UK Science Secretary Peter Kyle sees “loopholes” in the UK’s Online Safety Act censorship law, and is promising to “close” them.
The law is sweeping, influencing a broad swath of the industry and people’s right to free expression, but as ever when having to justify highly controversial policies, politicians start thinking and talking, quite narrowly, and insistently, about “the children.”
Kyle doesn’t appear to be the most charismatic, innovative, or indeed, persuasive of politicians, so he sticks to the script. The script is this: (despite the uproar in the free speech/privacy advocacy community because of it) the law is still lacking. There’s “loopholes.”
And Kyle is the one who gets to say he will “close them.” While at it, he (and the media, like the BBC) perpetuating this, refer to another kind of campaigner. Those, apparently, are not yet happy with how far the Online Safety Bill currently stretches.
Blocking adults from adding children as “friends” on social platforms? Sounds reasonable, if, that is, one can establish who is an adult and who is a child. Maybe – in itself, an extremely controversial issue known as “age verification” – could solve that while opening another Pandora’s Box?
But either way – closing the loopholes, (not amending the law to better reflect democratic traditions) – of which free speech is fundamental – was the thing Kyle was, and was not talking about while appearing on the BBC.
When all the media-trained “think of the children” yammering is taken out of the interview, however, Kyle’s basic message is this: the bill can be used in yet more restrictive ways.
Such as forcing tech companies to “prove” their products and updates are “safe” (as defined by a very broad political, and politically useful brushstroke).
“They (tech companies/platforms) are the only sector I can think of in society that can release products into society without proving they’re safe before release,” said Kyle.
(Governments, perhaps, and their wild narratives at the end of the day, accountable to nobody, can be viewed as another such “sector”?). The high-ranked UK official seems to be purposefully conflating concepts here.
Either that, or both “political” and tech “products” – like parroting platitudes – require equal legal scrutiny, as, say, civil engineering or food safety do.
It would be interesting to hear how Kyle sees the world from that point of view.
