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Crucially, the law avoids falling into the trap of censorship because it doesn’t ask tech platforms to actually remove harmful content, but to be more transparent about its side effects.
Yet the UK bill has become more controversial than it needs to be. A Conservative politician recently said he was “legislating to hurt feelings.” In fact, it forces social media companies to be more open about the risks of harm caused by their services, with the kind of internal Facebook research that whistleblower Francis Hodgen made public last year.
The bill essentially forces major social media companies to share the results of their risk assessments with the UK’s telecommunications regulator Ofcom, which has recruited hundreds of new employees with online skills to prepare to take on social media companies. Ofcom will then analyze the results, which will then be summarized and published on the platform’s terms of service pages.
The idea is to give adults a better understanding of how likely they are to be exposed to toxic materials and give them more control over what they see. According to a summary of a recent revision of the bill by Lorna Woods, professor of internet law at the University of Essex, the law would force tech companies to provide tools to control how much potentially harmful content adult users stumble upon. Among the first writers of law.
The rules are stricter for children and platforms have to reduce the amount of potentially harmful content shown to them by default. A recent update to the bill saw the government take that a step further: anyone who encourages a child to harm themselves or kill themselves will face criminal charges under the new law. That should not stop young people and adults from discussing self-harm issues in online forums in good faith, which can be valuable for sufferers.
It’s a complicated, gray area to legislate, but the UK has done its homework. The country’s Law Commission — a statutory independent body that reviews laws and recommends amendments where necessary — has laid the groundwork for making the Online Safety Bill workable for self-harm, last year setting relatively high thresholds for what constitutes self-promotion. was harm or suicide.
The Conservative government aims to make Britain the safest place in the world to go online. But he has watered down some aspects of the bill in the past week, particularly to reduce pressure on platforms to protect adults. For example, encouraging someone to self-harm ceases to be a criminal offense when the person is over 18 years of age. This worries some mental health charities such as The Samaritans, which runs a phone line in the UK for people struggling with suicidal thoughts.
But the bill still goes further than anything on the legislative docket in the US, and may yet roll out against the European Union’s own online content laws. And if there is a need to add protections for adult Internet users, British lawmakers can always strengthen their laws in the future.
Two hurdles will be how Britain wants the platform to determine whether its users are under 18, a process known as age-verification. Most social platforms already have a good idea of how old their users are, based on what they like and post, but enacting other authentication methods like biometric face scanning could prove controversial.
Another passes the law at all. The bill has already survived four prime ministers and factional warfare within the Conservative Party, which almost killed it entirely. Legislators should ensure that the law sees the light of day. Facebook whistleblower Hodgen revealed the alarming extent of damage to teen girls and Instagram, and Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover looks set to unleash a flood of hate speech as it removes the platform’s moderators. Social media needs UK law now more than ever.
More from Bloomberg Opinion:
• Europe’s worst energy crisis is not over: Javier Blas
• Musk’s Twitter won’t die. See Telegram: Parmi Olson
• UK playing politics with rental market: Stuart Trow
This column does not reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Parmi Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is the author of “We Are Anonymous.”
More stories like this one are available at bloomberg.com/opinion
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