Bill’s focus on legal but harmful online content ‘deeply worrying’

THE Online Safety Bill should ditch attempts to regulate “legal but harmful” content to avoid a backlash over free speech, says one of the architects of duty of care laws.

Baroness Kidron, who masterminded the code to protect children online, said the term “legal but harmful” was “deeply worrying” and government attempts to regulate such material were a mistake as there are already laws covering sexual equality, misogyny and discrimination.

The plans sparked a backlash against the Bill from Tory MPs and peers who fear free speech may be curbed as social media firms could censor content over “woke” prejudices or algorithms.

Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have committed to reviewing the Bill’s approach to legal but harmful content after the final Commons stages of the law were delayed until after the summer recess.

Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Baroness Kidron, who sat on the committee that scrutinised the Bill, said the cognizance of the need for laws to protect children online had “grown across time”, but that she understood free speech concerns and the need to ensure we don’t “put more power in the hands of the tech companies”.

She said none of those concerned about free speech were saying children did not need protection or that “these huge businesses shouldn’t be transparent and accountable for their systems”.

But she added: “I am hugely disappointed that the Government did not respond more cleverly and more fully to the work of the pre-legislative committee because the whole phrase legal but harmful is just deeply worrying.”

She added: “Creating some sort of new soft law didn’t seem to us necessary and we had a different route.”

This, she said, was to take advantage of laws and rights-based approaches already in place in the UK to protect people from racial abuse, misogyny and discrimination online.

Baroness Kidron felt a mistake had been to talk about the Bill as if it was regulating content. She said: “A lot of clarity could be brought to the Bill by expressing that the risk assessment process is to make sure companies are not deliberately amplifying anger and are not enabling young black footballers to be humiliated and abused.”

She added that whatever criticism she levelled at the Bill, it was needed to protect children from the vested commercial interests of the tech giants.