The UK’s ambitious and controversial proposed internet regulation started with scribblings on the back of a packet for a brie and cranberry sandwich from Pret a Manger. Those notes, from discussions between academics Lorna Woods and William Perrin about how to make tech companies responsible for online harms, became an influential white paper in 2019. That in turn became the foundation of a draft law called the Online Safety Bill, an ambitious attempt to turn the UK into the “safest place in the world to be online,” by regulating how platforms should handle harmful content, including child sexual abuse imagery, cyberbullying, and misinformation.
Since then, Britain has endured three prime ministers (and one lettuce), four digital ministers, a pandemic, and a rocky exit from the European Union. Successive iterations of the ruling Conservative government have expanded the bill that sprang from Woods and Perrin’s paper, mutating it from a genuine attempt to hold tech platforms to account for hosting harmful content, into a reflection of Britain’s post-Brexit political dysfunction.
The current government is widely expected to be voted from power next year, but the draft law returns to the House of Commons today, where members of parliament will have their final chance to debate its content. “It is very different from the sandwich packet, not least because there’s no brie smears on it,” says Woods, a law professor at the University of Essex. More significantly, different Conservative administrations have each left their own mark on it. “I think perhaps that has added to the baroque ornamentation,” Woods says.
Many others are far less measured in their criticism. The bill as it stands today sprawls to more than 260 pages, reflecting how ministers and MPs bolted on their own preoccupations, from cancel culture to security to immigration. Many of the original misinformation provisions have been removed or watered down. Additions to the bill include a controversial requirement that messaging platforms scan content for child sexual abuse images, something that tech companies and privacy campaigners say can only be achieved by weakening end-to-end encryption.
Major platforms, including WhatsApp and Signal, have threatened to pull out of the UK if the law is passed. They probably aren’t bluffing, and the bill probably will pass.
Earlier iterations of the bill took a relatively thoughtful approach to dealing with dangerous content online. Alongside provisions on how to prevent the most clearly illegal and harmful content, such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), it also acknowledged that sometimes legal content can be harmful because of how it’s amplified or targeted. For example, it may not be illegal to say that vaccines don’t work, but in the context of a deadly pandemic that message could become very harmful if shared widely and then served by platforms’ algorithms over and over to people susceptible to believing it. The bill originally looked at how to stop or limit this “legal but harmful” material from doing damage offline, not necessarily by banning that content, but instead by limiting how it ends up in users’ feeds, or who it can be served to. For example, algorithms might have to be tweaked to stop them from recommending posts that promote suicide to people in distress, or posts about extreme weight loss to young users.
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