Joanna Cherry, the MP for Edinburgh South West in the UK, raised concerns during a Commons debate on The Online Safety Bill as she called on Twitter to “apply its moderation policy evenly across society” and warned over the prospect of leaving organizations such as Twitter “to their own devices on their moderation content policy.” Cherry told MPs that under the Equality Act, “It’s against the law to discriminate against anyone with these protected characteristics or to victimize or harass them. But Twitter does discriminate against some of the protected characteristics. So, for example, it often discriminates against women in the way I described in an intervention earlier, where it takes down expressions of feminist belief but refuses to take down expressions of the utmost violent intent against women.”
The Online Safety Bill, which the Tory government claims will make the “UK the safest place in the world to be online,” is going through Parliament with MPs to vote on amendments when a new prime minister is in place. While it has garnered some cross-party consensus in the Commons, it has provoked some anger, including Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch, who suggests it will have “serious implications for free speech.”Meanwhile, 16 campaign groups have sent a letter to the Culture Secretary warns that the Online Safety Bill is “on the verge of being unworkable.” It said the legislation in its current form “focuses too heavily on trying to regulate what individual people can say online, rather than getting to the heart of the problem and addressing tech companies’ systems and algorithms that promote and amplify harmful content.”
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The National
