Mon Dec 5, 2022 – 9:49 am ESTMon Dec 5, 2022 – 10:07 am EST
(LifeSiteNews) – The United Kingdom’s revised Online Safety Bill (OSB) threatens social media companies with huge fines if they do not protect children from “legal but harmful” content.
This may lead to massive online censorship, as social media companies could ban the content outright, since enforcing a ban on child accounts may not be feasible, as the editor-in-chief of The Spectator magazine, Fraser Nelson, argues.
“Britain is sleepwalking into censorship and we’re running out of time to stop it,” Nelson writes.
The OSB was originally proposed as a “world-leading” means of protecting children online by making Britain “the safest place in the world in which to use the internet.”
To achieve this goal, the bill proposes to levy new “duty of care” obligations upon “user-to-user services” and internet “search services” which will require tech firms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp to police their platforms more closely for content considered “harmful,” regardless of it being legal.
RELATED: UK Conservatives warn proposed ‘Online Safety Bill’ could usher in end of free speech
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