Now, even before the Act has been fully implemented, the committee is reopening a debate on legislating against “harmful but legal” content.
Earlier drafts of the Online Safety Act imposed a duty on platforms to tackle material deemed “legal but harmful” to adults, but these provisions were stripped out of the bill under the previous Conservative government amid concerns about freedom of speech, to the dismay of online safety campaigners.
Committee chair and Labour MP Chi Onwurah insisted that the report’s call for the government to essentially return to the drawing board doesn’t mean reopening the same can of worms on online safety versus freedom of expression.
“We have seen on the streets of Sunderland and Hartlepool and Southport the physical realization of the consequences of online misinformation, and I think that has truly concentrated the issue in people’s minds,” she told POLITICO in an interview.
The Act barely deals with misleading content, yet “ministers were reaching for [it] and saying it would address the terrible scenes we saw on the streets of this country over [last] summer,” Onwurah said, a case of “expecting something from Ofcom it wasn’t going to deliver.”
The media regulator conceded in April that even the new False Communications Offence introduced by the Act “will not be easy for a company to identify,” and many legal experts have said the threshold is too high for charges to be successfully brought.
