UK Parliament Watch

The Online Safety Bill received Royal Assenton 26th October 2023, heralding a new era of internet censorship.

The new UK internet Ofcom was quick off the mark to outline its timetable for implementing the new censorship regime.

Ofcom has set out our plans for putting online safety laws into practice, and what we expect from tech firms, now that the Online Safety Act has passed. Ofcom writes:

The Act makes companies that operate a wide range of online services legally responsible for keeping people, especially children, safe online. These companies have new duties to protect UK users by assessing risks of harm, and taking steps to address them. All in-scope services with a significant number of UK users, or targeting the UK market, are covered by the new rules, regardless of where they are based.

While the onus is on companies to decide what safety measures they need given the risks they face, we expect implementation of the Act to ensure people in the UK are safer online by delivering four outcomes:

• stronger safety governance in online firms;

• online services designed and operated with safety in mind;

• choice for users so they can have meaningful control over their online experiences; and

• transparency regarding the safety measures services use, and the action Ofcom is taking to improve them, in order to build trust .

We are moving quickly to implement the new rules

Ofcom will give guidance and set out codes of practice on how in-scope companies can comply with their duties, in three phases, as set out in the Act.

Phase one: illegal harms duties

We will publish draft codes and guidance on these duties on 9 November 2023, including:

• analysis of the causes and impacts of online harm, to support services in carrying out their risk assessments;

• draft guidance on a recommended process for assessing risk;

• draft codes of practice, setting out what services can do to mitigate the risk of harm; and

• draft guidelines on Ofcom's approach to enforcement.

We will consult on these documents, and plan to publish a statement on our final decisions in Autumn 2024. The codes of practices will then be submitted to the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, and subject to their approval, laid before Parliament.

Phase two: child safety, pornography and the protection of women and girls

Child protection duties will be set out in two parts. First, online pornography services and other interested stakeholders will be able to read and respond to our draft guidance on age assurance from December 2023. This will be relevant to all services in scope of Part 5 of the Online Safety Act.

Secondly, regulated services and other interested stakeholders will be able to read and respond to draft codes of practice relating to protection of children, in Spring 2024.

Alongside this, we expect to consult on:

• analysis of the causes and impacts of online harm to children; and

• draft risk assessment guidance focusing on children's harms.

We expect to publish draft guidance on protecting women and girls by Spring 2025, when we will have finalised our codes of practice on protection of children.

Phase three: transparency, user empowerment, and other duties on categorised services

A small proportion of regulated services will be designated Category 1, 2A or 2B services if they meet certain thresholds set out in secondary legislation to be made by Government. Our final stage of implementation focuses on additional requirements that fall only on these categorised services. Those requirements include duties to:

• produce transparency reports;

• provide user empowerment tools;

• operate in line with terms of service;

• protect certain types of journalistic content; and

• prevent fraudulent advertising.

We now plan to issue a call for evidence regarding our approach to these duties in early 2024 and a consultation on draft transparency guidance in mid 2024.

Ofcom must produce a register of categorised services. We will advise Government on the thresholds for these categories in early 2024, and Government will then make secondary legislation on categorisation, which we currently expect to happen by summer 2024. Assuming this is achieved, we will:

• publish the register of categorised services by the end of 2024;

• publish draft proposals regarding the additional duties on these services in early 2025; and

• issue transparency notices in mid 2025.

The UK's disgraceful Online Safety Bill has passed through Parliament and will soon become law. The wide-ranging legislation, which is likely to affect every internet user in the UK and any service they access, and generate mountains of onerous red tape for any internet business stupid enough to be based in Britain. Potential impacts are still unclear and some of the new regulations are technologically impossible to comply with.

A key sticking point is what the legislation means for end-to-end encryption, a security technique used by services like WhatsApp that mathematically guarantees that no one, not even the service provider, can read messages sent between two users. The new law gives regulator Ofcom the power to intercept and check this encrypted data for illegal or harmful content.

Using this power would require service providers to create a backdoor in their software, allowing Ofcom to bypass the mathematically secure encryption. But this same backdoor would be abused by hackers, thieves, scammers and malicious states to snoop, steal and hack.

Beyond encryption, the bill also brings in mandatory age checks on pornography websites and requires that websites have policies in place to protect people from harmful or illegal content. What counts as illegal and exactly which websites will fall under the scope of the bill is unclear, however.

Neil Brown at law firm decoded.legal says Ofcom still has a huge amount of work to do. The new law could plausibly affect any company that allows comments on its website, publishes user-generated content, transmits encrypted data or hosts anything that the government deems may be harmful to children, says Brown:

What I'm fearful of is that there are going to be an awful lot of people, small organisations - not these big tech giants -- who are going to face pretty chunky legal bills trying to work out if they are in scope and, if so, what they need to do.

The grandly named All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation (APPG-CSE) is a just a group of anti-porn MPs. It is not an official parliamentary committee tasked with monitoring policy on behalf of parliament.

Of course it does try present itself as something more important than it really is by referring to people its listens to as 'witnesses' in 'evidence' sessions and publishing its biased opinions as 'reports. Of course it never listens to any opposing views from sex workers, film makers, or of course from people who enjoy sex entertainment.

Anyway it has just published a moralist diatribe against porn titled: Pornography Regulation: The case for Parliamentary Reform

Predictably its observations and recommendations are simply to destroy the entire adult pornography business. The campaigners write:

On 27 February 2023, the APPG on Commercial Sexual Exploitation launched the findings of its Inquiry on Pornography. The report, Pornography Regulation: The case for Parliamentary Reform, concludes that the epidemic of male violence against women and girls cannot be ended unless the Government confronts the role pornography plays in fuelling sexual violence.

The report highlights the scale and nature of contemporary online pornography, finding that the user base of pornography is highly gendered, with significantly more men watching pornography than women. Violence against women is prolific in mainstream pornography, and illegal content -- including videos of child sexual exploitation, rape and sex trafficking victims -- is freely accessible on mainstream pornography websites.

The report evidences a multiplicity of harms connected with the pornography industry. Pornography is found to fuel sexual violence and social and political harms against women and girls, as well as perpetuating racist stereotypes. Children continue to be exposed to online pornography on an alarming scale, which is an egregious violation of child safeguarding. Meanwhile, sexual coercion is found to be inherent to the commercial production of pornography, with producers commonly adopting exploitative and abusive tactics to coerce women into being filmed for pornography videos.

The inquiry concludes that existing legislation relating to pornography is piecemeal and wholly inadequate with respect to preventing and providing redress for harms perpetuated as part of the trade.

As a result of its inquiry, the APPG on Commercial Sexual Exploitation has made the following recommendations to Government:

• Make the regulation of pornography consistent across different online platforms, and between the online and offline spheres.

• Criminalise the supply of pornography online to children, and legally require age verification for accessing pornography online.

• Address pornography as commercial sexual exploitation, and a form of violence against women, in legislation and policy.

• Legally require online platforms to verify that every individual featured in pornographic content on their platform is an adult and gave permission for the content to be published there.

• Give individuals who feature in pornographic material the legal right to withdraw their consent to material in which they feature being published and/or distributed.

• Hold exploiters to account by making it a criminal offence to enable or profit from the commercial sexual exploitation of others.

• Conduct a comprehensive review of laws on pornography and obscenity.

 

Offsite Comment: Moral Coercion And Twisted Facts From The UK Parliament's Censorial Fanatics

5th March 2023. See article from reprobatepress.com

Johnson's group took evidence during their from the usual suspects -- not just NCOSE but also Gail Dines, the anti-porn academic writer who is like Andrea Dworkin without the writing ability, and Laila Mickelwait, head of anti-sex work Christian lobbyists Exodus Cry. They did not, you'll be unsurprised to hear, take any evidence from current sex workers or anyone else who might contradict their pre-existing beliefs -- because let's face it, anyone who is part of a group looking at commercial sexual exploitation led by a notorious anti-porn politician is not exactly going in with an open mind.

See full article from reprobatepress.com