Child safety campaigners have warned the government against watering down landmark online laws as part of a UK-US trade deal, describing the prospect of a compromise as an “appalling sellout” that would be rejected by voters.
A draft transatlantic trade agreement contains commitments to review enforcement of the Online Safety Act, according to a report on Thursday, amid White House concerns the legislation poses a threat to free speech.
The Molly Rose Foundation, a charity established by the family of Molly Russell, a British teenager who took her own life after viewing harmful online content, said it was “dismayed and appalled” at the prospect of the act being a bargaining chip in a deal.
The MRF said it had written to the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, outlining its concerns and urging him “not to continue with an appalling sellout of children’s safety”.
The commitment to review enforcement of the OSA and another tech-focused piece of legislation – the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act – was reported by the online newsletter Playbook, which said the legislation would undergo a review of how it is implemented and not a “do-over”.
This week, the Guardian reported that the US state department had challenged Britain’s communications regulator, Ofcom, over the OSA’s impact on freedom of expression.
The Online Safety Act focuses heavily on child safety and requires that tech platforms should shield under-18s from harmful content such as suicide and self-harm-related material. Companies that breach the act face fines of up to £18m or 10% of worldwide revenue, which in the case of those such as Facebook’s owner, Meta, or Google would equate to billions of pounds. In extreme cases, services can also be taken down in the UK.
Beeban Kidron, a cross-bench peer and internet safety campaigner, said: “The Labour party has lost its way. It’s pretty clear from my inbox this morning that their voters could not conceive that they would trade child safety for crumbs from Trump’s table.” The NSPCC, a UK child safety charity, said the government “must not roll back” on its commitment to improving the online environment for children.
Asked in the House of Commons on Thursday whether the digital safety and competition laws and the digital services tax were part of the trade talks, the business secretary said there were “real differences of opinion” on some issues such as VAT but refused to “go into the content of all of the negotiations”. A source close to Reynolds did not deny the Playbook report.
The technology secretary, Peter Kyle, told LBC last month that the government was standing behind its online safety measures and “none of our protections for children and vulnerable people are up for negotiation”.
The prime minister’s spokesperson said the government’s position on online safety had not changed.
“We’ve said previously our Online Safety Act is all about protecting children online, making sure what is illegal offline is illegal online,” they said. “The technology secretary has reiterated that our basic protections for children and vulnerable people are not up for negotiation.”
Source: theguardian.com
