Societal harm

The Government’s concessions on a number of criminal offences now listed in Schedule 7 (such as fraud; sale of a realistic imitation of firearms) have used the priority illegal harms route to open up areas of harm which are not specifically to individuals.  The new definition of harm also possibly opens the door for societal harm to be included as it recognises that members of a group being affected by comments directed at another member of a group. For clarity, we will have to wait and see on statutory instruments as regards content harmful to adults and children and as we have suggested, we feel it would be preferable for the initial list of priority harms to be included in the bill. Presumably, societal harms that could be harmful to adults could equally (if not more so) be harmful to children.

We know that many civil society organisations remain concerned about the lack of provisions for mis/disinformation; we will return to this issue in more detail in due course but it is notable that the Government’s response to the Joint Committee’s report, which rejected its recommendations in this area, went no further than all its previous statements on this issue during the course of the development of this legislation. Given the level of evidence-based concerns about the scale and impact of this – which are comparable to those expressed by campaigners in relation to e.g. fraud and scams, or anonymity – it is difficult to understand objectively why the Government was not prepared to consider similar concessions here.

There are two significant disinformation issues that the Bill does not address: disinformation supported by state actors and COVID disinformation. Several unaccountable civil service groups[1] exist to nudge service providers on these issues but we have no record of their effectiveness. This very direct state interference in the media gives rise to concerns. The Government should reform this system and bring disinformation firmly into the scope of the regime, putting the disinformation cells under OFCOM’s independent supervision.

[1] Dinenage-Puttnam – letter re counter disinformation cell https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/1280/documents/11300/default/