RANT: BRITAIN’S “ONLINE SAFETY BILL" IS WORSE THAN CANADA’S!

 

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. 

                  

HAVE YOU BEEN HEARING of late, lo these many months, about the increased need for safety in our lives? I’m not talking about industries where workers use dangerous machinery, or chemicals, or deadly germs and so on. I’m talking about a safety fixation we all seem to have in our generally quite safe, everyday lives. [Unless you are fill in blank. Ed.] I remember a few years ago being amused to see 20-somethings (and olderkins who should know better) wearing those red and orange safety vests as part of their gad-about town gear. I guess we should be grateful they weren’t wearing hardhats! And, to be fair, this was around the same time that the Gilet Jaunes (“Yellow Vest”) movement kicked into high-gear with protests against the French government’s proposed austerity laws turning out in the hundreds of thousands each weekend, many be-decked in brightly coloured safety vests.*  So, I can’t really blame our young folk for copycatting the style.

BUT SAFETY ON THE INTERNET is a ‘growth business’, these days. Safety and security are stressed when we engage on social media, with video and music hosting sites, with end-to-end encrypted messaging, in private chat-rooms, on-line banking and increasingly digitalized social services. When doing business on the internet we’re constantly reminded to “stay safe”. To guard our passwords and use encryption services (eg. VPNs, WhatsApp). The same goes for our personal websites, blogs, and when accessing content from digital providers large and small, foreign, and domestic, and on news sites and, heck, just about anything you see, hear, and read on-line. It’s safety first and last. Safety! Safety! Safety! It’s really quite batty.

THERE ARE LAWS on the books governing how we keep the peace in society, found in the Criminal Code and Civil Law codes, in Acts of Parliament and provincial legislation, in community laws and statutes, as well as regulations from various government agencies and certification associations. There is environmental law, corporate law, worker safety regulations, local 'do's and don'ts', and municipal laws. And of course, there are warning signs: “Slippery When Wet!”, “Stop!”, “Go!”, “Caution!”, “No Stopping!”, “No staring!”, “Turtle Crossing!”, etc. There are international laws that govern how states interact and international treaties that are supposed to keep everyone protected.

THERE are signs, labels, and announcements everywhere meant to moderate our behaviour and keep us “safe”. We are meant to attend to each and every one, and most of us mostly do. I, for one, need to be reminded not to eat that little packet of... whatever it is that comes in pill bottles and sundry packaging. My bad. (“Just the pills, Jake! Must Remember!”)  Our busy, modern world is teeming with warning signs that flash before our eyes to watch out about everything from speedbumps to rad levels. Makes you kind of hanker for those oldie Paleo times, doesn’t it? All you needed to know back then was to run like hell when you bumped nose-to-nose with a cave bear!

 

👉BUT TO THE PURPOSE of this post, namely Britain’s “Online Safety Act” (OAS): Dave Frieth, in a Reclaim the Net  article, writes: “The bill is shrouded in a veil of safetyism and pays only lip service to privacy and free speech rights.” It’s powers and scope may veer “into…territory where freedom of speech and privacy might be sacrificed at the altar of digital safety.” The new bill will have big tech and social media corporations adopt the role of internet 'watchdogs'⁺ for the government, charged with removing not only illegal content¹ but content that falls under the vague and imprecise labels of “harmful content”, “mis/dis/mal”-information, and the even more disturbing catchall: "legal but harmful"😲material. The bill gives the state power...to designate and suppress or record a wide range of speech and media deemed "harmful".(Wikipedia) The catchall phrase "legal but harmful" was in the OAS's original draft legislation introduced in Parliament in 2021, but was taken out of later drafts due to push-back from parliamentarians and advocacy groups who saw in the language a dangerous potential to erode free speech if it were ever enshrined into law.  Methinks the wet-dreamers in government who want such censorship powers have found a work-around by now to ensure they can regulate the internet when and how they want. [Isn't that the way holders of power and privilege always act? Ed.] It behooves all of us to 'read the fine print', before it's too late.

 

And, of course, there are stiff penalties  for big tech and social media outfits who are designated as censorship laggards. Who needs carrots when you can use a stick? They'll be fun times in the old town, tonight! 

IN A RELATED CASE, European Union commissar commissioner, Věra Jourová, in September warned Elon Musk, owner of X (formally Twitter), that he needs to censor posts that purport to contain the above phoney types of information and content. AND in October, following the Hamas attacks in Israel, the marvelously-coiffed EU commissioner Thierrry Breton, sent a letter to Musk threatening action if he failed to comply with the EU’s new internet laws² around “fake news”. Musk mused about pulling X from the EU. We'll see who wins this tug-of-war.

👉Of Britain’s “Online Safety Act”, Frieth concludes:

 

“The implementation sword will be wielded by Ofcom, the communications regulator, with the law setting a stringent punishment pathway for non-compliers, inclusive of colossal fines and even incarceration….

The bill imbues the government with tremendous power; the capability to demand that online services employ government-approved software to scan through user content, including photos, files, and messages, to identify illegal content. Non-compliance can result in severe penalties such as facing criminal charges.

From a free speech and anti-censorship perspective, this legislation is fundamentally disturbing. Critics argue this bill could enhance potential censorship on the pretext of safety.” (Reclaim the Net)

 

LIKE CANADA, Britain’s “Online Safety Act” may be leading everyone down the primrose path. And Britain and Canada are not alone adopting, in the post-COVID era, censorship regimes that greatly enhance state control over news and information and broad swaths of communication and discourse, while making ‘inconvenient’ media, like alternative news sources and forums where dissenting voices and critics of the status are perniciously labelled as “Harmful”, and summarily  memory-holed.

 

👉The Act’s scope is too wide, its definitions too vague, and its powers too intimidating.

 

“The bill itself is the biggest threat to free speech and privacy in living memory…. Provisions for privacy should not mean social media monopolists acting as a guardian of user privacy; they should be in place to protect citizens’ data from the platforms themselves.

Not only does the bill have weak free speech protections but it also disproportionately impacts small, independent media outlets, harms privacy, and creates a dystopian censorship alliance between Big Tech companies and the UK government.” (Reclaim the Net)

 

Buckle Up!

Cheers, Jake. ______________________________________

 

* If only we could bring the boffo way French people protest over here to staid and yawn Canada. 

 

Though, last month there were significant protests against “trans” agendas in our schools, when hundreds of thousands of Muslim-Canadians and people of other faiths marched together in cities across the country expressing concerns that their children are receiving, as part of their education, material their parents find unacceptable and contrary to the tenets of their religions. (FYI: Recently, the Saskatchewan government passed a law supporting parents’ rights to know about, and have a say in, the curriculum being taught to their children. For example, “gender-affirming” pronoun choice and other confusing woke ideologies promoted in our schools are receiving increased push-back from religious and parental-rights groups. As they should. 

 

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

Lewis Carroll

CHAPTER I. Down the Rabbit-Hole

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by zir sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice ze had peeped into the book zir sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversation?’

So ze was considering in zir own mind (as well as ze could, for the hot day made zir feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by zir.”

[sigh. Ed.]

 

+ By ordering large tech firms and social media platforms like Google and Facebook to do the 'dirty work' for them, to scrub "harmful" media, "dis/mis/mal-information", alternative news or dissident points of view from their platforms and services, the government can by-pass pesky freedom of expression laws, or in the case of the United States, "Free Speech" First Amendment rights in their Constitution. 

The "Twitter Files" clearly demonstrate such government overreach in its coercion of Twitter and Facebook to delete pandemic "disinformation", or to "shadow ban" posts and links that were (tiresomely) labeled as "Russian disinformation".   

 

1. FOR EXAMPLE, certain types of pornography, incitement to violence, slander, extortion, and so on, for which there are laws already on the books.

 

2.  THE EUROPEAN UNION has its own on-line censorship ‘safety’ Act called, innocuously, the “Digital Services Act”. The legislation gives EU mucky mucks plenty of room to swing their dicks around.  

 

 

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