Boris is about to give Silicon Valley censors more power than ever

Four years in the making, the Online Safety Bill has now been sent to senior ministers for review — a process that allows them to protest, to shout if anything obvious that has been missed. In this case, the process is invaluable because something huge has been missed. The Bill, if passed, would empower the Silicon Valley firms it’s designed to suborn. It would formalise and usher in a new era of censorship of UK news — run from San Francisco. This Bill would backfire in a way that its Tory advocates have so far proven unable to understand let alone address. That’s why it needs to be halted, and a rethink ordered.

The original aim is to make Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others liable for any genuine filth promoted online. But introducing a new test of ‘legal, but harmful’ would vastly expand a bot-censorship system that is disfiguring public debate already. Politicians struggle to understand this, thinking instead that the BBC is their proper target. For all its faults, the risk of BBC bias is as nothing compared with the risk of asking woke Silicon Valley executives to police digital news by deciding between them what’s ‘harmful’ and what’s not.

I write about this in the Telegraph today. But I’d like to say more about how smaller publications like The Spectator, who rely on digital reach to grow, are already now doing daily battle against the censorship bots in a way that already sends a message from Big Tech: stay away from controversial topics, or your business will suffer.