What would you do if somebody told you you were ugly, or stupid, or bad at your job? What if they did it repeatedly, every day, for a sustained period of time? What if it wasn’t your mother or your lover or anyone you know at all, but a total stranger? Or a horde of them, all at once? Face to face, it’s an unthinkable (if engagingly surreal) proposal, but online it’s often par for the course. Many people with public profiles are routinely abused: celebrities, politicians, influencers, unfortunate members of the public caught in a news cycle. Putting aside the grotesque, graphic violent messages also sent with horrendous regularity, unkind (but not criminal) insults are sent every day on social media.
In its proposed Online Safety Bill, the government describes such posts as “lawful but harmful”. The bill, if passed, would see the vast problem of hateful online behaviour addressed with the blunt force of the legal system. It would place the onus on social media platforms to eliminate extremist material, illegal pornography and hate speech, threatening them with enormous fines for failure to do so. More ambiguously, it would place a duty of care upon them to protect users from harmful content. This is a different and separate enterprise to mandating the removal of already illegal content. It seeks to ban online messages and posts not based on their legality, but instead on the psychological effect that the message creates in other users. (After hearings earlier this month, a joint committee will publish a report into the bill by 10 December.)
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