Britain Passes Sweeping New Online Safety Law

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The far-reaching bill had set off debates about balancing free speech and privacy rights against efforts to halt the spread of harmful content online.

Britain passed a sweeping law on Tuesday to regulate online content, introducing age-verification requirements for pornography sites and other rules to reduce hate speech, harassment and other illicit material.

The Online Safety Bill, which also applies to terrorist propaganda, online fraud and child safety, is one of the most far-reaching attempts by a Western democracy to regulate online speech. About 300 pages long, the new rules took more than five years to develop, setting off intense debates about how to balance free expression and privacy against barring harmful content, particularly targeted at children.

At one point, messaging services including WhatsApp and Signal threatened to abandon the British market altogether until provisions in the bill that were seen as weakening encryption standards were changed.

The British law goes further than efforts elsewhere to regulate online content, forcing companies to proactively screen for objectionable material and to judge whether it is illegal, rather than requiring them to act only after being alerted to illicit content, according to Graham Smith, a London lawyer focused on internet law. » | Adam Satariano, Reporting from London | Tuesday, September 19, 2023