My Lords, the Secretary of State, Michelle Donelan, has acknowledged that protecting children is the very reason that this Bill exists. If only the Government had confined themselves to that crucial task. Instead, I worry that the Bill has ballooned and still could be a major threat to free expression of adults. I agreed with much of what the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, just spoke about.
Like some other noble Lords here, I am delighted that the Government have dropped the censorious “legal but harmful” clauses. It was disappointing to hear Labour MPs in the other place keen to see them restored. In this place, I have admired opposition resistance to assaults on civil liberties in, for example, the Public Order Bill. Perhaps I can appeal for consistency to be just as zealous on free speech as a foundational civil liberty. I urge those pushing versions of censoring “legal but harmful” for adults to think again.
The Government’s counter to many freedom of expression concerns is that free speech is protected in various clauses, but stating that service providers must have regard to the importance of protecting users’ rights of freedom of speech is incredibly weak and woolly, giving a second-class status whencontrasted with the operational safety duties that compel companies to remove material. Instead, we need a single comprehensive and robust statutory duty in favour of freedom of expression that requires providers to ensure that free speech is not infringed on by measures taken to comply with other duties. Also, free speech should be listed as a relevant duty for which Ofcom has to develop a code of practice.
The Bill requires providers to include safety provisions for content in their terms of service. However, no similar requirement for free speech exists. It seems ironic that a Bill that claims to be clipping the power of big tech could actually empower companies to police and censor legal material in the name of safety, via the commercial route of terms and conditions.
The Government brush off worries that big tech is being encouraged to limit what UK citizens say or read online by glibly asserting that these are private companies and that they must be free to develop their own terms of service. Surely that is disingenuous. The whole purpose of the legislation is to interfere in private companies, compelling them to adhere to duties or face huge penalties. If the Government do not trust big tech with users’ safety, why do they trust them with UK citizens’ free speech rights? Similarly, consider the user empowerment duties. If users ask that certain specified types of legal content are blocked or filtered out, such as hate or abuse, it is big tech that has the power to decide what is categorised under those headings.
Only last year, amendments put forward in this House on placing convicted sex-offending trans prisoners on the female estate were labelled online as hate-fuelled, transphobic abuse. However, with the ability to hear all sides of the debate online, and especially in the light of recent events in Scotland around the Gender Recognition Act, more and more people realise that such views are not hate but driven by concerns about safeguarding women’s rights. Would such a debate be filtered out online by overcautious labelling by big tech and the safety duties in its Ts and Cs?
Finally, like others, I am worried that the Secretary of State is given too much power—for example, to shape Ofcom’s codes of practice, which is a potential route for political interference. My concerns are fuelled by recent revelations. In the US, Elon Musk’s leaked Twitter files prove that, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign routinely flagged up tweets and accounts that it wanted removed, influencing the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop exposé. Here in the UK, only this week, a shocking Big Brother Watch report reveals that military operatives reported on online dissenting views on official Covid lockdown policies to No. 10 and the DCMS’s counter-disinformation unit, allowing Whitehall’s hotlines to giant media companies to suppress this legal content. Even the phrase “illegal” in the Bill can be politically weaponised, such as with the proposal to censor content allegedly promoting small boat crossings.
Free speech matters to democracy, and huge swathes of this Bill could threaten both unless we amend it appropriately.
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