UK Removes Most Censorial Aspect Of Online Safety Bill, But It’s Still Terrible For Speech & Privacy

We've talked about the mess that is the UK's Online Safety Bill a few times now, focusing mostly on the extremely serious concerns over requiring websites to take down legal but harmful" speech, which is a ridiculous and impossible to meet standard that would lead to massive over-blocking of perfectly reasonable content. Many people, including activists pushing for this bill, seem to think that there's some magic wand that can be waved to determine what content is harmful" and then magically remove it.

That's not how any of this works. There are a ton of different judgment calls that need to be made, often lacking the relevant context. Rules against harmful" speech often run into all sorts of problems, including the removals of friends joking around with each other, or people calling out abuses by others.

So it's good to see that the current UK government has responded to the concerns raised by many that the bill would lead to censorship. The part about legal but harmful" speech has been removed from the bill. While, as you can see in that article, this is leading to some angry complaints from censorial activists, it's the correct move.

That said, none of this magically makes the bill acceptable. It still has tremendous problems, including with overly broad censorship via some of its rules around protecting children." Like California's similar Age Appropriate Design Code (which supporters claim was modeled on the already existing UK AADC, but was really more modeled on the Online Safety Bill), it creates some impossible standards to try to force websites to magically figure out what harms might occur, and magically stop them.

That means that sites will still need to make use of dangerous and intrusive (and privacy violating) age verification tools, which will do real damage to people.

Indeed, you could argue that the bill appears to both require and prohibit age verification technology. It requires it by demanding that websites understand if children (including teenagers) are using their site. It prohibits it by telling websites to carefully analyze any new feature that might cause harm and seek to prevent the harm. The only way to do that with age verification is... to not use it.

I don't see how any site can comply with this law since the law itself is self-contradictory.

It sure would be nice if parents, politicians, and the media stopped blaming websites for anything bad that happens, including parental failings. Sometimes bad stuff happens. Blaming tech companies for that is not just a cop out, it's actively avoiding looking inward at where the real problems came from.