I’ve written a piece for the Spectator’s Coffee House blog about the changes Michelle Donelan, the Digital Secretary, has made to the Online Safety Bill. Here’s how it begins:
The new version of the Online Safety Bill seems, on the face of it, to be an improvement on the previous one. We’ll know more when it’s published – all we have to go on for now is a DCMS press release and some amendments moved by Michelle Donelan, the Digital Secretary and architect of the new Bill. The devil will be in the detail.
Let’s start with something that hasn’t got much coverage today, but which I think is important. Plans to introduce a new harmful communications offence in England and Wales, making it a crime punishable by up to two years in jail to send or post a message with the intention of causing “psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress”, have been scrapped.
That’s good news because, as Kemi Badenoch said in July, “We should not be legislating for hurt feelings.”
The bad news is, the new communications offence was intended to replace some of the more egregious offences in the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. The communication offences in the Malicious Communications Act are still going to be repealed, but not s127 of the Communications Act.
But this change does solve a problem I’d previously flagged up about the previous version of the Bill. It obliged the large social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc) to remove content in every part of the UK if it’s illegal in any part of the UK (“offence means any offence under the law or any part of the United Kingdom”). So if it’s illegal to say something in Scotland, in-scope providers would have to remove it in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
That created a problem because the new harmful communications offence would only have replaced some other communications offences in England and Wales, not in Scotland and Northern Ireland. So when it came to what you could and couldn’t say online, the new communications offence would not have replaced one set of rules prohibiting speech with another; it would have just added a new set.
That problem won’t arise now, and nor will social media platforms have to enforce the new speech restrictions in the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act across the whole of the UK because the government amended the previous version of the Bill so providers won’t be obliged to remove speech that’s prohibited by laws made by a devolved authority.
Fears that Nicola Sturgeon might become the content moderator for the whole of the UK can be laid to rest – at least for the time being. It’s worth bearing in mind that a future Labour government could change that with a single, one-line amendment.
But the new version of the Online Safety Bill won’t criminalise saying something, whether online or offline, that causes ‘hurty feelings’, and we should be grateful for that.
Okay, now on to the main event.
Clause 13 of the Bill (“Safety duties protecting adults”), which would have forced in-scope providers to set out in their terms of service how they intended to ‘address’ content that is legal but harmful to adults, has been scrapped.
How big a win is that?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Professor Andrew Tettenborn, a member of the FSU’s Advisory Council, is more sanguine about the changes to ‘legal but harmful’ than me, but less impressed by the removal of the harmful communications offence. Also in the Spectator.
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Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
We have to get away from the individual citizen being capable of defining what is offensive to all, by what they consider offensive to them.
We simply don’t need an online safety bill.
Correct.
I’ve written repeatedly about the virtue of Christian forgiveness on these pages, and make no apologies for doing so. On the day when the census reveals that Christians are now a minority in England and Wales, it is worth reflecting that Christian forgiveness made Britain a tolerant country, and that woke intolerance (amongst other things) threatens this. It is therefore to be welcomed that the legal but harmful nonsense has been removed from the Online Safety bill, as it would certainly be hijacked by the intolerant. However, the reprieve is likely temporary if current trends continue (though I expect the decline in Christianity to level off by the 2030s, with a possible Muslim majority long term). I say again, if individuals decide to forgive perpetrators of these crimes against humanity, that is no bad thing – but does not mean an amnesty. The crook Fauci and others should be duly punished (with genuine remorse, should it occur, taken into account).
There was a message discovered on the body of a Jewish boy in Auschwitz, so the story goes, asking God to let the heroic virtues that some people in these concentration camps showed in the face of these atrocities, to be the forgiveness of the perpetrators. Noble and brave words.
Yes, forgiveness is difficult, and for some impossible especially when the wicked show remorse. But it is certainly worth while. Judge not lest ye be judged. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, as they used to teach in schools back when Britain was a civilised country.
(Should read “when the wicked show no remorse” above).
I will never forgive while I am alive on this planet. What is planned is the wholesale destruction of unique nation states and their citizenry in order to facilitate some form of transhumanism wholly bereft of soul.
We are beyond forgiveness and quite rightly should be. If TPTB have their way the murders, nay massacres of billions will make WWI, WWII, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda, ISIS and any others, cumulatively look like nothing more than western shoot outs.
That’s the reality we are facing and they intend this to be relentless.
“The fruits of abortion are nuclear war” (Mother Teresa, an Albanian Christian religious).
No, we can’t turn this around without Christian virtue. And some of us would argue that it was Christian prayer that brought a bloodless end to Soviet tyranny and their crimes against humanity.
And by the way we also badly need the Christian virtue of hope in these apocalyptic times.
In any case, I don’t see that people’s personal decision to forgive or not need have any great impact on the wider agenda, that those responsible need to be punished – and first of all brought to trial, a big battle in itself (ask Hillsborough victims).
‘let the heroic virtues that some people in these concentration camps showed in the face of these atrocities, to be the forgiveness of the perpetrators’
Er, could you read that over and make sure it says what you mean. I can make no sense of it.
Also, I don’t know where you get the idea of Christian tolerance from. The founding Christians rampaged all over the ancient world wrecking and destroying the art of the golden age, a performance repeated by their descendants in the 16th century. Christians, until quite recently, went in a lot for burning people alive who differed with them on doctrinal points. Not much tolerance there.
It has always seemed to me that Christian goody-goody-ness is a veneer over dark malice. A lot of them would be burning people alive still if they could. Nowadays, if they desire that pleasure, they must accept it at second hand, and avail themselves of the consolation of Acquinas to ‘see the punishment of the damned in hell’.
Nasty business, Christianity; harboured and nurtured a lot of perverts and maniacs down the ages. And founded on insane beliefs.
Thus the case for the “nones”, whose beliefs, on closer inspection, often turn out not to be particularly sane. Of course there are traitors in the church, one of the most notorious people who ever lived was a follower of Jesus Christ. His name was Judas Iscariot.
Whatever the reasons for “burning people alive”, be it forms of government, the particular times that these events occurred, character flaws in the people perpetrating these acts or alleged flaws in Christianity, certainly the people who are held up by Christians as saints (including the above mentioned Mother Teresa for some Christians) are not revered for committing such acts. And it is Christian theology that brought us the concept of the just war. Sadly chivalry seems to have been abandoned in many modern wars. And certainly I don’t see as a lack of forgiveness and lack of belief in the possibility of redemption as being conducive to tolerance.
I would suggest the”perverts and maniacs” simply didn’t do Christianity properly. And if we are going to talk about nastiness, I think it is fairly well established that places that have less belief in hell have more crime.
In actual fact, Christianity is completely sane and rational, and the “insane” (or by your leave extraordinary) beliefs and claims of Christianity are only taken seriously because of the miracles that accompanied the ministry and preaching of those (especially Jesus Christ) on whom Christianity is founded, attested by credible testimony. Yes, there is an element of faith in it, but for Christians, faith is a virtue. Such miracles continue to occur today according to many Christians, and certainly the evidence for some of them is far stronger than that for some popular atheist beliefs such as “the aliens” or, to take a specific scientific point, random combination of amino acids forming proteins.
Your post rather begs the question is there an ideal system where there will be no “perverts or maniacs”? I’d sure like to see it. So far as I can see, the decline of Christianity has in fact unleashed totalitarianism on the world. Whether this is inevitable is another matter, but those who decry Christianity would be well advised to have a credible, workable alternative if we are not to end up under various tyrannies.
The christian belief that it is possible to eat the living flesh and drink the living blood of a man who died 2,000 years ago is insane. No way to pretty it up, Hughie. Mad, barking up the wall, mad.
Certainly, if you don’t believe in miracles – though as I’ve alluded to, the “nones” effectively believe in their own miracles. There is in fact a body of Christians who believe in contemporary Eucharistic miracles to which they would point in support of this “insane” belief, and the case for such events should be taken on their own merits, the same as the various beliefs of the “nones”, which they sometimes falsely seem to characterise as scientific fact. Without getting bogged down in the details of the various Christian churches, I am satisfied, from my experience and from what I have seen and heard, that there is ample evidence to support the contention that miracles have occurred and indeed continue to occur in modern times, this age of miracles. As for the popular “nones” belief that amino acids formed into proteins through random combination, if statistical probability says that this is impossible, and science has not observed this, they should be rather more open and honest about it than they are, and accept that they effectively believe in some sort of miracle of probability to allow this to happen, or point to what as yet unidentified mechanisms may allow this. I could go on, but you get the idea.
I ought to add that Christians believe that Jesus Christ is no longer dead, and that there have been reports of miracles in modern times with echoes of the resurrection.
Also that the Soviets tried moving away from Russia’s Christian identity but apparently found it did not work.