The online safety bill, the government’s flagship internet regulation, returns to parliament on Monday, after a five-month delay prompted by Conservative party factional warfare threatened to kill it off.
The bill was postponed until after the summer recess in July in order to make room for Boris Johnson’s unusual decision to call a confidence vote in his own government, and its return has since been put back multiple times. An anticipated revival in late October was delayed to December, while this week’s return will not see the bill progress rapidly through parliament, the digital minister Paul Scully has said, as it will instead be sent back to committee stage for deeper scrutiny.
Originally proposed by Theresa May in the online harms white paper, the bill has survived four prime ministers and seven departmental secretaries to reach this point. In the process, it has changed substantially, from its original focus on harms including online abuse and harassment, through a switch to child protection concerns around suicide and self-harm in the wake of the death of teenager Molly Russell, to a “triple shield” for free speech in the latest version of the bill, which requires platforms to offer the right of appeal if posts are moderated.
The bill’s provisions on so-called legal but harmful speech became a focus of the Conservative party leadership contest, after Kemi Badenoch, now the trade secretary, called it a bill that attempted to ban “hurt feelings”. Legal but harmful content, officially called “priority harms” in the bill, are specific topics that platforms would be required to have a policy on, such as content promoting self-harm. If they fail to apply their stated policy, they could be subject to fines by Ofcom, which is due to become a “super regulator” for the internet.
As a result of criticism from MPs such as Badenoch, the reintroduction of the bill comes with a number of elements designed to soften objections on the grounds of free speech. One amendment would focus the legal but harmful limits only on child protection, while another abandons attempts to replace the old “malicious communications” offence with a new “harmful communications” one – in the process leaving in place a law that many have criticised as making it “illegal to be rude”.
“Given the bill’s stage of passage, it is not possible to make the majority of these changes at report stage, as the amendments relate to clauses that were debated on the first day of report,” Scully said in a written statement. “Therefore … the government intends to return a limited number of clauses to a public bill committee.”
Further delays to the bill would be disastrous. If not passed by April 2023, it would be dropped entirely, and the process would need to be started from scratch in a new parliament.
