The UK's Online Safety Bill: The day we took a stand against serious online harms or the day we lost our freedoms to platforms and the state?

Alexander Dittel
Additional contact information
Alexander Dittel: Wedlake Bell, UK

Journal of Data Protection & Privacy, 2022, vol. 5, issue 2, 183-194

Abstract: This paper discusses the UK's Online Safety Bill, which is intended to protect vulnerable individuals online, although at the risk of promoting surveillance techniques and mandating proactive content removal by platforms. It analyses how the Bill, a very ambitious project, tries to safeguard vulnerable people through means which could be easily abused, and asks whether the risk of abuse that could affect everyone is worth the protection of a minority of online users. Recently demonstrated authoritarian approaches to solving the COVID-19 crisis make this concern palpable. The paper concludes by saying that once we take a path, it will be difficult to walk it back.

Keywords: online harms; Online Safety Bill; lawful but harmful; user-generated content; content monitoring; user; monitoring; cyber offences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hstalks.com/article/7169/download/ (application/pdf)
https://hstalks.com/article/7169/ (text/html)
Requires a paid subscription for full access.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aza:jdpp00:y:2022:v:5:i:2:p:183-194

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Data Protection & Privacy from Henry Stewart Publications
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Henry Stewart Talks ().