Online Safety Act<\/a> imposed a duty on platforms to tackle material deemed \u201clegal but harmful\u201d to adults, but these provisions were stripped out of the bill under the previous Conservative government amid concerns about freedom of speech, to the dismay of online safety campaigners.<\/p>\nCommittee chair and Labour MP Chi Onwurah insisted that the report\u2019s call for the government to essentially return to the drawing board doesn\u2019t mean reopening the same can of worms on online safety versus freedom of expression.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have seen on the streets of Sunderland and Hartlepool and Southport the physical realization of the consequences of online misinformation, and I think that has truly concentrated the issue in people\u2019s minds,\u201d she told POLITICO in an interview.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Act barely deals with misleading content, yet \u201cministers were reaching for [it] and saying it would address the terrible scenes we saw on the streets of this country over [last] summer,\u201d Onwurah said, a case of \u201cexpecting something from Ofcom it wasn\u2019t going to deliver.\u201d<\/p>\n
The media regulator conceded in April that even the new False Communications Offence introduced by the Act \u201cwill not be easy for a company to identify,\u201d and many legal experts have said the threshold is too high for charges to be successfully brought.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now, even before the Act has been fully implemented, the committee is reopening a debate on legislating against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[7480,1394,748,60393,2001,2437,393,4884,11582,2845,1144,23740,60394,7965,2443,5549,712,1199,53,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-256289","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-advocacy","10":"tag-big-tech","11":"tag-britain","12":"tag-chi-onwurah","13":"tag-communications","14":"tag-companies","15":"tag-england","16":"tag-great-britain","17":"tag-lobbying","18":"tag-misinformation","19":"tag-northern-ireland","20":"tag-online-safety","21":"tag-peter-kyle","22":"tag-platforms","23":"tag-regulation","24":"tag-safety","25":"tag-scotland","26":"tag-services","27":"tag-technology","28":"tag-uk","29":"tag-united-kingdom","30":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114834867988802821","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}