The International Forum for Responsible Media Blog

Month: February 2022 (Page 1 of 3)

Harm Version 4.0: the Online Safety Bill in metamorphosis, Part III, Strand 4 and What is a duty of care? – Graham Smith

Strand 4 involves the creation of new and reformed criminal offences that would apply directly to users,  in parallel with the government’s proposals for an online duty of care, the Law Commission has been conducting two projects looking at the criminal law as it affects online and other communications: Modernising Communications Offences (Law Com No 399, 21 July 2021); Hate Crime Laws (LawCom No 402, 7 December 2021). Continue reading

Harm Version 4.0: the Online Safety Bill in metamorphosis, Part II, Strands 2 and 3 – Graham Smith

The most heavily debated aspect of the government’s proposals has been, Strand 2,  the ‘legal but harmful content’ duty. In the draft Bill this comes in two versions: a substantive duty to mitigate user content harmful to children; and a transparency duty in relation to user content harmful to adults. That, at any rate, appears to be the government’s political intention. As drafted, the Bill could be read as going further and imposing a substantive ‘content harmful to adults’ duty (something that at least some of the Committees want the legislation explicitly to do). Continue reading

Harm Version 4.0: the Online Safety Bill in metamorphosis, Part I, Introduction and Strand 1 – Graham Smith

It is time – in fact it is overdue – to take stock of the increasingly imminent Online Safety Bill. The two months before and after Christmas saw a burst of activity: Reports from the Joint Parliamentary Committee scrutinising the draft Bill, from the Commons DCMS Committee on the ‘Legal but Harmful’ issue, and from the House of Commons Petitions Committee on Tackling Online Abuse. Continue reading

Article 8 as a ‘common source’ for both data protection and the tort of misuse of private information? – Helen Fenwick

This short blog post considers only one – so far largely disregarded – aspect of the decision of the Supreme Court in Lloyd v Google LLCits rejection of the argument that since Article 8 ECHR underlies both data protection and the tort of misuse of private information (MPI), the two actions should provide the same level of protection for private information. Continue reading

Law and Media Round Up – 21 February 2022

On 16 February 2022, the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in ZXC v Bloomberg [2022] UKSC 5. The judgement confirms that anonymity should be granted to those under criminal investigation until they are charged; the assumption that an investigation is private information should be taken as the “legitimate starting point” [74]. Article 10 does not provide a universal justification for inflicting serious, and often unjustified, damage on the reputations of suspects. Continue reading

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