Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak will get rid of Clause 13 of the Online Safety Bill, which requires the big social media companies to set out how they intend to address “priority content that is harmful to adults” in their Terms and Conditions, with Ofcom making sure they enforce those T&Cs. To be clear, this is not illegal content, but legal content that has been identified as harmful to adults by the Culture Secretary in a Statutory Instrument and which future Culture Secretaries would be free to add to. This is the most sinister clause in the Bill, so this is good news, although there are other clauses of the Bill which need to be either scrapped or amended as well. The Telegraph has more.
A planned crackdown on legal but harmful content online is set to be ditched amid freedom of speech fears by both Tory leadership candidates Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss.
They have pledged to introduce duty of care laws to protect children from online harms and adults from illegal content such as terrorism, drugs, weapons and suicide material as soon as possible.
But they are expected to scrap Clause 13 in the Online Safety Bill that aims to regulate legal but harmful content after Tory critics warned it could allow “woke” social media firms to remove offensive or controversial comments that they disagreed with.
It comes just a week after Baroness Kidron, an architect of the duty of care laws and new Children’s Code warned in the Telegraph that it was “deeply worrying” to try to regulate “legal but harmful” online content when there were already laws covering discrimination, sexism and hate speech.
A spokesman for Mr. Sunak, the former chancellor, said: “Rishi has spoken passionately as a dad about his desire to protect children online from content no parent would want their children to see – from violence, self harm and suicide to pornography.
“As Prime Minister he would urgently legislate to protect children. His concern with the bill as drafted is that it censors free speech amongst adults which he does not support.
“Rishi believes the Government has a duty to protect children and crack down on illegal behaviour, but should not infringe on legal and free speech.”
A source in Ms. Truss, the Foreign Secretary’s camp, said she would not scrap the Bill. “She thinks it needs to protect children from online harm, but we have to be careful to not damage freedom of speech for adults, ultimately,” said the source.
One of the leading figures in the criticism has been Lord Frost, the former Brexit minister, who has urged ministers to “take a fresh look” at the Online Safety Bill because of the threat to free speech.
Worth reading in full.
The Telegraph reckons it was the Telegraph wot won it, but I think the Free Speech Union, which has been highlighting the danger this Bill poses to free speech for over two years, deserves some credit. Our members and supporters have sent thousands of emails to MPs raising their concerns about the Bill using the email template on the FSU’s website. If you’d like to email your MP to share your concerns about the Bill, you can find our template here. Just enter your details and the email will automatically be sent to your MP. It only takes two minutes. Let’s keep the pressure up now we appear to be winning.
Stop Press: In last night’s GB News hustings, Liz Truss gave Alastair Stewart a “pledge” that she would amend the Online Safety Bill to make sure it doesn’t endanger free speech.
Stop Press 2: The lawyer Graham Smith published an excellent blog post two days ago in which he explains that the ‘legal but harmful’ clause is far from the biggest shortcoming of the Online Safety Bill.
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Israel and Britain hedging their reckless bets.
“Let’s hope the Government follows it.”
Indeed. But is the Government in charge of policy?
Hasn’t it got enough? What more do you need than the bleedin’ obvious?
Vaccination will kill many thousands of children who are at no risk from Covid-19, but remarkably they still need more information.
I suppose big pharma etc. will be able to hide it?
(And out of interest, how many have died/will die from hunger, disease etc. in the third world due to lockdowns (and what is the UK’s share of responsibility)? Are the Grauniad covering this? if not, why not?)
This makes me angry. Deaths and disability from malaria, polio, dysentry, malnutrition and on and on. Someone arrives with a vaccine to *save* people when access to clean water, healthcare, education is needed.
Just think of all the good that could have happened if the money had been spent curing the worlds real ills and issues.
Yes, it’s heartbreaking. I don’t know what we can do.
Refuse all Government directives and coercion. Put questions in the minds of your friends.
yes, I’d previously assumed that the climate scare would be the biggest waste of money this century, but it seems I was wrong. How many millions of lives could have been saved with the money squandered on this nonsense (though it seems that to some of the people behind this, population reduction was the point anyway)?
The climate connection is starting to be made. It feels so predictable. Read an article on BBC the other day, my mistake. ‘We know the world is overpopulated’ it stated. Emerging economies forced into *sustainable* practices that will keep them poor.
“Sustainable” always means subsidised (and thus economically unsustainable), so you can guess the establishment are taking a big cut.
They’ll be figuring out how to ramp up the alleged risk factor through some new variant or similar.
“No Benefit, lots of Risk”.
“Hmmm, but I’ll lose my phoney baloney job if they don’t get jabbed.”
Well the logical thing to do would be to treat it the same as every other drug and require a 2- 3 year RCT before it is considerwd for approval.
After a this is what the Covi-
Zealots screech whenever Invermectins success is mentioned.
The Covid vaccines are clearly dangerous and there can be no acceptable reason to run trials on children, who we know can only be harmed and will provide no benefit. Any person allowing their child to participate in a Covid vaccine trial is clearly an unfit parent. Any person organising or involved in running such trials should be charged with planning an assault on minors.
I suspect there is a shocking level of ignorance about these “vaccines”, even more than of basic numeracy (perhaps not unrelated).
And of course as I’ve said previously, there’s a pervasive and sophisticated propaganda campaign for these “vaccines” across politics, media, science etc.
Same with those snotrags people have been wearing. Be nice if everybody did the right thing, but there are some formidable obstacles to overcome. The crooks responsible for all this nonsense pretty much run this planet, unfortunately.
It is a Government mass crime – should it take place.
Effects on fertility on embryos and children cannot be discovered in such a short period.
It’s the best we can hope for at the moment.
It might keep the teachers unions at bay, at least.
remind me how many teachers have died of (or even with) Covid-19 after becoming infected by their pupils? And why their unions don’t know better.
I’m not holding my breath, given the obvious tactics from yesterday of pushing luck to the furthest extent..
… but it will be interesting to watch progress – a bit of a weathervane.
We should feel sorry for kids in America that are unwittingly taking part in a massive scientific experiment. Fingers crossed that it doesn’t go horribly wrong for them, even though this would make vaccination of kids more likely in this country.
Whose parents are knowingly enrolling them in a mass experiment.
Germany’s vaccine authority has decided against it, except for children with specific diseases and then only with consultation of the doctor.
Has the EMA not decided against it either?
U Turn by Friday? Regardless, my kids over my dead body.
…until they have a rethink in a couple of days then reverse their decision. What’s it called- oh yes, a fluid decision, nothing firmed up, keeping their options open. Another tactical strategy – they’ll increase the ‘case’ rate, start pressurising the adults again, intimating if the uptake doesn’t radically increase, there’ll be no option but to inject the kids so it’s up to the adults to step forward and bare their arms. I think it’s called blackmail.
Theatre. They are intent on vaccinating our children. The only thing that will stop them is if they think they can introduce Digital Compliance ID without the need to vaccinate children. They are not sure that is possible.
I suspect they will u-turn and defer vaccination of U-18s.
They don’t need them vaxed for the digital passport to be effective. The passport will be used to control adults’ behaviour with Chinese-style social credit scoring, to be topped up with aCarbon Credit Rating to suit the climate change agenda.
Children will have to be vaxed as soon as they reach 18.
That could be the reserve position, till they “tweak the vaccines”.
Dear JCVI, if that advice is sensible for under 18s, why should we older ones be expected to be any safer taking this experimental shit?
My take on this is that they will not vaccinate children. The trials have already shown injuries and it is inevitable that there would be deaths. Roger H estimated that 1 in 1000 children might die if jabbed. In my area (Windsor and Maidenhead) there are around 60000 children. If 60 children died then this would wreak havoc. Not only would it bring the whole thing to a grinding halt but it would also affect the confidence in (real) vaccine programmes. They would not want either of these things to happen – this could not be covered up.
I am waiting to see what happens with the, say, 18-30 age group injuries and deaths which will also be difficult to bury, because they will find it difficult to account for the “coincidence” of onset of illness.
The fertility issue – possibly the big one in all this – will take at least a couple of years – minimum – to show up. I think that they had hoped there would not be so many immediate effects because if there weren’t, the reduction in fertility could have gone ahead no problem, and by the time discovered – too late.
Two years is way too short a time frame on fertility. What impact is the spike having on female embryos in “vaccinated” mothers? That’s 20 – 30 years down the line. Remember we people of femininity are born with all our eggs.
Might it have a bigger impact on the fertility of children than adults, with their developing reproductive systems, again, especially girls? Similar time frame.
We don’t know.
Surely we should know.
People will be making a choice they don’t realise, the risk of some not ever being grandparents against massive inconvenience taking a summer holiday flight.