Lord Frost is one of three ex-Cabinet ministers who’ve spoken out against the Online Safety Bill today, warning of the damage it will do to free speech. The Daily Mail has more.
Lord Frost today urges his former Cabinet colleagues to scrap their “unsatisfactory” and “un-Conservative” plans to clean up the internet.
The Tory peer claims the Online Safety Bill contains so many flaws “it is hard to know where to start”.
He singles out for criticism the fact that it will outlaw comments on social media that would be legal in the real world.
Lord Frost, the former Brexit minister, says the move will be “highly damaging” to free speech and will benefit only the “perennially offended” who want to be protected from anything they disagree with.
He says: “A Conservative Government should not be putting this view into law. The best thing the Government could do would be to slim down the Bill so they can proceed rapidly with the genuinely uncontroversial aspects, and consign the rest where it belongs – the wastepaper basket.”
His forthright comments, echoed by two other former Cabinet ministers – David Davis and Liam Fox – come in response to a briefing published today by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think-tank, which says the planned law’s “scope, complexity and reach are breathtaking”.
Former Brexit Secretary Mr Davis said: “The Bill could end up being one of the most significant accidental infringements on free speech in modern times.”
The IEA report focuses on the likely consequences of the Bill’s threats to impose huge fines on tech giants unless they make the internet safer.
As well as forcing social media companies to delete illegal content, such as child abuse imagery, they will also have to try to get rid of some “hate crime offences”, even though they would be allowed in the real world because of freedom of expression protections.
A new offence of circulating fake news will lead to “those who are easily offended or who are acting in bad faith” to get material wiped by claiming it is “intentionally false or psychologically distressing”.
Although ministers say online platforms will have to notify news publishers of any intention to delete an article, an amendment introducing this protection has not yet appeared.
Tech firms will also be required to protect users from anything deemed “legal but harmful”.
This could cover anything from debate about the origins of Covid to climate change scepticism, and is likely to lead to over-cautious companies deleting anything they fear will be controversial.
You can read the IEA’s new report here and read co-author Victoria Hewson’s piece about it in today’s Telegraph here.
Stop Press: According to a YouGov poll, the Online Safety Bill is hated by Conservative Party members. Guido Fawkes has more.
The poll of 982 Tory Party members, conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Legal to Say, Legal to Type campaign, is crystal clear that the government is utterly barking up the wrong tree here. When asked “Do you think people should or should not be able to post content online that is legal, but that some people might find offensive or harmful?”, as the OHB aims to prevent, 79% of members said people should be able to do so.
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Legal but harmful content ahead that’s likely to get banned by Nadine Dorries to Protect the children!: The mother of a child is the woman who gave birth to it. The man who sired it is its father.
Additional explanation for people who haven’t read all of this: It’s routinely claimed that stating nasty truths which contradict their peculiar derangements causes so-called trans people to commit suicide. Hence, in case the above isn’t already regarded as deadly hate speech, a strong push for it to be recognized as such will certainly come once this bill has become law.
Goody, Toby’s on Mark Steyn show (GB News) tonight!
Apparently, after 150 years of speakers’ (or is it speaker’s?) corner, you’re not allowed to say something if people in the vicinity if people find it offensive. And media won’t report on the reason there was a terrorist attack in Oslo. And now to top it all, we have this beastly online harms bill…
Offence is taken, not given.
Easy one for the government this – just make anything that anyone might find offensive or harmful illegal.
EDIT – oh I get it, that’s what they’re doing. Makes perfect sense. Sorry if I caused any offence by this post, I will whip myself to death before bedtime.
Best rush out and vote at the next election so I can show how much I consent to all of this!
Lord Frost is the only politician of real calibre in the entire country at this time.
Thank God for Lord Frost.
Good to see D Davis + L Fox weighing in against it, too.
Let’s hope it’s not like the EU renewing the COVID pass despite overwhelming negative feedback from the public.
While Labour is out of office, the permanent administrative state becomes the real opposition. And an extremely effective one at that; one which manages to get many of Labour’s policies implemented.
We saw yesterday how much Johnson son Loves Trudeau
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I wrote to my MP, Tory Anthony Mangnall, who replied that he was all for the online safety bill. I’m a lifelong Conservative voter, but never will I vote for them again. Conservative values no longer apply to the Tory party.
This is absolutely nothing to do with protecting little Johnny’s feelings – because he might identify as Janey (or a bloody mountain goat), and everything to do with mass control of the population. It’s about purging dissenting views from the public space – views that undermine grand plans. The pushback against the government, MSM and ‘vaccines’ may have been slow in the making, but it was steady and surefooted, having significant impact amongst the population at large. They cannot let this happen again; a more Orwellian strategy is needed to curtail the wrong thoughts. This is the Trojan horse lying at the centre of this bill.
Former Brexit Secretary Mr Davis said: “The Bill could end up being one of the most significant accidental infringements on free speech in modern times.”
There is nothing accidental about it
Absolutely so.
Follow the money. Who do you think is lobbying Nadine’s department for greater legal restrictions for online content? Could it possibly be the tech companies themselves? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47762091:
It’s a classic tactic manifesting itself: make it look like the government are about to “regulate dem nawty tech companies” when in-fact its the tech companies behind the scenes influencing ministerial departments who are absolutely clueless to what they are doing.
Just look at this. Egged on my tech lobbyists who might call Nadine and her department “useful idiots“.
That’s a nice theory. There’s just one problem with it. It’s demonstrably wrong. The German NetzwerkDG requires Facebook (and similar providers) to delete content that’s illegal under German law and submit regular reports about that to the government to prove that they’re taking this seriously, ie, that they’re deleting enough stuff.
The drive for this is political in the USA as well. There, it’s basically about circumventing anti censorship legislation: All kinds of politicians and political NGOs badly want to censor stuff they disapprove of. But as they’re prohibited from doing this themselves, they get private utility companies (technically, facebook is as much a utility as the land-line phone system) to do it for them.
There’s no reason to assume that Zuckerberg cares for anything except $$$.
Sorry but which part is a theory? Perhaps I chose my wording poorly by conflating two issues – regulation vs. content moderation policies.
All the large social media companies have been pushing for governments to do more to set content policy for them, you’ll get all sorts of nice soundbites from their policy teams with a quick Google search. Having the government address the problem is preferential for them, since they can then write a policy engine against someone else’s standards, not their own. Practically, this makes their life much easier (product development, operations etc.) as well as being much better for PR (it’s not us, it’s your government).
I agree.