Free speech and Ofcom's consultation on protecting people from illegal harms online.
The delimiters which seek to avoid suppression of free speech and therefore political speech can be seen in Annex 10: Online Safety Guidance on Judgement for Illegal Content:
"A13.23 When making an illegal content judgement, services will need to have reasonable grounds to infer that both the following are true:
a) the user sending the message knew it was false; and
b) the user sending the message conveying false information intended to cause nontrivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience."
Hopefully that sets out a reasonable boundary.
However, another important aspect is the information that is used to make such an assessment in terms of false communications. We have therefore responded to Ofcom as follows:
"In respect of false communications, in order that it is not possible for a large actor or group of actors acting in concert to exercise excessive influence over public debate and to suppress free speech we believe that the guidance should state that no party is expected to give more than 25% weight to information coming from, or likely to come from, one source, or a group of sources, under the control of a single actor or an aligned group of actors.
For example, the Horizon Post Office case showed that governments can get things wrong and that can result in harm. Therefore, the fact that the majority of statements of alleged facts and information in the public domain may be coming from the government directly, or indirectly by means of any government funded bodies or research, or by the press largely repeating government statements or those of government funded bodies, should not lead to an assumption that the government’s position, or those of the aligned actors, is correct, or place any sense of obligation legally or morally on private companies to assume that those statements are correct."
The consultation that closed on 23 Feb 2024 is at: https://lnkd.in/e48J2N-q
