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On-Line Safety Bill Is Full Of Loop Holes And Fails To Protect Say MPs

Age Verification Checks Not Included!

Concerned MPs have warned that the Government's much awaited Safety legislation designed to protect people from sexual predators and personal attacks via the practice of trolling and baiting via social media content; is not fit for purpose.

As per usual, this Tory Government's hype whenever it introduces new policy and new legislation, does not match the reality of its self congratulatory claims of being 'world beating', this or that!.

The BBCNews Website reports that MPs have said that 'The draft online safety bill would not stop the sharing of "insidious" images of child abuse and violence against women and girls.' This despite the Government's claim that this legislation will make the UK the safest place to be on-line!

Further, on-line safety campaigners concerned about children accessing pornography via smart phones and laptops and PCs in their bedrooms were astonished and appalled that the government's draft Online Safety Bill does not contain long-promised age verification checks for pornography.

John Carr, Secretary of the Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety was quoted by the B BC News article as saying: "I was completely astonished when I saw the bill," said . Pornhub, xHamster, all of the big commercial pornography sites - the largest single source of pornography in the world - are outside the scope of the bill or could easily put themselves outside of the scope of the bill."

The BBC News article continues:

They could do so by easily removing all user-uploaded content, he said - as Pornhub recently did within days of an investigation being launched into its user-generated content. "They could do that and it would not affect their core business model in any way, shape or form," Mr Carr said.

Proposals to make all UK pornography users confirm their age before accessing explicit content was first mooted in 2016. It was made law in the 2017 Digital Economy Act - but that was never brought into force after repeated delays, and fears it would not work. It was officially dropped in 2019, but the government pledged "other measures" would achieve the same results.

Julian Knight, the Conservative chair of the committee, commenting on the overall draft Bill said: "In its current form what should be world-leading, landmark legislation instead represents a missed opportunity." the website article reports.

The unimaginable usual stance by Government's is to use fines as a way of modifying company behaviour, but this will merely make social media companies to blandly wipe out a whole range of content, not necessarily falling foul of new rules and allow some nasty stuff to still remain.

"The Online Safety Bill neither protects freedom of expression nor is it clear nor robust enough to tackle illegal and harmful online content. Urgency is required to ensure that some of the most pernicious forms of child sexual abuse do not evade detection because of a failure in the online safety law." Julian Knight told the BBC.

Those MPs concerned that the Bill does not deal with the real problems argue that the government should change the bill to ensure Ofcom had powers to assess whether online platforms were sufficiently considering the right to freedom of expression in their decision making. They raised concerns that a focus on threatening companies with fines could lead to "excessive takedowns" of content.

The first draft of the On-Line Safety Bill, published in May 2021, put a "duty of care" on large social media websites to remove harmful or illegal content and protect children, whilst leaving it up to the tech giants to police themselves. Ofcom will 'oversee' this.

You can watch the evidence meeting of the The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee below:

 

But the parliamentary report published earlier this week (24th Jan) calls for Ofcom to be able to set more explicit standards, and be given greater powers to investigate and fine social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.

It also wants the age verification requirement to be put back into the legislation and for it to cover more than just covering online platforms where children are more likely to find pornography by chance.

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee's report published 24th January 2022, can be downloaded from the E-Library using search word 'pornography' and can be found in the 'Government Reports' category of the library.

Source: UK Parliament / BBC News Website

 

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