THIS was the week of ultimate British navel-gazing. Internecine warfare at Reform continued unabated; a ‘pile-on’ joined by anyone and everyone with a personal score to settle or vendetta to pursue, swept up in a tide of rebuttal and retaliation, blind to everything else. Eyes off the wheel, once again.
I am not in this instance talking about Starmer’s scrapping of NHS England and shameless stealing of the right’s clothes as reality strikes over the UK’s parlous finances. State waste and inefficiency – quangos which Reform could have targeted among a yet (ever?) to be announced list of ‘deep-state purge’ promises.
I am talking about the Online Safety Act (another great State intrusion into personal freedom), the ‘illegal harms’ aspect of which come fully into force at midnight tonight. Reform, like the rest of establishment right, seems to have bowed down to this Tory invention without an analysis, let alone a fight. Please correct me, readers, if I am wrong.
Yet one thing for sure that Starmer is not going to bend to the ‘Right’ over is depoliticising the judiciary, nor will he retreat over the wonderful new censorship powers over social media that the Online Safety Act gives him. This is part of his anti-free speech war against us, and America too, that J D Vance so rightly charged Europe with a few weeks ago – those increasingly brazen legislative assaults on ‘democratic values’- that N S Lyons discussed on TCW last week.
We knew this was coming. I have discussed the implications of this Tory-introduced bill in the past with Mark Steyn, when we at TCW were hit with a six-month mobile phone ban in May 2022, courtesy of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) who, we were to find out, was the regulator in charge of the mobile phone companies; and also on further occasions, when the Online Safety Bill was announced.
Ominously, banning mobile phone access to our site was on the grounds of our ‘inappropriate content for under 18-year-olds’ – not, may I say, justified by any porn ‘finds’. ‘The Conservative Woman? Were they joking?’ I asked at the time. Me, a second coming of Mary Whitehouse? No, they justified it by a handful of comments (out of some 40,000 comments on the system they trawled) that had slipped through our moderation net that were either homophobic or racist. It was a slow and painful process (six months in all before we were back to normal) to find and delete the offending comments and persuade the BBFC to lift the ban first on the site and then, after two more months, on the comments. We lost thousands of readers over this period. In retrospect, it looks like a dry run for the Online Safety Act. The BBFC’s statement denouncing and demonising us remains on its website for all to see to this day. And yes, it came from one anonymous ‘request to review’ us.
That’s exactly the complaint/reporting compliance that is built into the new legislation. It is very unclear which websites must comply. To find out, you need to read all the reams of documentation, try to answer the questions in their ‘tool’, carry out a ‘risk assessment’ and a ‘child access assessment’, document it all, update your terms and conditions, create new procedures for people to report content and complain, add your name as the person responsible – only then can you cross your fingers that your understanding of your new legal duties is correct. The potential fines for noncompliance or ‘proven’ complaints are eye-watering. No wonder several sites have already closed down or are making their content unavailable to the UK.
I am afraid that the full force of this reality for us at TCW only caught up with me this last week, thanks to pressing alerts from TCW’s webmistress. I have been struggling with various Government and Ofcom ‘guidance’ and multiple commentaries on it ever since, trying to work out the implications for TCW. False communications are already in its remit. What compliance is demanded for us not to be breaking the law? It’s a bureaucratic nightmare to wade through it, as noted above; it is designed to defeat you, apart from anything else. Kafkaesque. Not, I can assure you, a way I enjoy spending my time.
After several hours reading the small print, it became difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is our comments sections that put us at most risk. Though the Act guidance states that posted comments relating to the blog post above them are exempt, TCW could be held accountable for posts by third parties (commentators) that are unrelated (off-topic) to the content on that site or that include images, videos or links. Our Readers’ Forum is certainly not exempt, as it allows someone to comment on anything. It is therefore in scope of the Online Safety Act.
The more I read, the more worried I became about the other comments too which are often interactive and off-topic. In response to one legal request to clarify liability for such off-topic content, Ofcom repeated that ‘Content will be exempt if it comprises comments or reviews “relating to” provider content. (But) The Act makes no mention of how closely connected to the provider content the comment or review must be to benefit from this exemption.’
If we were to continue to allow off-topic comments (and the definition of that will be Ofcom’s, as it was for covid misinformation), we’d need to do a risk assessment described above and have that in place. Here is a sample.
Frankly, I am not personally prepared to go through this on top of all my other daily stresses as Editor. I don’t even know if after all the effort it will protect us. We know that Ofcom are hostile to independent-thinking journalists like Mark Steyn. We know that Hope not Hate already have us in their sightline. Regardless, it is one big self-censorship operation that I’d be agreeing to which I disapprove of in principle.
Comments are not the hill I am prepared to sacrifice the site or my home on.
This is why with deep regret I have decided that we must discontinue our Readers Forum from tomorrow. From today, in order to protect us, I have also taken the decision to restrict any posting of images, videos or links on comments underneath articles. We just cannot (and do not at the moment) check them all, but links can be obfuscated, nor can we risk links to illegal content. Therefore, we will be setting all comment filters to the highest setting. This means the strictest Disqus auto-moderation in which lots of comments will be caught. We have neither the time nor money to moderate them all, so they will be auto deleted. I am sorry.
I am not sure that even this will protect us from the potential deployment of the Act. It may be that, in the coming weeks, we have to lose comments altogether. The simple fact is that we cannot fight this on our own. It’s been depressing read for you today, I am afraid, as it has been for me to write. Not least because the very people who should be fighting this latest assault on our freedom, for us and with us, are too busy fighting each other.
