Peter Kyle, the UK’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, has said freedom of speech does not extend to “the right or the opportunity to harm others”, and refused to rule out revisiting draconian prohibitions on so-called ‘legal but harmful’ speech that were stripped out of the Online Safety Act prior to enactment.
In an interview with The House magazine, Kyle said: “I take a very different view on free speech than Elon Musk does. Not that free speech isn’t important, because my God it is. These are the things that you die in a ditch over when it comes to upholding democracy.”
“But,” he added, “free speech doesn’t mean having the right or the opportunity to harm others. I think that’s where the conversation needs to be, not just with Elon Musk, but with many others.”
Following completion of his takeover of X, then Twitter, in 2022, Musk announced that he intended to grant an amnesty to all gender critical feminists who’d had their accounts suspended by the previous owners simply for stating biological facts, or raising important questions about women-only spaces. True to his word, the company then welcomed back a number of gender critical commentators, including women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen, comedy writer Graham Linehan, journalist Meghan Murphy, barrister Dennis Kavanagh and philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith.
Musk also previously allowed a number of high-profile independent journalists, including Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi to access the company’s vast archive of internal documents, with the aim of documenting how Big Tech and the U.S. federal government colluded to silence those who challenged prevailing orthodoxy on issues like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, immigration, climate change and trans ideology.
More recently, Musk was part of the backlash against Ireland’s Hate Speech Bill, which he said placed Irish people at “the mercy” of politicians and bureaucrats who would define speech they don’t like as hate speech – and pledged to fund Irish legal challenges to the legislation.
During his interview with The House, Kyle was pressed about reports that he wants to revisit controversial prohibitions on so-called ‘legal but harmful’ content that were stripped out of the Online Safety Act before it reached the statue books.
One of the provisions the Free Speech Union (FSU) and other campaign groups successfully lobbied to have taken out was a clause empowering the secretary of state at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to lay a statutory instrument identifying a list of lawful content that social media companies would be obliged to remove. We persuaded the government this would be a hostage to fortune, given the risk that a Labour secretary of state would include perfectly legitimate criticism of public policies on that list – such as Ed Miliband’s rush towards Net Zero.
Kyle responded by suggesting that the U.K. will have to be constantly alert to emerging threats and be prepared to take tough action where necessary.
“I’m about the future, not the past,” he said, “and I think the online world is evolving very fast, so whereas some of the issues which are wrapped up in legal but harmful still exist, I think actually they’re evolving.”
Unfortunately, Kyle didn’t expand on the distinction between ‘free speech’ and speech that ‘harms others’.
What we know, however, is that officials from his department – the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) – attended an “emergency” meeting hosted by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a lobby group that campaigns for more online censorship, to discuss the role of social media in fuelling the civil disorder that followed the murder of three girls in Southport.
Kyle’s staff were joined at the meeting by officials from the Home Office, Ofcom and the Counter Terrorism Internet referral Unit of the Metropolitan Police, as well as representatives of the Community Security Trust, Tell Mama, the Incorporated Society of British Advertising and current and former MPs.
Cosily enough, this little get together was held under the Chatham House rule, meaning that when CCDH published the policy recommendations that emerged from the meeting views weren’t attributed to individual participants.
The most eye-catching proposal to emerge from the meeting is that the Online Safety Act should be amended to grant Ofcom – one of the bodies represented at CCDH’s conflab – additional “emergency response” powers to fight “misinformation” that poses a “threat” to “national security” and “the health or safety of the public”.
Unfortunately, the stipulation that these new powers would only be used in an “emergency” or a “crisis” isn’t particularly reassuring, politically or epistemologically: “politically”, in that such terms have a remarkable tendency to expand to suit the agenda of our would-be censors; “epistemologically”, in that the difference between “misinformation” and a “plausible hypothesis” – the lab leak theory of COVID-19’s origins, for instance – is often little more than the passage of time.
CCDH’s proposal would involve amending the section 175 “special circumstances” directive created by the Online Safety Act to enable Kyle, as the Secretary of State for DSIT, to issue a “directive” to Ofcom to ramp up its censorship powers if the Government feels there is a threat to national security or to the health and safety of the public.
Not only that, but the “objective” he would be “directing” Ofcom to prioritise, e.g. what online content to remove, would be defined by him.
So what is Kyle likely to regard as a threat to public safety?
We’re frequently told by environmental lobbyists that we’re in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ – indeed, as far back as 2018, Mr Kyle was boasting to his constituents of how he and his Labour Party colleagues had “managed to force the Government to declare a climate emergency”.
So what guarantee is there that he wouldn’t persuade himself that ‘climate denial’ – which in a report published earlier this year the CCDH defined as “arguments used to undermine climate action” – is causing significant harm to the health or safety of the public and issue a directive to Ofcom to remove this dangerous ‘misinformation’?
You might think: “So what? Climate denialism is ridiculous, potentially harmful, and should be removed from social media.”
The difficulty, however, is that while it’s indisputable that average global temperatures have increased since the mid-19th Century, lots of people, including climate scientists, hold a range of different views about the causes and effects of climate change and that in turn influences their opinion about the best way to tackle it – or, indeed, whether “climate action”, as CCDH describes it, is possible or necessary. Different solutions to tackling climate change are informed by different values and recommending one approach over another inevitably involves making a political choice. There is no-such thing as an apolitical, ‘scientific’ solution and, therefore, it is a dishonest sleight-of-hand to categorise dissent from one particular solution as ‘misinformation’.
Ofcom is of course free to meet under the Chatham House rule with as many think tanks as it likes – but under the proposals put forward by CCDH the regulator would become a weapon of censorship wielded by the Government.
