Explainer-in-brief: Guess who’s back, back again – it’s the Online Safety Bill
The online safety bill is back in Parliament this month. Rishi Sunak has vowed to make substantial progress with it before Christmas. The nub of his plan is to scrap the “legal but harmful clause” on the basis that it might impinge on free speech. It was also the more contentious element of the laws.
Legal but harmful content is different than illegal content like terrorism-related or child-abuse material. It can be racist, misogynist content, or content inciting self-harm. Under previous plans, the social media platforms would have been in charge of individuating and removing this type of content.
This worried free speech campaigners who claimed the clause would lead platforms to censor more content than necessary. Sunak seems to have agreed with them.
The provision will be only scrapped for adults, however. There will still be extra protections in place for children’s content – which was the focus of the bill in the first place, according to the culture secretary.