 Details have emerged about the Government's planned online harms bill, a new law intended to curb abuse and misinformation online. According to the Times, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has accepted recommendations from the Law Commission that the characterization of criminal online abuse should, in the bill, be based on the likely psychological harm that online messages might cause to their victims. This would be a shift from current law which defines illegal online speeches based on what messages actually contain, so what's in the message, not the effect they might have, so currently it would include things like indecent or grossly offensive content. It would be a dramatic change, what's more, causing psychological damage will not be the only new offence in the online harms bill. The Times Report A new offence of threatening communications will target messages and social media posts that contain threats of serious harm. It would be an offence where somebody intends a victim to fear the threat will be carried out. A knowingly false communication offence will be created that will criminalize those who send or post a message they know to be false with the intention to cause emotional, psychological or physical harm to the likely audience. Offence sources gave the example of anti-vaxxers spreading false information that they know to be untrue. The new offences will include so-called pylons where a number of individuals join others in sending harassing messages to a victim on social media. Lots of different kinds of online communication there, which is potentially going to be criminalized. Misinformation, causing harm, pylons, ash, what do you make of this? This is briefings to The Times, obviously they haven't published the bill, but is it time to send Twitter trolls to jail and criminalize pylons? When it comes to the pylon stuff, this is going to be impossible to legislate and even more difficult to enforce. Maybe what it does is that it forces Twitter into rejigging its algorithm so it directs people away from quote tweets, it's what it sort of shifted people towards and back into replies. This matter of what is a pylon, what it means to participate in it and how you prove the intention is very, very tricky indeed because yes, you do have cases where you've got organized brigading, where on a different platform you have trolls organized to harass, abuse and threaten one individual or a set of individuals. Something that's happened to me and it's fairly easy to see where that's been the case. There is a digital footprint which is left by people and so you can kind of tell when you've been a victim of that level of coordination and obviously social media platforms should be doing more to stop that from happening. That's a really bad use of the platform. But a pylon where you get accused of participating in a pylon, if you quote tweet in response to somebody's quote tweeted you first, you've got MPs claiming that they're being bullied when people are quite politely saying, hey, why did you vote against an amendment which would have stopped raw sewage being pumped into our rivers? What it means to be the victim of a pylon is unconscionably broad and I think there's room for an awful lot of cynical misuse of that. We see people who tend to be protected to some degree by being part of the establishment, whether they're politicians or whether they're journalists, framing, criticism and sometimes lighthearted insults as abuse, harassment and a pylon and so I wouldn't want to see that outlawed far from it. I think that that's actually a sign of a healthy and participative political discussion where all parties can speak back to each other. So I think that this would be a very bad law if it actually came into effect. I'm skeptical of the ability to draft this as a piece of legislation for it to be effectively enforced but even if it was just one of those laws which is sort of chucked into the atmosphere without any real expectation of there being prosecutions under it, I think that this could have a real effect on how social media platforms function and I think that it would have a stifling and censoring impact on freedom of speech. Given its implications for free speech, one might have assumed this bill, the online harms bill, would be subject to widespread political scrutiny and debate, however it appears that may not be the case. In the wake of the tragic death of David Amos, Keir Starmer made the following pledge at PMQ's. It's three years since the government promised an online safety bill but it's not yet before the House. Meanwhile, the damage caused by harmful content online is worse than ever. So we'll have promised to build on the desire shown by this House on Monday to get things done and commit to bring forward the second reading of the online safety bill by the end of this calendar year. If he does, we'll support it. What we're doing is ensuring that we crack down on companies that promote illegal and dangerous content and we'll be toughening up those provisions but what we're also going to do is ensure that the online safety bill does complete its stages before this House before Christmas and I'm delighted or rather we do bring it forward before Christmas in the way that he suggests and I'm delighted Mr Speaker that he is offering his support and we look forward to that. Really bizarre. You'll note that what we've just told you about the online harms bill, that's not even official information, that's what's been briefed to the Times and that was only briefed today. So weeks ago, Keir Starmer was saying, I'm going to vote for a law which you are or a bill sorry that you're going to introduce before I have any idea whatsoever is in it. This isn't like a bill about what day the bins get collected. This is quite significant because it's about criminalizing speech, it's about determining what part of political discourse is not legitimate. So you'd have thought he'd at least forensic Keir Starmer would at least want to read the bill before committing to vote for it. Ash, what's going on here? Clearly a political decision was made that this is not an argument Labour want to have so the Tories now have a blank check to put whatever they want in that bill. I think that there's sort of two core audiences that Keir Starmer is speaking to and he's giving his unqualified support to a bill which has I think a severe risk of curtailing lawful political expression to audiences that he's talking to. The first audience, I would say is a kind of amorphous network of concerned parents who've got concerns about the internet's impact on their kids but don't really know how to deal with it and those concerns I think are legitimate particularly thinking about the impact that Instagram has been having on teenagers and body. This is something which has come out with the leaks contained within the Facebook papers and the testimony of Francis, is it Horgan? Is that how I pronounce her name or is it Horne? It's one of those names I've only ever read, I'm so sorry. But Facebook has been aware of the detrimental mental health impacts associated for their apps and essentially they didn't want to do anything about it because it could have risked even a smidgen of profit. So I think that there's concerns that parents have are legitimate. I just think that this very broad sweeping bill which I think seeks to allay those fears without getting into the core problems which is how do we have democratic oversight of these social media platforms that we've come to rely on so much is mistaken and misleading. So that's audience one. Audience two is the culture that exists in and around Westminster where you've got a lot of journalists and a lot of politicians with a highly inflated sense of self who really do think that agonising is a form of attempted murder who are incredibly thin skinned who don't see their own action in demonising individuals and particularly marginalised communities as being in the same level or order of harm as somebody calling them bald on the internet. And I think that he's trying to get in quite nicely with these columnists. I think Michael, me and you have had some run-ins with as well where we've had completely fatuous allegations of bullying simply because we've done things like stand up for our organisation and point out where we've been treated unfairly. And these are the kind of people that Kirsten are speaking to, people who are exceptionally thin skinned and don't want freedom of speech. You're indeed a marketplace of ideas. What they want is a stranglehold on the public discourse where they get to talk from the top of the mountain and no one gets to talk back. I mean, it's also another one of those situations where I think a focus group has told Kirsten that we want the political parties to come together. There's too much disagreement. And so he says, I'll do what they want. I'll stand up and say, I agree with the government, which is not what you should do. People think he plays politics because he plays politics. If you disagree on issues of substance, people won't think that.