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The Free Speech Union has been lobbying the government about the impacts of the bill on freedom of expression.
FSU founder Toby Young wrote in The Spectator that the new version of “the Online Safety Bill seems, on the face of it, to be an improvement on the previous one” but that “the devil will be in the detail.”
“Another objection to the previous version is that, according to its provisions, the list of legal content that was harmful to adults was going to be included in a statutory instrument and not in the bill itself,” a Free Speech Union spokesman told The Epoch Times by email. “One concern free speech groups had is that after this list had been drawn up it could easily be added to by another statutory instrument, whether by this government or the next, creating an anti-free speech ratchet effect,” he said. “That would have been a hostage to fortune,” he added.
Owen Evans, The Epoch Times, 30th November 2022.
