UK wants to squeeze freedom of reach to take on internet trolls

The UK government has announced (yet) more additions to its expansive and controversial plan to regulate online content — aka the Online Safety Bill.

It says the latest package of measures to be added to the draft are intended to protect web users from anonymous trolling.

The Bill has far broader aims as a whole, comprising a sweeping content moderation regime targeted at explicitly illegal content but also ‘legal but harmful’ stuff — with a claimed focused of protecting children from a range of online harms, from cyberbullying and pro-suicide content to exposure to pornography.

Critics, meanwhile, say the legislation will kill free speech and isolate the UK, creating splinternet Britain, while also piling major legal risk and cost on doing digital business in the UK. (Unless you happen to be part of the club of ‘safety tech’ firms offering to sell services to help platforms with their compliance of course.)

In recent months, two parliamentary committees have scrutinized the draft legislation. One called for a sharper focus on illegal content, while another warned the government’s approach is both a risk to online expression and unlikely to be robust enough to address safety concerns — so it’s fair to say that ministers are under pressure to make revisions.

Hence the bill continues to the shape-shift or, well, grow in scope.

Other recent (substantial) additions to the draft include a requirement for adult content websites to use age verification technologies; and a massive expansion of the liability regime, with a wider list of criminal content being added to the face of the bill.

The latest changes, which the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) says will only apply to the biggest tech companies, mean platforms will be required to provide users with tools to limit how much (potentially) harmful but technically legal content they could be exposed to.

Campaigners on online safety frequently link the spread of targeted abuse like racist hate speech or cyberbullying to account anonymity, although it’s less clear what evidence they’re drawing on — beyond anecdotal reports of individual anonymous accounts being abusive.

Yet it’s similarly easy to find examples of abusive content being dished out by named and verified accounts. Not least the sharp-tongued secretary of state for digital herself, Nadine Dorries, whose tweets lashing an LBC journalist recently led to this awkward gotcha moment at a parliamentary committee hearing.

Point is: Single examples — however high profile — don’t really tell you very much about systemic problems.

Meanwhile, a recent ruling by the European Court of Human Rights — which the UK remains bound by — reaffirmed the importance of anonymity online as a vehicle for “the free flow of opinions, ideas and information”, with the court clearly demonstrating a view that anonymity is a key component of freedom of expression.

Very clearly, then, UK legislators need to tread carefully if government claims for the legislation transforming the UK into ‘the safest place to go online’ — while simultaneously protecting free speech — are not to end up shredded.

Given internet trolling is a systemic problem which is especially problematic on certain high-reach, mainstream, ad-funded platforms, where really vile stuff can be massively amplified, it might be more instructive for lawmakers to consider the financial incentives linked to which content spreads — expressed through ‘data-driven’ content-ranking/surfacing algorithms (such as Facebook’s use of polarizing “engagement-based ranking”, as called out by whistleblower Frances Haugen).

However the UK’s approach to tackling online trolling takes a different tack.

The government is focusing on forcing platforms to provide users with options to limit their own exposure — despite DCMS also recognizing the abusive role of algorithms in amplifying harmful content (its press release points out that “much” content that’s expressly forbidden in social networks’ T&Cs is “too often” allowed to stay up and “actively promoted to people via algorithms”; and Dorries herself slams “rogue algorithms”).

Ministers’ chosen fix for problematic algorithmic amplification is not to press for enforcement of the UK’s existing data protection regime against people-profiling adtech — something privacy and digital rights campaigners have been calling for for literally years — which could certainly limit how intrusively (and potentially abusively) individual users could be targeted by data-driven platforms.

Rather the government wants people to hand over more of their personal data to these (typically) adtech platform giants in order that they can create new tools to help users protect themselves! (Also relevant: The government is simultaneously eyeing reducing the level of domestic privacy protections for Brits as one its ‘Brexit opportunities’… so, er… Read More