The UK culture secretary, Michelle Donelan, has defended removing a provision in the online safety bill to regulate “legal but harmful” online material, after the father of teenager Molly Russell said it was a “watering down” of the bill.
Ministers have scrapped the provision after MPs raised free speech concerns. It would have included offensive content that does not constitute a criminal offence, but instead Donelan said platforms would be required to enforce their terms and conditions.
If those terms explicitly prohibit content that falls below the threshold of criminality – such as some forms of abuse – Ofcom will then have the power to ensure they police them adequately.
The bill, which returns to parliament on 5 December after being paused in July, also contains new provisions on protecting children. Overall, the legislation imposes a duty of care on tech firms to shield children from harmful content.
Other changes to the bill include criminalising encouragement of committing self-harm, a change that was introduced after the inquest into the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who died after viewing extensive amounts of harmful material on Instagram and Pinterest in 2017. It will also criminalise nonconsensual “deepfake” pornography and “downblousing”.
Molly’s father, Ian, told Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday that it was wrong to remove a duty on social media companies to curb legal but harmful content.
“I don’t think you can see the removal of a whole clause as anything other than watering down,” he said.
Donelan said she would defend the removal of the clause, which she said was preventing the bill from progressing.
“It had very, very concerning impact, potentially, on free speech,” she told Sky News. “There were unintended consequences associated with it. It was really the anchor that was preventing this bill from getting off the ground.
“It was a creation of a quasi-legal category between illegal and legal. That’s not what a government should be doing. It’s confusing. It would create a different kind of set of rules online to offline in the legal sphere.”
But Donelan said it would not have consequences for the kind of material children would see online. “The whole point around this bill fundamentally is about protecting children,” she told the Today programme.
“That’s why the first thing that I did when I became secretary of state is defy what everybody said was impossible and actually strengthen this bill for children. We’re going further when it comes to children. I also said, look, if we all agree things should be illegal, let’s let’s make them illegal.
“And now in this bill, the promotion of self-harm is illegal, the promotion of intimate images including deepfakes are illegal. But I did also recognise, as did a number of my colleagues, that there is a deep concern about freedom of speech on the legal but harmful aspect.
“It was the government saying yes, this is legal. You can say it to one another, but you can’t type it online … That is a shocking place for us to end up.”
She said the content that Russell had viewed would no longer be legal. “The content that Molly Russell saw will not be allowed as a result of this bill. And there will no longer be cases like that coming forward because we’re preventing that from happening,” she said. “And I want to be really clear on that. Because that is fundamentally what this bill is about.”
