In response to the Government’s Online Harms White Paper published today, Dr David Haynes, a Visiting Lecturer and Royal Academy of Engineering Fellow in City, University of London’s Department of Library & Information Science, says the following:
Putting responsibility for content on platform providers shifts the emphasis away from the perpetuators of crimes and creates a whole new layer of unnecessary regulation. Just as telephone companies are not made liable for the nature of the conversations that are carried over their lines, it is unrealistic and unreasonable to expect social network platforms to police the content on their platforms. It is even more problematical to attempt to regulate content itself, as the results are either mechanistic or ineffectual and can directly harm the interests of medical support groups for instance (anyone remember the banning of the word ‘breast’ from some platforms?). There is already extensive legislation against libel, human trafficking, sexual exploitation of vulnerable individuals and conspiracy to commit terrorist acts. It would be far better to use these existing laws than to create a special, parallel ‘online’ law.
Our research indicates that even a well-educated, information-aware individual can be largely ignorant of the principal risks associated with online transactions, especially when it comes to disclosing personal data. A consistent approach would be to beef up the operations of existing regulators and improve the coordination of enforcement activity rather than setting up a new agency. Obvious candidates for this coordinating role would be the Office of the Information Commissioner and Ofcom.
Monitoring online content with a view to enforcement is straying in to the territory of censorship. For example, it would be difficult to decide when hateful speech turns into incitement to criminal acts. Such a regulation could all too easily be misapplied by an authoritarian regime that wants to stifle or control public debate. It would be better to have a reporting system in place backed up with a publicity campaign to make individuals aware of their online rights and who to contact if they have a concern about the nature of the online content that they have come across.