The Government's Online Safety Bill will police free expression - Bill Carmichael

In one now notorious case, just three weeks before the US Presidential election in 2020, the big tech companies and mainstream media actively censored a bombshell story about incriminating emails found on a laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

Facebook and Twitter banned links being posted to the story on the grounds that it was “Russian disinformation” despite it being originally published by the New York Post, a respected and venerable newspaper.

It has since emerged that the laptop was genuine and the story was true – but far too late to have any impact on the election.

But you don’t have to go all the way across the Atlantic for instances of big tech clamping down on free speech. Here in the UK the radio station TalkRadio’s channel was “terminated” by YouTube in 2021, without the company offering any details or explanation, before reversing its decision after 12 hours.

Yet abusive and racist material, including death and rape threats, often get a pass – as long as they are directed against people the Silicon Valley tech company moderators disapprove of.

For example, former US President Donald Trump is banned from Twitter, but Vladimir Putin is not. Go figure, as our American cousins say.

The last thing we should do is to give these tech companies even more power to control free expression – but that is precisely what the UK Government is doing.

The Online Safety Bill, currently progressing through Parliament, tasks the big tech companies with policing the speech of millions of Britons far beyond existing laws.

The regulator Ofcom will be given new powers to fine the tech companies up to 10 per cent of global turnover if they refuse to take down “harmful” content.

Of course people should be protected from online crime, threats of violence, pornography and racist abuse and sites that promote self-harm, eating disorders and suicide.

Much of this is already illegal, and there is a strong argument for strengthening existing laws.

But the new Bill introduces an entirely new concept of speech that is “legal but harmful”.

Harmful material is anything “having a significant adverse physical or psychological impact on an adult of ordinary sensibilities” which is a very broad definition and entirely subjective.

What is psychological harm and how on earth is it going to be measured? It could include everything from someone being a bit upset because they have read something they have disagreed with, to a full-blown psychotic illness. And what is “an adult of ordinary sensibilities”?

It reminds me a little of the preposterous concept of “non-crime hate incidents”, which are not against the law and usually don’t include any actual hate, but which have soaked up an enormous amount of police time and resources investigating what amounts to little more than “hurty words” on Twitter.

In response to worries over the restriction of free speech, the government included a new clause in the Bill that grants an exemption from the legislation for journalistic content.

Speaking as a journalist of many years standing, I think this is a terrible idea. Reporters are nothing more than ordinary citizens with notebooks or microphones.

When we attend a council meeting or a court case we do so as members of the public.

It is an important point of principle that journalists should not enjoy any special privileges in law that are not afforded to their readers or viewers.

I am all for taking down the social media companies down a peg or two, perhaps by forcing them to open up the algorithms that push particular content to users to public scrutiny.

But we won’t do that by encouraging them to clamp down even further on free speech.

The big tech companies have shown themselves to be censorious and zealous in their policing of the free expression of their users, and with this new Bill the Government will force them to go even further.

Culture secretary Nadine Dorries has hailed the new Bill as “world beating”, but in fact it is a bit of a mess.

It has been five years in the making and has been chopped and changed so often it has become a botched job that doesn’t tackle the issues it was designed to address.

The best thing to do would be to rip it up and start again.