For the online safety bill to be effective, the government must grow a backbone

As the Prime Minister shuffles the deckchairs, so much in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport that is already long overdue action is at risk of being snarled up.

The most pressing issue is online safety, which cannot see any further delay. The online safety bill has seen parliamentary dramas, arcane procedures and a revolving door of ministers. The government has already set and missed countless deadlines to implement it. And the Tories have proved themselves unable to stand up to the vested interests that need to be taken on to finally keep people safe online.

Every passing week throws up another example of why stronger online regulation is urgently needed. From Andrew Tate and the damning Molly Russell inquest, to threats to democracy in Brazil and the storming of the US Capitol. All exacerbated by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, ripping up its rules and banning journalists he doesn’t like. All the while technology continues to change at pace. Nobody had even heard of TikTok when we first discussed the bill, yet today it’s one of the main ways young people get their news.

Social media platforms reach into all of our pockets. They’re in every room in your home, in every workplace, in every school, at every event, and with the rise of virtual reality, also in our heads. The need to drive constant engagement has brought about serious harms online. These don’t just affect children, but hurt our democracy, economy, society and public health.

Labour has long called for and supported the online safety bill. We worked with the government, and won significant improvements, to regulate small platforms that cause huge harms, ensuring that extremists can’t slip through the net by recruiting people on Facebook and then migrating to smaller platforms. Working cross-party, we argued that tech bosses will be criminally liable for failing to make their platforms safe – ensuring that the regulator has proper teeth to get these huge companies to sit up and take notice. As families face the Conservative cost-of-living crisis, we also won victories to crack down on online scams ripping people off.

However, there is no denying that the government bowed to vested interests and gutted and weakened the bill at the last minute. They dropped whole swathes of it, including parts covering many of the harms it was originally designed to deal with.

In failing to reconcile harms that individually are not illegal with the very nature of powerful platforms promoting engagement and outcomes that are harmful, the government has let these big tech companies off the hook and left us all more at risk.  Online hate, disinformation, abuse, racism, self-harm, eating disorders, misogyny and much more are now completely out of scope of the bill and will continue to proliferate.

This fear of taking on vested interests in online safety speaks to a wider issue with this government’s approach to tech. While the Prime Minister is keen to talk about promoting innovation – creating a new department in and of itself – he won’t address the fundamental imbalances in the digital economy.

While the promise of the digital age was to be a great equaliser, in reality we’ve seen a further concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few giants. The UK has great strengths; we are at the cutting edge of many of the technologies of the future, with a track record of fair and effective regulation. But the Tories’ inability to use the power of the state to intervene in markets that aren’t working, to drive innovation and growth across the country for consumers and small companies and to lay the foundations of digital infrastructure and skills is holding us back.

The online safety bill is now with the House of Lords, and momentum is building around a number of amendments to beef up the bill once again. I hope we will see further improvements. But for online safety and digital and technology strategy to be truly effective, the government must grow some backbone.