(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]
alecm
2023-10
The people who believe that a “Duty of Care” can be imposed upon platforms that broker speech between arbitrary people, are now in the position of having got what they wanted. They won – which, of course, for them is the worst possible thing because now they have to (a) live with the consequences, and (b) listen to (but not accept) the blame for the consequences. We also saw this with (e.g.) Brexit.
A lot of the original impetus for the OSB came out of the techlash – about a decade of post-internet-honeymoon-period media and civil society anticapitalist suspicion & hate that was initially borne out of fairly criticised bad behaviour like user-profiling and inequitable treatment of individuals, peaked in the era of leaks and monthly whistleblowers, and finally began to break on the beach of the pandemic – a time when people were forced to admit that “tech” actually can help the world be more open and connected.
The techlash is basically over – it has become vastly more personal, and specifically Elon Musk has fully replaced Mark Zuckerberg as social media’s PublicEnemyNumber1™; certainly there are wispy-bearded digital rights activists, vitriolic journalists, european super privacy activists and earnest academics who will attempt to keep the ball rolling… but the public wind has fallen out of the sails. The people’s focus is elsewhere.
Nonetheless the initiatives which arose mid-techlash will rumble onward for some time and the OSB is one of them. So what happens next?
My suspicion is that the general themes will be:
The bill does not go far enough and needs [more things] added to it
This is not the Online Safety Bill that we wanted / needed / voted for
Ofcom have the powers and need to use them now!
Ofcom have the powers and need to use them differently!
Ofcom have the powers and need to use them like we say!
Ofcom need a new CEO!
Some commentators on Twitter argue that Ofcom will suffer from being swamped with requests to achieve the impossible and that the bill’s enforcement will somehow usefully collapse under its own weight — but I see such thinking as narrow, missing the sheer delight with which public funding will be shovelled into Ofcom for the next couple of years in attempts to make this work / in attempts to save from embarrassment the minds behind it.
Also: there is likely (what, 70-30, something like that?) to be a new Government within the next 18 months, and the politicians from the likely new Party of Government are steeped in techlash thinking: billionaire CEOs are innately wrong, tech is bad, unattributed speech enables racism, private speech enables abuse, algorithms are innately harmful… The above themes will all play terribly well with a new Government which comes with such an inbuilt mindset, finding fertile ground for maybe the first 5 years of a new administration.
In short: this is not going to even start to get better until maybe (2023.5 + 1.5 + 5) = the start of 2030 or thereabouts; unless the Tories somehow get back into Government there will be an extended period of digital rights self-harm in the UK, even when the rest of the world is beginning to step back from the precipice.
One thing which I suspect will be rebooted soon is the NSPCC’s concept of “A Voice for Children” which — apparently inspired by a recently-failed Australian referendum issue to create an Government advisory body to represent issues of an oppressed minority — comes straight out of the techlash playbook (PDF) demanding:
[…] a bolder and more ambitious approach to user advocacy: As part of the online harms arrangements, the Government must commit to a dedicated user advocacy voice for children, funded by the industry levy. This is essential to create a level playing field for children – to ensure there is an effective counterbalance to industry interventions, and provide the regulator with credible and authoritative evidence, support and challenge. The Government should draw more directly on what exists in other regulated sectors, from postal services to transport, where the user voice is funded and empowered. Children are potentially the most vulnerable of all users – and they deserve a regulatory settlement that affords the strongest possible protections from abuse.
https://www.nspcc.org.uk/globalassets/documents/online-safety/delivering-a-duty-of-care.pdf
The Americans have a term for this: Pork-Barrel Politics — it would be a very pleasant job indeed to head up a quango dedicated to child protection and funded by a supertax on internet platforms, ostensibly tasked with representing the perspectives and needs of children in a way that is somehow not already achieved by the extant Children’s Commissioners for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
What’s more impressive is how this has been dressed up as representation; the NSPCC have (techlash timeline again) been pushing for this for several years, creating impetus by posting blogs and petitions that make emphatic “it’s time to give children a voice!” calls without explaining that this means “…by getting a pot of money from the Government with the remit of reviewing software for potential harms to children” and without noting that there’s already someone who’s meant to be doing that kind of thing.
Summary
We’re going to be screwed for a while, and I don’t expect improvement in this decade. My greatest hope is that the rest of the world see sense about online privacy, and that this online-safety-inspired Digital Brexit can be contained for long enough that it gets partially unwound… but I regrettably expect that this will be more like the Terrorism Act 2000 where a lot of people had to suffer illiberal treatment until the thing was largely canned.
[END]
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