Boris Johnson’s government will stop Silicon Valley chiefs being the “supreme arbiters” of freedom of speech online, culture secretary Nadine Dorries has claimed.
Lambasting the “unelected” leaders of US tech giants, Ms Dorries vowed that the online safety bill would help strip them of the power to decide who is “cancelled” and “silenced”.
“Unelected Silicon Valley execs have become some of the most powerful people in the world,” the cabinet minister wrote on ConservativeHome ahead of publication of a revised version of the bill on Thursday.
She added: “They decide who gets to speak online, and who is silenced or cancelled from public life. That prospect should concern anyone who truly cares about free speech.”
“We would never pursue legislation that threatens freedom of expression. Similarly, nor can we maintain the current status quo, where a handful of West Coast execs are the supreme arbiters of online speech.”
Ms Dorries said she did not agree with a “group of MPs and journalists” worried that the bill will give Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg and others greater power to censor online expression.
She claimed the bill’s attempt to bring in tougher regulation and crackdown on harmful content would not allow Silicon Valley bosses “to decide what is and isn’t acceptable to say online”.
Ms Dorries said: “We would never pursue legislation that threatens freedom of expression … nor can we maintain the current status quo, where a handful of west coast execs are the supreme arbiters of online speech.”
It comes as Politico reported that Ms Dorries used a meeting with software giant Microsoft to asked when they were going to get rid of algorithms, citing an official given an account of the meeting.
An official close to the culture secretary told the website the request may have been “lost in translation”. She and others have expressed concern about the way algorithms are used by tech platforms to feed dangerous biases.
Ms Dorries told ITV’s This Morning that algorithms which help decide what sort of content to show users based on their online habits would also come under more scrutiny.
“It’s the algorithms that cause the harm, so this Bill will compel those platforms to expose those algorithms to our regulator so they can pick up where the harm is happening and hold those platforms to account,” she said.
Ms Dorries also told ITV on Wednesday that she had been working to get the bill “into a place where it would actually make the internet the safest place in the world for our children in this country to go online”.
She claimed: “It is world-beating. It is world-leading. The rest of the world is watching to see what we do and we will be the first people ever to bring in regulations and legislations which will achieve that, and hold those who run these online platforms criminally liable and impose fines if they don’t agree to the legislation that we pass.”
The overall aim of the bill is to require online platforms to conform to a duty of care to their users and remove content that is illegal or considered harmful, with large fines and the prospect of sites being blocked among the potential penalties.
The bill has been strengthened with the addition of several new criminal offences to force social media firms to act on illegal content more quickly.
Ms Dorries confirmed last month that offences such as revenge porn, hate crime, fraud, the sale of illegal drugs or weapons, the promotion or facilitation of suicide, people smuggling and sexual exploitation have been added to the list of priority offences.
Cyberflashing will become a criminal offence, punishable by up to two years in jail, under new laws to be introduced in the online safety bill.
Three new criminal offences, recommended by the Law Commission, are also to be added to the Bill in an effort to make criminal law fit for the internet age, the government said.
The new offences cover communications that are sent to convey a threat of serious harm; those sent to cause harm without a reasonable excuse; and those sent which are known to be false with the intention to cause non-trivial emotional, psychological or physical harm.
The government has also said the bill would also enables the proposed regulator Ofcom to take faster enforcement action against firms that fail to remove harmful content.
