Regulation of online speech in the UK

Online speech in the UK is already being chilled due to the provisions and/or operation of a variety of laws. In statutes dealing with defamation, terrorism, data protection, privacy, and more, ‘notice and take-down’ regimes and state mandated content moderation are to be found aplenty. This has reached such saturation that instead of thinking of speech as ‘free’ one could be forgiven to observe that the adjectives that more accurately describe the situation in the UK nowadays is ‘restricted’, ‘permitted’, ‘proscribed’ and ‘censored’. What you can say now very much depends on who you are, what you are saying, and where you are saying it.
Against this background, the newly enacted Online Safety Act goes even further. Instead of the usual notice and takedown regime, corporations will be placed in charge of and legally required, to proactively seek out and limit online content. The likely result of outsourcing public duties like this would be censorship by algorithm. Various established principles of the law are being stretched or outright violated. This paper analyses the likely effects of the new law by comparing it to current domestic and select laws from other similar jurisdictions, and concludes that it will not operate in a transparent or accountable manner but will instead be anti-democratic and it will violate the rule of law.

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