The draft legislation is now due to return to the House of Commons next week when lawmakers will resume scrutiny of the wide-ranging speech regulation proposals
The U.K. government has completed a major revision to controversial but populist online safety legislation that’s been in the works for years — and was finally introduced to parliament earlier this year — but has been paused since this summer following turmoil in the governing Conservative Party.
In September, new secretary of state for digital, Michelle Donelan, said the reshuffled government, under newly elected prime minister Liz Truss (who has since been replaced by another new PM, Rishi Sunak) would make certain edits to the bill before bringing it back to parliament.
The draft legislation is now due to return to the House of Commons next week when lawmakers will resume scrutiny of the wide-ranging speech regulation proposals.
The government says the changes it made to the Online Safety Bill are in response to concerns it could lead to platforms overblocking content and chilling freedom of expression online — largely focused on adult safety provisions related to so-called ‘legal but harmful’ content, which included mitigation requirements like transparency obligations but did not actually require such material to be removed.
Nonetheless the controversy and concern over this aspect of the bill has been fierce.
In a press release announcing the latest raft of tweaks, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Secretary of state for digital issues, Michelle Donelan, wrote: Any incentives for social media firms to over-remove people’s legal online content will be taken out of the Online Safety Bill. Firms will still need to protect children and remove content that is illegal or prohibited in their terms of service, however the Bill will no longer define specific types of legal content that companies must address.
This removes any influence future governments could have on what private companies do about legal speech on their sites, or any risk that companies are motivated to take down legitimate posts to avoid sanctions. New measures will also be added to make social media platforms more transparent and accountable to their users, as a result of amendments the Government will propose, DCMS said.
Parents and the wider public will benefit from new changes to force tech firms to publish more information about the risks their platforms pose to children so people can see what dangers sites really hold. Firms will be made to show how they enforce their user age limits to stop kids circumventing authentication methods and they will have to publish details of when the regulator Ofcom has taken action against them, DCMS added.