The UK’s Online Safety Act, criticized for its wide-reaching censorship, may expand further with government officials and media proposing tighter rules on private messaging, encryption, and chatbots under the umbrella of child protection.
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(Reclaim The Net) — It’s par for the course for legacy media to serve as the mouthpieces – even when they’re in the same room – of purveyors of entrenched policies that have a habit of spanning different governments, despite them supposedly having significantly different political agendas.
An example of this is now coming from the U.K., where Laura Kuenssberg of the public broadcaster BBC sat down with Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle – basically to discuss how the much-criticized, sweeping online censorship law, the Online Safety Act, could be made even worse.
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The key premise is that the law needs expanding, for the sake of becoming more restrictive in different areas. One idea Kuenssberg presented to Kyle is to make sure the law is legislated going forward to deal with private messaging and chatbots.
This is only slightly confusing, given that the act, as it is, already covers private messaging; however, the BBC presenter’s tone suggested that despite its broad and troubling scope, the Online Safety Act is still not “good enough” and needs to be broadened to usher in more censorship and surveillance.
At the same time, the push to expand the law’s powers is framed in a way that people like those involved in the conversation must consider the safest sell to the public: always supposedly “thinking of the children.”
The idea that the Online Safety Act “doesn’t go far enough” and contains “loopholes” that need to be fixed is promoted by the interviewer, and Kyle wasted no time in moving the narrative along by declaring he is “very open-minded” and has already publicly spoken about the need to “legislate into the future again.”
Kyle threw in another “bulletproof” scaremongering tactic, mentioning the supposedly serious threat from deepfakes and – one of the favorite targets of censorship-prone authorities – online encryption.
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On the latter, he noted that the act already contains a requirement for messaging platforms to effectively backdoor this essential safety feature.
“The law says, on messaging, that all developing technology must be used in order to avoid even internet encrypted (platforms) being used to supply and deploy illegal content,” Kyle said.
As for deepfakes, etc., this cabinet member uses that to justify what he calls Parliament needing to get “more into the cycle of updating the law” frequently.
Reprinted with permission from Reclaim The Net.
