The free-speech wing of the Conservative party is lining up against the “fundamentally misdesigned” online safety bill as the government rushes to pass the legislation before the House of Commons breaks up for the summer.
The backbencher David Davis said of the flagship bill: “We all want the internet to be safe. Right now, there are too many dangers online, from videos propagating terror to posts promoting self-harm and suicide.
“But the bill’s well-intentioned attempts to address these very real risks threatens being the biggest accidental curtailment of free speech in modern history.”
Davis, who had a speech questioning vaccine passports taken down from YouTube, argued the bill’s requirements on social media companies to come up with terms of service to restrict “legal but harmful” content mean they will “inevitably err on the side of censorship”.
Davis said: “It’s simply acceptable, in my view, to target lawful speech in this way,” arguing the bill would create new categories of speech that were “legal to say, but illegal to type: it’s both perverse and dangerous to allow speech in print, but not online”.
His criticisms mirror those of the Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch, who described the bill as “legislating for hurt feelings”, to the chagrin of the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, who defended it as focusing on “the protection of children and young people from some of the serious harms they are vulnerable to when online”.
The Tory backbencher Nick Fletcher called for “stronger protection for free speech in the digital public square” than the bill provides, adding that “whatever we might think about Donald Trump, it cannot be right that he was banned from Twitter”.
Opposing the bill for Labour, the shadow culture minister, Alex Davies-Jones, warned that despite the bill’s vast remit, it would fail to provide meaningful safety online, since it overlooks smaller websites almost entirely.
She said: “Categorisation of services based on size rather than risk of harm will mean the bill will fail to address some of the most extreme harms on the internet.
“We all know that smaller platforms such as 4chan and BitChute have significant numbers of users who are highly motivated to promote very dangerous content. Their aim is to promote radicalisation, and to spread hate and harm.”
Davies-Jones and Davis also criticised the “undue power” the bill places in the hands of future culture secretaries, who will be able to add new clauses to the code of conduct that the regulator Ofcom will expect websites to follow. Davies-Jones said: “This is not a normal approach to regulation.”
The bill has returned to parliament with a number of government amendments, including a requirement for tech companies to shield users from state-sponsored disinformation that poses a threat to British society and democracy.
There is also a demand aimed at heavily encrypted messaging services, calling on tech companies to use their “best endeavours” to deploy new technology that identifies and removes child sexual abuse, and exploitation content, which critics fear could effectively ban secure messaging in the UK.
