From the UK’s Online Safety Bill to the German NetzDG legislation, an increasing number of national governments are implementing legislation to address “online harms” and create a safer online environment. While the details of these national bills differ, they broadly seek to create new duties of care on online platforms to remove illegal and “legal but harmful” content from their services. To achieve this goal, these bills utilise a variety of mechanisms for ensuring accountable online safety practices are met, including requirements for platforms to disclose their removal practices, disabling certain kinds of content within a set period of time, and requiring the adoption of automated moderation technologies. In some cases, these proposed bills also create new regulatory powers to audit and inspect the prevalence of harmful material on a platform and assess a company’s moderation practices.
While many of these bills are still in draft, they have raised serious concerns with civil society organisations around how various “harms” are defined and whether they raise conflicts with commitments to free expression. In some cases, national bills have come under fire for failing to adequately meet their stated objective of keeping users safe. As new bills emerge in Canada and the UK, the time is ripe for a discussion about what lessons we can draw from the objectives, effectiveness, and approaches to online harms legislation in different jurisdictions.
The Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, the Ada Lovelace Institute, and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) hosted this webinar to discuss the challenges and opportunities these bills raise and how regulators charged with enforcing these powers might consider proceeding. This event brought speakers from Canada, UK, Germany, and Australia to discuss common approaches towards online safety legislation and considerations that draft bills may wish to include.
This event was chaired by Centre Research Director, Sonja Solomun, and hosted the following panelists:
Lex Gill, Research Fellow, The Citizen Lab (Canada)
Mark Bunting, Director, Online Safety Policy, Ofcom (UK)
Caio Machado, Vero Institute (Brazil)
Prabahat Agerwal, European Commission (EU)
Daphne Keller, Director of Program on Platform Regulation, Cyber Policy Center (USA)
The objectives for this event are to bridge regional conversations around online harms legislation and produce an output that we believe can help shape national legislation. Through this webinar event, we hope to share resources and thinking on what the goals of online harms legislation should be and how regulators can regulate this behavior.
This webinar will thus focus on the following four questions:
What are governments trying to achieve with online safety legislation? How are they defining the problem to solve, and what does success look like?
What policy mechanisms and requirements are available for them to meet these needs? What kinds of powers (e.g. auditing, assessment) or requirements (e.g., transparency reports are necessary)?
What role do civil society organisations and others have to play in these bills?
How do we ensure international coordination and cooperation on these issues?