It’s anybody’s guess at this point: Are the UK’s majority lawmakers oblivious, defiant, or for some other reason, known only to themselves – “feeling themselves”?
Amid myriad controversies centered on the way the country’s government(s) have been choosing to treat free speech online for a while now – the “pinnacle” of which should have been the highly controversial Online Safety Act – reports now say there are UK parliament members who want yet more censorship laws to be enacted.
But tripling down, at this particular moment in domestic and international politics, why? To what end?
For a cabinet under all sorts of pressure, it might just be a matter of coming up with a negotiating stance, as the figurative waves keep crashing in.
Here’s Minister of State for Data Protection and Telecoms and Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism Chris Bryant – always, at this point embarrassingly, falling back on the nebulous “think-of-the-children” platitude – while sounding like he’s “soothing” not only his voters but also himself:
“I do not doubt for a single instant that this will be the end of the story, that the Online Safety Act will be the end of the story. I will be amazed if there weren’t further legislation in this field in some shape or other in the next two or three years.”
One could choose to look at this flurry of very recent comments from UK officials as vying to gain a “strong” (if that’s possible at this point) negotiating position with the new US administration (which has not been shy to lump in trade tariffs with abuses of free speech).
So the UK officials at this point – instead of addressing the issues at hand – appear to be trying to talk themselves out of the huge predicament that the Online Safety Act is.
Namely, by “threatening” it could get much worse.
And they go very shallow to appear to be deeply trying to dive into their self-imposed “virtuous” online rhetoric – Liberal Democrat MP Caroline Voaden found it within herself to complain that the Online Safety Act, such as it is, does not properly deal with things like, “the myths of the perfect body.”
Talk to the ancient Greeks, not social media, MP Voaden – they were the first to come up with that “myth” thousands of years ago.
But to avoid real-world political issues now at hand, threats are made of making the Online Safety Act even worse than it is, for any number of often flimsy “reasons.”
