UK national security strategy failing to account for online world

Is the Online Safety Act ineffective?

During the course of his address, Hall also implicitly criticised the UK government over its oft-repeated catchphrase of making the UK the “safest place to live and work online”, saying that despite the provisions of laws such as the Online Safety Act, any individual in the UK who cares to can easily find proscribed content online.

“In the last month, for example, my special adviser, Adam Hadley, found a Facebook account openly identifying itself as affiliated to Islamic State, openly posting an instructional document on the ‘deadliest places for stabbing’ on a body diagram, which had been online for at least a month and remained accessible despite being reported to Facebook itself,” he said.

“The Online Safety Act relies on tech platforms to apply safety duties,” said Hall. “Ofcom’s role is to monitor those safety duties, but tech companies make it very difficult for regulators or researchers to monitor their output at scale. And nothing in [the] Online Safety Act allows the authorities to take down content or to order tech companies to take it down. But despite this, you will continue to hear ministers saying that the Online Safety Act makes the UK the safest place to be online.”

Despite this, Hall said he still supported the principles laid down in the Online Safety Act, saying that the nation could still benefit from greater clarity about what it can and cannot actually do.

He also called for the government to examine whether or not the banning mechanisms deployed by the government against groups such as Palestine Action can be used “without unintended consequences” against online movements that venerate mass murderers such as Anders Breivik and inspire copycat attacks, but do not amount to organisations, and to consider whether or not the UK’s pre-digital surveillance laws are in fact restricting the authorities’ ability to use publicly available information given up freely by ordinary people – such as their location or interests – in their work.

“However, I think the UK needs to hold its nerve in face of compelling challenges from free speech absolutists, generally based on principles in the US Constitution, that in effect consider all regulation of the internet a bad thing,” said Hall. “I think that is not only naïve … but also ultimately undemocratic, because it suggests that we as society through our laws cannot assert control over our digital lives despite the harms, especially to children.”

He said that online, it is not the case that more speech is the remedy for bad speech, given the internet has morphed from a democratic marketplace of ideas into a series of echo chambers.

However, optimistically, Hall said, we are still in the “online foothills”, and society can still learn and adapt. Pointing to the example of Australia, where under-16s are to be banned from social media altogether later this month, he said society as a whole is becoming stronger in areas such as child protection. That, he concluded, “is not a bad place to start”.