On Wednesday 20 July, PICTFOR hosted their fifth event of the year, focusing on the Online Safety Bill and asking ‘What comes next?’
The roundtable featured insights from Member of the Online Safety Bill Committee, Kirsty Blackman MP, Legal and Policy Officer at Big Brother Watch, Mark Johnson, the Shadow Minister for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Alex Davies-Jones MP, Political Organiser at Hope Not Hate, Liron Velleman and Member of the Digital Panel at the Institution for Engineering and Technology, Catherine Allen. The event was chaired by Maeve Walsh, Associate at Carnegie Trust.
Please see below for minutes of the session.
The event Chair, Maeve Walsh provided opening remarks, welcoming all PICTFOR members, Vice-Chairs, and attendees from the wider tech community, and thanking them for attending the event. She then remarked on the recent delay to the Online Safety Bill and the implications of this for the sector, before introducing member of the Online Safety Bill Committee, Kirsty Blackman MP.
Kirsty Blackman MP began by stating that after 50 hours of scrutiny in the Online Safety Bill Committee, it would be heart-breaking to not see the Bill passed. She then reflected on spending her entire elected life online and growing up accustomed to the digital world. She emphasised that as important as it is to protect MPs from abuse, the main priority of the OSB was to protect children online and this was her focus in the Committee, before outlining some of the details of the legislation, including a proposed user advocacy panel and child safety duties. She stressed that the Bill had to recognise that children use the internet differently to adults, and the importance of making sure that the Bill was future-proofed for new developments and trends in online usership. She closed by saying that the internet should be considered a massive positive, but we must ensure adequate protections are in place so that we can continue to experience it as such.
Legal and Policy Officer at Big Brother Watch, Mark Johnson stated from the outset that he didn’t think the Bill was world leading. He said that it could only really be considered world leading in the way that it fails to protect human rights and infringes on people’s freedom of expression. He highlighted illegal content duty, which would not look to take down posts that met a criminal threshold but instead be beholden to what social media companies deemed acceptable. He said this process would undermine the rule of law and due process. He also pointed out that parts of the legislation could be unjustly discriminative to people posting in foreign countries and languages. He closed by underlining the importance of stress testing areas like this, as well as the legal but harmful consideration and the child and adult safety duties, as it is important to think about the examples whereby the worst-case scenario could impact on our right to freedom of expression.
Shadow Minister for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Alex Davies-Jones MP opened her remarks by thanking everyone who had contributed to the Bill Committee for their hard work and airing her frustration that they would not be having a second stage of the debate. She pledged to not stand idly by while the Bill is delayed, saying that she would continue to work the issues contained in the Bill. She said she had spoken to the Shadow Lords team and was looking at how to best restrict the Secretary of State’s powers amongst other crucial matters. She said that she was grateful for everyone’s support and that her door remained open if there were any other issues that people wanted to raise with her regarding the Bill. When asked by the Chair whether she thought one Conservative Leadership candidate would be more likely to back the Bill as Prime Minister, she said that Penny Mordaunt and Lizz Truss were incredibly supportive of the Bill whereas Rishi Sunak was not.
Political Organiser at Hope Not Hate, Liron Velleman said that his organisation had been tracking the far right for decades and that the online world has become very important for them as a meeting place. He explained that many members of the far right spend their time on smaller platforms as they have been de-platformed from the major ones, and that these platforms are not good faith actors, in some cases being explicitly set-up to support far-right debates. He was concerned that exemptions and loopholes in the proposed legislation could be exploited and manipulated by the far right, such as journalistic exemptions. He highlighted that in many cases mainstream journalists have inadvertently shared content which supports the far-rights ambitions as it grants them the greater audience that they desire. He closed by saying that although he was happy with the intention of the bill, if the categorisations within it don’t change, they think the far right could be let off the hook.
Member of the Digital Panel at the Institution for Engineering and Technology, Catherine Allen opened by stressing the importance of futureproofing the Bill. She said that even as an ardent supporter of virtual and augmented reality as a form of creative media she still acknowledged that these new technologies need to be handled responsibly, and that there exists a great deal of public anxiety and mistrust. Because of this, she has worked to inform policy and legislation in online harms, recently publishing a report on the existing and future harms of VR and the metaverse which recommends that both VR and AR are included in the Bill. She also spoke about the need for immersive literacy from policymakers, noting that over the last year the percentage of UK adults who had experienced VR doubled, with adoption rising fast and investment growing rapidly in this field. She ended by pressing policymakers to confirm the inclusion of VR and AR in the OSB, as this is a field that cannot simply be governed by regulations from other areas, noting that we have a golden opportunity to futureproof and proactively shape this media.
The event chair then opened up the discussion to the roundtable, where the panel heard from representatives from the Online Dating Association and RAID Conference. Maeve Walsh then thanked all the speakers and attendees before closing the event.
You can catch up on the entire event below.