
Like all safety-first regulation, however, Ofcom’s guidance faces unavoidable conflicts with other important social values, especially privacy and freedom of expression. For example, its description of hateful content “could include content which may not meet the threshold for illegal hate”. Under this definition, and given the nature of the internet, it is hardly surprising that “one in four online users (adults and children aged 13-17) had seen or experienced content they considered to be hateful, offensive, or discriminatory, and which targeted a group or person based on specific characteristics such as race, religion, disability, sexuality, or gender identity,” in the preceding four weeks.
In these febrile times, it’s very easy to point to online discussion of controversial issues which could meet this description. Especially since, as Ofcom notes, this content tends to spike following newsworthy events such as terrorist attacks. Feelings run high, but there is also genuine desire to debate why these things happen, and how they could be prevented in future.
The problem with a risk-based regulatory framework, backed by the threat of hefty fines for companies which show insufficient zeal to clean up online hate, is that the incentives only go in one direction. Freedom of public expression is given lip service, but there seems little likelihood of a Silicon Valley behemoth facing fines from Ofcom for taking down, or selectively muting, what might — in somebody’s eyes — be hateful content. Far more likely that erring on the side of caution will sanitise digital public squares from any human interactions which might cross an ill-defined boundary into the grey zone of online harm.
Alongside the draft guidance, Ofcom promises further consultations followed by further regulation. This will include “crisis response protocols for emergency events (such as last summer’s riots)”. It seems unlikely that such protocols will be designed to protect freedom of online speech, given Ofcom’s emphasis on protecting adults, as well as children, from material which, in itself, breaks no laws.
Under “risk factors” for hateful content which technology service providers are expected to consider, Ofcom lists users’ ability to post content, respond to others’ material, and to build online communities. We might regard these things as the very essence of social media, messaging apps and the internet. But to Ofcom, they are fertile ground for potential hate crimes.
The Online Safety Act aspired to make the internet a safer place. We might ask: safer for whom, and from whom? What started as an attempt to make it safer for children has become an ever-widening system of control. It will make the world safer for those in authority: from controversial public debates, bottom-up criticism, and the ability of ordinary internet users to make connections and organise ourselves.
It will protect those who fear offensive words and challenging ideas more than the use of legal power to silence them, which is an invitation to the powerful to silence the powerless. It’s big technology companies which will be playing it safe to avoid punitive fines, and the first casualty will be freedom of expression.
Timandra Harkness presents the BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and How To Disagree. Her book, Technology is Not the Problem, is published by Harper Collins.
TimandraHarknes
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SubscribeIf I remember correctly, the Online Safety Bill was introduced as an attempt to deflect attention from the real reasons for the appalling murder of MP David Amess.
George Orwell
Oh, the people making these speech codes completely believe they have the right to tell us what we don’t want to hear. They just also believe we don’t have the right to tell them what THEY don’t want to hear.
I was born under communism and this proposals and many others before are just softer version of media control exercised by communist party for “benefit of society” obviously.
We know what the intentions are from Neo-Marxists like Keir Starmer and his ilk.
To stop criticisms of mass immigration (especially Muslim one) and multiculti.
To prevent discussions of islamofascists atrocities and society response to it.
To stop society mobilisation against Stalinist measures introduced during covid.
To prevent growth of mass movents like Reform, which is opposed to globalisation ideas of both Labour and Conservatives.
To stop criticism of gender and net zero woke idiocies.
To prevent society mobilisation against constant denigration of Western culture and history.
To prevent discussion of overpromotion of useless cultures with little achievements in science, art and technology.
A far bigger problem, unaddressed by Unherd, is the stranglehold of the Left in UK media.
Right wjng views are not represented.
No criticism is allowed of Gender or Race.
The pathetic Unherd is symptomatic of the promotion of Ignorance. Not allowing debate means people cannot express their political views. There is no Free Speech.
Anyone with right wing views is ignored, ridiculed and not allowed a platform to express them.
All you get on Unherd (stupid name) is the Left wing consensus.
I have never read an article here criticising Feminism. Or one promoting Christianity. Or one calling for the prioritising of the welfare of young English people over foreigners. Or one defending British culture and history. Or one making the case that all children learn British history, read English literature, are taught the Christian religion.
These are some right wing views. They are literally unheard.
Well said!
The predominance of down-ticks proves your point!
Obviously logic is not one of your strong points!!
Once again, you’re claiming something about Unherd that simply isn’t true, namely:
“A far bigger problem, unaddressed by Unherd, is the stranglehold of the Left in UK media.”
Seriously, i ask you: can you not read? There are literally dozens of articles in which this point is fully debated, both in-article and in Comments. Until you start posting with some degree of intelligence, your comments will continue to be downvoted. But i’d rather challenge you directly, as i’ve done before, and pointed you in the direction of articles you claim don’t exist.
The same applies to every single one of those types of article you cite in your penultimate paragraph.
Ok then. Find one Unherd writer or article which has the content I describe at the end of my comment.
If this isn’t “promoting Christianity”, what is?
Why I am now a Christian – UnHerd
It took me less than two minutes to find it.
Now, will you finally shut up about what Unherd does or doesn’t do?
So you’ve found a Dutch politician who has just converted to Christianity. That’s the best you can do?
Baaah
Christianity is very much a minor belief in the UK today whether you like this or not. Of course our culture is strongly influenced by that religion, including ironically the woke religion that we’re now being inflicted with, with which the irrational aspects of Christianity bear rather a lot of similarity. The concept of the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Birth?
Nobody writing about these events written about in the New Testament was doing so contemporaneously. UnHerd is actually staging a debate with Tom Holland and Nick cave about the rising interest in traditional religion on the 7th of January
Brilliant post.
As you can see, downvotes exceed upvotes (at time of posting).
So you are correct about editorial bend of Unherd.
I am inclined to bin both Unherd and Spectator subscriptions and look for another forum.
Any suggestions?
I’ve unsubscribed from the Spectator – it feels tainted now Gove is there.
The Critic perhaps? but it has all the feminist usual suspects so that too is like Unherd (stupid name).
Völkischer Beobachter?
These positions are extremely frequently represented on UnHerd! I don’t know what planet you are inhabiting!
Regarding the specific issue of Christianity, for better or worse we are not a believing nation anymore, and of course government reflects that position. Ironically the true believers can be found amongst the ethnic minority recent migrants to the country!
Brought up on “sticks and stones can break your bones but words can never hurt you” I do not take offence at what others say. I was also brought up on “think for yourself” so I like to think I can look after myself. It does seem to me that what is missing from all of this is a failure to teach self-reliance. In particular the ability to see what is sensible and what is not.
Time to get Javier Milei over here to scrap Ofcom and most of the other useless/worse than useless quangos.
All they ever do is take something that’s simple, working and well understood and make it more complex, unpredictable, arbitrary, slow and expensive.
Kafka warned us about the tyranny of the petty bureaucrats 100 years ago.
The UK is a borderline totalitarian state, if not actually one.
There speaks a person who’s clearly never lived in one. Be running back here quick as a flash if you did.
And you should know. Who needs a gulag when you can imprison people in their own heads?
Stockholm syndrome Mr Watson?
How do you think totalitarian states come in to being?
They rely on people like you.
OK, we are not there yet, but slowly approaching situation of late communism in Poland (let say 70s onwards) when you were no longer killed or imprisoned for defying prevailing orthodoxy but you lost your job.
Are you denying that is what happened to people posting about gender and multiculti idiocies and pointing out atrocities of islamofascists?
Arrogant and sarcastic! I DID live in a totalitarian state, which imprisoned citizens for saying things the government did not like – not dissimilar to what is developing in the UK today. So Foxtrot Oscar yourself!
Yes but you use weasel words to eliminate an important distinction. “It is developing”. You aren’t imprisoned for saying something the government doesn’t like, institutional control by progressives means that the government doesn’t really have to do anything and there are still social sanctions applied.
I don’t see any difference between illegal hate and illegal thought.
Will anyone of the Unherd sheep care to explain?
Baaah
That’s it. Freedom of thought squeezed out by law and the media.
And what are you left with?
Baaah.
And you’ve found your home in Unherd. Orwell would appreciate the joke.
Stupid name calling. I think you must be in a tiny minority, not to mention managing to not read anything on UnHerd, if you actually think it was set up by people who believed in heard mentality, writers conform to a certain position and whose contributors are “sheep”.
I expect your true unstated position is that you’d very much like them all to be sheep, but instead following your particular line on any issue!
It’s just exasperating to see people with the moral certainty and simplistic reasoning abilities of middle school students believing in their bones that we need them to protect us from unpleasant things. And are willing to put people in jail to do so.
No, sorry.
These people, like TTFGK and Met Police are taking a knee to placate BLM mob and protect islamofascists.
Complex. The Bill actually refers to protecting free speech too, so Judges interpreting any cases will need to weight that provision too.
Nonetheless is anyone saying OnLine doesn’t need better regulation when you get to see and understand what our kids can now get to see? – like nothing we had exposure to at their age. Surely just about all of us now more aware of the damage we are doing.
Of course it’s gets trickier with the provisions on ‘harm to adults’, but in some regards it’s just about bringing the OnLine world into line with other media. And there is certainly a case for challenging the business models of the largest companies and they way they use and hide their algorithms.
There needs to be specific protection in law for the robust criticism of all kinds of mediaeval superstition and pseudo-science. If we can’t be as rude as we like about Islam and the trans nonsense, then we don’t have free speech.
I’m with you on giving kids back their childhood (which includes not sterilising them in pursuit of some bizarre adult fantasy).
Agree.
The issue is when it veers into incitement to violence. Judges will need to decide. Not always ideal but free speech and incitement can be complex.
You must be living in some parallel universe to the rest of us.
I live in London.
There were weekly demonstration calling for genocide of Jews and Met Police and judges did nothing to stop it.
Somehow after murder of 3 girls both police and judges were very quick to arrest and sentence people to prison terms for tweets.
Please tell us what happened to people who attacked police officers at Manchester Airport?
I guess you would claim they have protected characteristics?
Some people online could do with being silent, but the only thing that should be illegal is overt incitement to violence.
How strange then that government and police do nothing about islamofascists teaching in mosques and their incitement to violence against Jews and other communities?
I think the whole free speech debate requires us to use the right words. At its core, it’s white men debating with other white men about what they can or cannot say. It has nothing to do with minorities because minorities don’t have the power to make laws. That’s why it feels so strange when people claim, ‘You can’t say anything about gender or race anymore.’ The reality is that those groups aren’t the ones creating the laws. It’s just white men arguing among themselves about speech, and that’s weird—really weird. What is happening?
What’s happening is that the Far Left’s dogma or ‘Theory’ as they like to say, is now dominant in all UK institutions , including (the stupidly named) Unherd.
The new dogma of the Left controls language, and so, controls what can be said and what cannot be said. Unherd goes along with this, herdlike, with the rest.
What planet are you on?
I don’t really follow this piece but I suspect that repealing the Online Safety Act and starting again would help clarify the situation and make clear who is attempting to do what and why.
What would happen if all these moronic social networks were to be destroyed by a bot, Trojan, virus or other data hack? If the undersea fibres that interconnect all the massive data centers were to be sabotaged, how would free speech be regulated then? What then? What does it tell us that so many of us inhabit these false social communities? Seems self evident to me ; don’t eat Macs or other UPFs, don’t smoke and keep off social mejia, rots your mind and surveils your every thought.
“It was never going to be possible to make the online world, any more than the real world, perfectly safe.”
It was never going to be possible to make it perfectly free either. If I were to point out that most of us who aren’t hermits spend the bulk of our waking hours at home, at school, in the workplace, or in some public environment (in a park, a store, or on a bus, for example), no one would regard this as a controversial claim; and in none of these environments are we free to speak and behave exactly as we please. There are always conventional constraints, often legal ones, that everybody is obliged to observe, and I think arguing that the internet should be different is a difficult case to make.
The real issue we face is how to ensure that internet regulators don’t abuse their power–not that identifying this problem correctly makes it easier to solve. The question of how to police the police, save a child from a bullying parent or teacher, or an adult from a tyrannical boss, is not one any society has ever successfully addressed. We can sometimes manage to reverse injustices in egregious cases; but in general, as Billy Jack put it when told he was ‘going against the law,’ “When policemen break the law there is no law, just a struggle for survival.” If, someday, an authoritarian regulator decides these observations of mine are too incendiary to post, there probably won’t be a whole lot I can do about it.
Yes, free speech can never be absolute. You can have more or less adherence to free speech ideals and we are going in the wrong direction.
I also disagree with your characterization of ordinary life in fact you can speak much more freely in the pub than at work or in other more controlled environments.