We need to call time on the Wild West online, said the MP who’s the chair of the Joint Committee on the draft Online Safety Bill. He is Damian Collins, the MP for Folkestone. He said: “The Committee were unanimous in their conclusion that we need to call time on the Wild West online. What’s illegal offline should be regulated online. For too long, big tech has gotten away with being the land of the lawless. A lack of regulation online has left too many people vulnerable to abuse, fraud, violence and in some cases even loss of life.
“The Committee has set out recommendations to bring more offences clearly within the scope of the Online Safety Bill, give Ofcom the power in law to set minimum safety standards for the services they will regulate, and to take enforcement action against companies if they don’t comply.
“The era of self-regulation for big tech has come to an end. The companies are clearly responsible for services they have designed and profit from, and need to be held to account for the decisions they make.”
See also his article in The Times of December 14. Committee MPs and peers heard from victims of online harms (Molly Russell’s father, the England and Manchester United footballer Rio Ferdinand, the TV money adviser Martin Lewis) Nobel prize-winning journalist (Maria Ressa) academics and experts, the big tech companies, the communications regulator Ofcom, Facebook whistle-blowers Frances Haugen and Sophie Zhang, and the new Secretary of State for Digital, Culture Media and Sport, Nadine Dorries; and received written evidence.
The Committee argued the Bill should be clearer about what is specifically illegal online; and it should not be up to the tech companies to determine this. For example, cyberflashing should be made illegal.
Among the Committee’s calls: Ofcom should set the standards by which big tech will be held accountable and their powers to investigate, audit and fine the companies should be increased; Ofcom should draw up mandatory Codes of Practice for internet service providers and a Code of Conduct on such areas as child exploitation and terrorism. The service providers should have to conduct internal risk assessments to record reasonable foreseeable threats to user safety, including the potential harmful impact of algorithms, not just content. A new regulatory regime must contain protections for freedom of expression, including an automatic exemption for recognised news publishers, and acknowledge that journalism and public interest speech are fundamental to democracy. Service providers should be required to create an Online Safety Policy for users to agree with, similar to their terms of conditions of service.
Also covered were scams and online fraud, extreme porn, racist abuse, self-harm, deepfakes, misogyny, incitement to riot, protecting election candidates and religious discrimination. For the committee’s report visit https://publications.parliament.uk/.
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For Labour, Lucy Powell MP, Shadow Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, complained that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s failure to bring forward the Online Harms Bill by Christmas was ‘yet another broken promise’. She said: “The Joint Committee’s report is welcome and will help improve how the internet is governed.
“Social media companies have for too long gotten away with facilitating harmful content online. Current regulation is from the analogue age and lags far, far behind the digital age in which most of us all now live. The Government must now urgently act to strengthen its proposals and bring them to Parliament to prevent more and more people becoming victims online.”
At the counter-fraud trade association of banks, insurers and others, Chief Executive Mike Haley, pictured, urged the Government to adopt the recommendations to meet the Bill’s key objective of making the UK a safer place to be online.
He said: ‘Cifas welcomes the recommendation for the inclusion of paid-for ads in the Online Safety Bill as this is an important step in making the UK a safer place to be online. Fraud in the UK has reached epidemic levels and poses a threat to national security. The inclusion of paid-for adverts in addition to user-generated fraud places the responsibility upon online platforms to stem this tide and take actions to curb this threat.’
And at the consumer rights campaign group Which? Rocio Concha, Director of Policy and Advocacy, said: “It is absolutely right that the committee has recommended that the Online Safety Bill tackles fraudulent paid-for advertising. It has acted on the overwhelming evidence it’s received of the devastating financial and emotional impact on innocent scam victims, when online platforms with some of the most sophisticated technology in the world fail to protect them.
“It’s positive that the committee has recommended that online platforms will need to prevent fraudulent paid-for adverts appearing in the first place, as opposed to just adopting reactive measures.
“If the government is serious about cracking down on the epidemic of fraud, it must act on these recommendations and use the Online Safety Bill to finally require online platforms to take responsibility and prevent fraudulent paid-for adverts appearing on their sites.”
