According to today’s Sun and the i newspaper, the Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan will shortly bring back the Online Safety Bill, but without the hated ‘legal but harmful’ clause. Here’s how the i reports it:
i understands Ms Donelan is seeking to balance the protection of children with freedom of speech concerns.
As a result, she is scrapping sweeping “legal but harmful” rules which required social media companies to address content that is not illegal but is dangerous – such as that promoting suicide or self-harm.
The rules would have meant social media sites, such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, were responsible for dealing with this content for both adults and children.
But, amid criticism that it would have led to a widespread attack on freedom of speech by companies hoping to avoid hefty fines, i understands the new laws will only apply to material targeted at children.
That’s great news. The Free Speech Union has been campaigning against the ‘legal but harmful’ clause in the Bill ever since it was published. (See this piece by me in Conservative Home, for instance.) Of course, the Bill has many other shortcomings, but this change alone will be a huge improvement. Well done to all those FSU members and supporters who took advantage of our campaigning tool to email their MP to ask them to highlight the problems with the Bill, particularly the ‘legal but harmful’ clause. Let’s hope Michelle Donelan goes further and transforms it into a piece of legislation focused on protecting children from online harm, not adults.
You can read a report on Guido Fawkes about this excellent news here.
Stop Press: You can see a panel discussion by various experts about the shortcomings of the Online Safety Bill at the Battle of Ideas last month here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
If the WHO gets it this year, next year’s recipients should and will likely be: Selenskij, the Azov battalion, the CEOs of Raytheon, Northrop&co and, of course, Victoria Nuland.
Well the committee awarded it to Barack Obama BEFORE he became president. Then “Obomber” began to bomb more people with drones than anyone before….
At some point in the future after the planet has been denuded of several hundred million people as a result of vaccine accelerated “sudden deaths”, cancers, and fallen fertility levels, perhaps Sukarit Bachti, Dr Robert Malone, or Dr Mike Yeadon will get the prize for warning about these clot shots?
Yeah maybe I’m dreaming….
The plandemic will indeed not be over before they get that, or rather a more credible and meaningful prize, and its instigators, main actors and little helpers are in a gulag.
I used to be full of admiration for the Nobel Peace Prize. Right up to the point where I grew up, stopped being a child and saw it for what it is: brownie points for grown ups.
Just like the Queen’s honours; the adult world equivalent of a head teacher giving out certificates.
Why anyone cares or pays any attention is beyond me.
A committee of self important people deciding who, of all the people in world, has made the most significant contribution to world peace. Its hilarious really.
Excellent piece Mr Young.
Thank you.
One comment:
In this now Orwellian world in which we live surely there can be only one winner of the Nobel Peace Prize – you know what’s coming –
The WHO.
This sort of nonsensical, woke, global virtue-signalling is entirely in keeping with awarding a dysfunctional organization which practices medieval voodoo the George Medal –
rNHS.
They love handing it out to people who have allegedly committed crimes against humanity. Ethiopia seems to be a breeding ground for war criminals/Nobel Laureates
I guess this is the the same kind of ‘peace’ advocated by Megatron in Transformers when I was a child in the 1980s: ‘Peace through tyranny’ was his motto!
The WHO has succeeded in turning the formerly free world into a nascent Red Chinese-style despotism and that’s called ‘peace’ is it? And Tedros unilaterally declaring a monkeypox emergency from a ‘tied’ vote that was 9-6 against is democracy, I guess.