Will Sir Keir Stalin Make the Online Safety Act Even Worse?

In my latest Spectator column, I’ve tried to work out what it is Sir Keir Starmer is threatening to do when he talks about amending the Online Safety Act 2023. Whatever it is, it isn’t good, not least because the Act is draconian enough without needing to be ‘toughened up’.

Are the Act’s critics claiming the duties it imposes on companies to remove illegal content – stirring up racial hatred, for instance, or inciting people to commit crimes – are being ignored because the penalties aren’t severe enough? That would be an odd thing to argue since Ofcom, which has been given the job of enforcing the new rules, is still consulting about these duties and they won’t come into force until next year. When they do, failure to comply could result in a fine of up to 10% of annual global turnover – which for Facebook would be more than £10 billion – and jail sentences for “senior managers”. Isn’t that draconian enough?

Or do they mean that one of the criminal offences created by the Act – the section 179 false communications offence, which came into force in January – applies only to disinformation, not misinformation? Last week, Cheshire police arrested a 55-year-old woman for wrongly identifying the Southport attacker as a Muslim asylum seeker, and kept her in custody for 36 hours before releasing her pending further investigation. I’m in touch with that woman, who’s a member of the Free Speech Union, and while she may be guilty of spreading misinformation, it would be hard to charge her with the ‘s179’ offence, because one of its tests is that ‘the message conveys information the person knows to be false’ and this wasn’t the case here. In her tweet, she added ‘if this is true’ and when she discovered it wasn’t, she deleted it. I’d be amazed if she’s charged, but if she is the Free Speech Union will pay for her defence.

Does Sir Keir want to broaden that offence to catch people guilty of spreading dangerous misinformation? If so, would that include the public health officials who, in 2021, overstated the efficacy of the Covid vaccines and downplayed the harms? What about the BBC, which got several things wrong in its reporting of an explosion in the car park of Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital on 17 October, overestimating the number of casualties and wrongly blaming an Israeli airstrike? No doubt that wasn’t deliberate – misinformation, not disinformation – but the report certainly caused harm, contributing to the cancellation of a peace summit between Joe Biden and various Arab leaders.

Worth reading in full.