LONDON — U.K.’s much delayed Online Safety Bill appears to be heading to implementation after last minute negotiations at the House of Lords, in spite of vocal criticisms by virtually all digital rights and free speech organizations and advocates.
Leading digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published an extensive analysis of the bill, written by Jason Kelley and Monica Horten, warning that the legislation “will mandate dangerous age verification for much of the web.”
As free speech advocates have pointed during the protracted, years-long process leading to its current version, the Conservative government’s Online Safety Bill will effectively censor and officially classify adult content according to whatever standards the politicians that happen to be in power in the U.K. at any given time will deem “harmful” or “pornographic.”
Though termed a “constitutional monarchy,” the U.K. has no written constitution and no equivalents to the U.S. Bill of Rights, First Amendment or codified Section 230 protections.
The Online Safety Bill currently being finalized by the unelected, aristocratic membership of the House of Lords, the EFF analysis explains, defines two types of sites which it will target: “web services that solely exist to publish and sell access to pornographic content, and user-to-user services which allow users to post their own content.”
The latter “may carry limited amounts of pornographic or ‘harmful’ content — because user-generated content is impossible to moderate at scale — but clearly that is not their primary purpose.” Social media platforms and other sites that contain user-generated content “will have to assess the risk of children using their service, and the risk of content defined as harmful to children being on their site. They will have to block children from being able to access content defined as harmful. This includes pornography, but the full list encompasses a much wider range of content”
Whatever the U.K. government considers a “pornographic website,” however, will be mandated to prevent anyone under 18 years old from accessing its content
“Pornography websites that have U.K. users, or target U.K. users,” the EFF explains, “will be required to use age verification to ensure that children are not able to encounter their content. Age verification is, essentially, identity verification, which makes it effectively impossible to browse pornographic sites anonymously, and creates the risk of data breaches and the potential for data to be collected and potentially shared or sold. Data protection laws apply, although little guidance exists in the Bill about compliance.”
A Much-Delayed Bill to Placate Anti-Porn Crusaders
As XBIZ has been reporting, the Tory government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was pressured this year by a campaign by hardline conservatives in his own party to address adult content online through the Online Safety Bill.
After years of delays, the Sunak government made the controversial bill a priority, seeking to hand a victory to social conservatives, religious crusaders and SWERF activists. Those groups have been conducting a moral panic campaign around “harmful content” — which for many of them includes all porn — through the U.K. media, marketing the bill as a “save the women and children” measure while disregarding or minimizing privacy and technical issues.
In July, Sunak also ordered a review of all legislation relating to pornography, online and off, to ensure that it is “fit for purpose.” Tory Technology Minister Paul Scully told The Telegraph that the Prime Minster’s Pornography Review ‘will look closely at the laws and regulations relating to offline and online content, informing our next steps” after passing the Online Safety Bill, which leaves the definition of what is “harmful” to the current Conservative-majority U.K. Parliament.
The details of the bill’s implementation, however, “have been left to the UK’s regulation agency, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), but the Bill is vague on the details of this,” the EFF reports. “Social media and other sites, where users regularly engage with each other’s content, will have to determine the risk of minors using their site, and block their access to any content that the government has described as ‘harmful’. Platforms like Facebook and TikTok, and even community-based sites like Wikipedia, will have to choose between conducting age checks on all users – a potentially expensive, and privacy-invasive process – or sanitizing their entire sites.”
The bill, the EFF concludes, will “lead to a less open, less functional, and less free Internet. Platforms will face criminal penalties for failing to comply and may choose to block young people — including those as old as seventeen — entirely. They may filter and moderate enormous amounts of content to allow young people on the site without age verification. They may filter and moderate enormous amounts of content for young people only, while allowing age-verified users access to all content. Or, they could exclude UK users entirely, rather than risk liability and the cost of expensive and untried age estimation systems and content moderation.”
Tech trade group NetChoice sued Arkansas’ Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin over the state’s Act 689, which bans minors from using social media platforms without proof of parental consent, “with a number of confusing exceptions,” Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported.
The decision by Judge Timothy L. Brooks coincided with a similar injunction against Texas’ anti-porn age verification and mandatory labeling law, also scheduled to be enacted today.
As XBIZ reported, a Texas court granted on Thursday a preliminary injunction to Free Speech Coalition (FSC) and its co-plaintiffs, blocking the Texas Attorney General from enforcing HB1181 while the case is litigated
Chris Marchese, director of the NetChoice litigation center, commented, “We’re pleased the court sided with the First Amendment and stopped Arkansas’ unconstitutional law from censoring free speech online and undermining the privacy of Arkansans, their families and their businesses as our case proceeds. We look forward to seeing the law struck down permanently.”
Nolan Brown explained that, “as with all such age verification laws, the Arkansas measure would invade the privacy of all social media users — including adults — who would be forced to turn over official IDs in order to speak or access information online. It would also infringe on the rights of minors to share and access constitutionally protected speech.”
Judge Brooks wrote in his decision that Act 689 was “unconstitutionally vague because it fails to adequately define which entities are subject to its requirements.”
More Brits Weighing in to Curtail U.S. Free Speech
In yet another instance of U.S. anti-porn politicians importing British subjects to share their opinions on American Free Speech issues, the Arkansas government calledU.K. age verification proponent Tony Allen to testify in support of Act 689.
Though termed a “constitutional monarchy,” the U.K. has no written constitution and no equivalents to the U.S. Bill of Rights, First Amendment or codified Section 230 protections. Another sweeping “child protection” internet legislation, California’s controversial AB 2273, the so-called “Age-Appropriate Design Code Act,” was drafted and lobbied for by British noblewoman and filmmaker, the Baroness Beeban Kidron.
Weighing in on the Arkansas act, Allen attempted to convince the judge of the merits of U.K.’s controversial and long-term stalled Online Safety Bill, which the court was told “is expected to pass the Houses of Parliament sometime next month.”
Allen explained that the U.K. bill, unlike the Arkansas act, mandates that “age verification requirements will be triggered by particular content, called ‘primary priority content,’ which the U.K. has determined is damaging or harmful to minors.”
Examples of the UK’s “primary priority content,” he continued, include “adult pornography and information about suicide, self-harm and dieting.”
After confusingly comparing the internet and platforms to “a mall,” Allen testified that “in the U.K., online parental consent [will be] only required when a minor seeks to perform some action online that the law forbids, such as enter into a contract for the sale or purchase of goods. By contrast, Act 689 will require social media companies to obtain ‘express consent of a parent or legal guardian’ much more frequently — whenever an Arkansas minor seeks to open a social media account — and to use procedures reliable enough to ensure that these companies avoid incurring civil and criminal penalties.”
Implementing these procedures, Allen warned, will not be easy. “I think the biggest challenge you have with parental consent is actually establishing the relationship, the parental relationship. It’s easy to say that this person who is giving the consent is, let’s say, in their 40s, versus the person that’s asking for the consent being under 18. But actually establishing that that is a parent or a legal guardian, that’s the challenge with those processes.”
