The UK Online Safety Bill Attacks Free Speech and Encryption
Subjective Standards for Censorship
"If the Online Safety Bill passes, the UK government will be able to directly silence user speech, and even imprison those who publish messages that it doesn’t like. The bill empowers the UK’s Office of Communications (OFCOM) to levy heavy fines or even block access to sites that offend people. We said last year that those powers raise serious concerns about freedom of expression. Since then, the bill has been amended, and it’s gotten worse.
Section 10 of the revised bill even authorizes jail time—up to two years—for anyone whose social media message could cause “psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress.” The message doesn’t even have to cause harm. If the authorities believe that the the offender intended to cause harm, and that there was a substantial risk of harm, that’s enough for a prosecution. There’s also a separate crime of transmitting “false communications,” punishable by fines or up to 51 weeks of imprisonment.
The problem here should be obvious: these are utterly subjective criteria. People disagree all the time about what constitutes a false statement. Determining what statements have a “real and substantial risk” of causing psychological harm is the epitome of a subjective question, as is who might have a “reasonable excuse” for making such a statement. The apparent lack of legal certainty casts doubt on whether the UK's Online Safety Act meets international human rights standards.
The few exceptions in the section appear to be grants to large media concerns. For instance, recognized news publishers are exempt from the section on communications offenses. So is anyone “showing a film made for cinema to members of the public.”
The exceptions are telling. The UK’s new proposed censors at OFCOM are making it clear they’ll never enforce against corporate media concerns; it’s only small media creators, activists, citizen journalists, and everyday users who will be subject to the extra scrutiny and accompanying punishments."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/....2022/08/uks-online-s
