Before some of the UK’s strictest censorship laws in living memory have even come into effect, there are already calls to make them even more draconian.

In 2023, the UK government passed the Online Safety Act allegedly to protect children from online harms, or so the public was told.  However, the Government is now threatening to use this Act to crack down on free speech in response to recent civil unrest.

Paymaster General and Minister for the Constitution and European Union Relations Nick Thomas-Symonds MP told Sky News: There are obviously aspects of the Online Safety Act that haven’t come into effect yet, but we stand ready to make changes if necessary.” (Watch HERE)

Times of crisis often breed authoritarian responses, Big Brother Watch’s Mark Johnson warned.  “This should be a moment for cool heads. Not more censorship.”

He quite rightly pointed out that “instead of addressing the root causes of the shameful scenes of social unrest, some politicians have suggested knee-jerk reactions which threaten to weaken all of our democratic rights.”

Johnson explained that what began with a speech by David Cameron in 2013 on cleansing the Internet of disgusting material led to an Internet safety strategy Green Paper in 2017, which developed into an Online Harms White Paper in 2019, a draft online safety bill in 2021 and then a full and final online safety bill in 2022.

The Internet Safety Strategy Green Paper focused on three areas:

• Holding internet companies accountable for their users’ safety and well-being.
• Implementing technological measures to prevent online harms, such as hate speech, trolling, and child exploitation.
• Providing guidance and resources for parents, carers, and teachers to educate children about online safety and empower them to make informed decisions.

The government published its response to the consultation in November 2019, reaffirming its commitment to the Online Harms white paper and expanding the remit of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (“UKCCIS”) to cover adults, as well as children. The response also highlighted the growing concerns around disinformation, AI manipulation, and data misuse.

The Online Harms White Paper was first published in April 2019 and has undergone subsequent revisions and consultations.  The key proposals were:

• Internet companies, including social media platforms, will be held accountable for tackling a comprehensive set of online harms, ranging from illegal activity and content to behaviours that are harmful but not necessarily illegal.
• An independent regulator, currently proposed to be Ofcom, will oversee the implementation of the duty of care and determine appropriate levels of risk-based and proportionate protection for children.
• The regulator will set out through its codes of practice the steps companies need to take to ensure online safety, covering legal but harmful content and activity such as cyberbullying, and access to age-inappropriate content.

The Online Safety Bill, also known as the Online Safety Act 2023, enshrined the Online Harms White Paper in law.  The key provisions of the law are:

• The bill sets out duties for regulated services to protect children from harmful content, including preventing children from accessing harmful content, detecting and removing illegal content, and assessing risks to children’s safety, and preventing children from accessing age-inappropriate content.
• The bill requires services to rapidly remove illegal content, including suicide and self-harm content, and proactively protect users from content that is illegal under the Suicide Act 1961.
• Ofcom is designated as the regulator of online safety, responsible for ensuring platforms comply with the bill’s requirements and enforcing penalties for non-compliance.
• The bill introduces new criminal offences, including intimate image abuse and cyberflashing.

The UK government’s guidance for the Online Safety Bill clearly states it is not only about “protecting” children.  It states: “The Online Safety Bill is a new set of laws to protect children and adults online. It will make social media companies more responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms.” 

This makes it start to look like a censorship Bill and even more so when Thomas-Symonds threatens that the Government is ready to use aspects “that haven’t come into effect yet” in the context of the civil unrest seen in recent weeks.  In other words, the Government and corporate media sold this Bill to the public as “online safety” for children but this was just a cover story.  It is looking less and less like “safety” and less and less about children.

We have previously published numerous articles warning about the UK Online Safety Bill posing a serious threat to freedom of speech and privacy.

“The Online Safety Act … will formally appoint Big Tech companies as our online speech police.  It gives state backing to Big Tech’s censorial terms and conditions, creates powers which could be used to force tech companies to scan private conversations by undermining encryption, the technology that keeps our messages private,” Johnson warned.

Related: UK Online Safety Bill is in its final stages and is a serious threat to our privacy and freedoms

Johnson continued, “The previous government, even tried to introduce provisions around lawful speech which they deemed harmful to adults … Thankfully, after years of campaigning, the censorial, legal but harmful speech powers were dropped from the bill.”

Why take out “harmful but not illegal”? “Because it had a very, very concerning impact potentially on free speech,” he said.  “Yet now there are calls from some of Labour’s most high-profile politicians to revisit this [censorship] charter.”

Adding, “Giving the government a blank cheque to control what we can read, see or hear would sew more division and mistrust instead of solving the vital issues at stake. Our response to the riots and unrest in our society must be one that protects all of our rights, not takes them away.”

You can support the work that Big Brother Watch does HERE.