UK Finally Passes Its Online Safety Bill With Controversial Scanning Provisions Intact

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Photo by Marcin Nowak on Unsplash

The UK finally passed a sweeping law, the Online Safety Bill, to regulate online content, introducing age-verification requirements for pornography sites and other rules to reduce hate speech, harassment, and other illicit material.

The Online Safety Bill, which also applies to terrorist propaganda, online fraud, and child safety, is one of the most far-reaching attempts by a Western democracy to regulate online speech. About 300 pages long, the new rules took more than five years to develop, setting off intense debates about balancing free expression and privacy against barring harmful content, particularly targeting children.

At one point, messaging services, including WhatsApp and Signal, threatened to abandon the British market altogether until provisions in the bill that were seen as weakening encryption st…