UK Online Safety Bill On Hold Until New Prime Minister Named

“The bill’s well-intentioned attempts to address these very real risks threatens being the biggest accidental curtailment of free speech in modern history,” argues Tory MP David Davis. These calls from the free speech element of the Conservative Party come as news broke of the Online Safety Bill being placed on hold for the foreseeable future.

Eleanor Langford, a curation editor and politics reporter for UK news outlet PoliticsHome, reports that the government has dropped the Online Safety Bill from House of Commons as its next item of business and has shifted the bill to return to the Commons during the autumn.

This is a measure to remove the debate from the agenda “to make space for a motion of no confidence in the government due to be put to the House on Monday.” In other words, government business regarding the Online Safety Bill is delayed until a new prime minister and cabinet are named, after embattled PM Johnson has witnessed a full-fledged party mutiny due to his clear inability to be an effective leader.

The delayed action appears to have taken place after Labour MP Dame Diana Johnson, the chair of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, made a motion to insert amendments to the Online Safety Bill. This amendment text includes language that “would place a legal duty on online platforms hosting pornographic content to combat and remove illegal content through specific and targeted measure of verifying the age and consent of every individual featured in pornographic content on their sites.” The amendments were defeated by a vote of 285-220.

MP Johnson also entered into the Commons record the texts of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist turned would-be Democrat politician Nicholas Kristof.

Kristof is the former New York Times opinion contributor who authored a series of sensationalist “investigations” that miscommunicated the actions of Pornhub and other adult tube sites to monitor and remove CSAM content on their websites.  He wrote the “Children of Pornhub” column for the Times in December of 2020, and Johnson included that text for the record.  PoliticsHome reported that proponents of the Online Safety Bill have called for the bill “to place limits on ‘harmful’ pornography and content promoting ‘extreme diets.'”

Opponents of the bill, including Davis and party leadership contender MP Kemi Badenoch, warn that the bill “is going to have some serious implications for free speech.”

Boris Johnson portrait by Ben Shread of the Cabinet Office, licensed under the United Kingdom Open Government Licence v3.0.