The Online Safety Bill could lead to the biggest curtailment of free speech in modern history – The Telegraph

Following Boris Johnsons resignation, the Conservative Party stands at a crossroad.

We have serious decisions to make about the future of our Party and our country. This will be one of the most important leadership elections in modern times. And it presents huge opportunities for a return to our values, including the protection of individual freedoms that are so often threatened by the excessive growth of the state. We have to make sure we take those chances.

The Commons is this afternoon debating a Bill, the Online Safety Bill, that is in parts wholly out of step with our tradition of protecting and promoting freedom of speech. I have long said, this Bill is a censors charter. Among the main reasons for this are the provisions in the Bill regarding so called legal but harmful expression.

Under the legislation, the Secretary of State will be granted the power to designate categories of speech as harmful, which social media companies will then have to deal with on their sites.

The Government insists this will not put us on a path to censorship. In fact, it claims that the Bill will actually strengthen free speech. But when legal speech is designated as harmful by the state, we all know what social-media firms will do. They will err on the side of censorship, not least because the Government could slap them with huge fines or even prison sentences if they do not.

As Conservatives, we should wholeheartedly oppose a two-tier speech system, where the public may be prohibited from saying things online that are lawful to say offline. The authoritarian and arbitrary distinction of legal but harmful speech is an attack on freedom and is as unConservative as it is unBritish.

Like many politicians and commentators, I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of online censorship.

Last year, I made a speech at Conservative Party Conference. My speech, which focused on the potential impact of vaccine passports on peoples rights, actively praised the COVID-19 vaccine. Yet despite this, the video was censored on YouTube, which claimed - bizarrely - that it went against expert consensus, whatever that meant.

I pored over my speech and found nothing inaccurate in my remarks, which almost solely focused on public-policy issues. YouTube relented and let the video go back up. But the episode served as yet another example as if any more were needed - of social-media companies attitude to free speech.

The current trajectory of the Bill threatens to compound the situation by bringing the state in as the enforcer of online censorship. It grants an enormous amount of executive power to the state in an entirely undemocratic way.

There will nothing to stop future Secretaries of State from using their powers to lean on intermediaries to remove speech they dislike. Indeed, the only scrutiny any Secretary of State will face when designating content harmful will come from a heavily whipped Delegated Legislation Committee.

Think about it: a future Secretary of State it could even be a Labour MP - with the power to effectively ban political content they do not want online. What would it have been like to go through the Brexit debates with that kind of infrastructure in place? It does not bear thinking about.

The Bill needs serious improvement in order to protect the civil liberties we hold so dear. Most importantly, it should not grant powers to the state to designate categories of free speech as legal but harmful.

Additionally, the Bill should not allow for the compromising of privacy on encrypted platforms like WhatsApp. We have the right to communicate without the Government spying on our every interaction.

Online safety is important to all of us. That is why I think we should make it a criminal offence to post content that encourages suicide or self-harm. We should do that under primary legislation, properly debated and challenged by the whole House of Commons.

But we must not compromise liberty under the guise of protection. Right now, the balance of the Bill is all wrong and it could end up being the biggest accidental curtailment of free speech in modern history.

The cut and thrust of a leadership contest will allow us to debate these issues and at least one of the leadership candidates has identified the Bill as being in need of reform. So as the Online Safety Bill returns to Parliament today, let us take the opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to protecting freedom of speech and radically reform the legislation.

We may not get another chance.

Rt Hon David Davis MP served as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union and was previously Shadow Home Secretary

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The Online Safety Bill could lead to the biggest curtailment of free speech in modern history - The Telegraph