Praise for Online Harms Plan, Action Needed on Fake News

Speaking at the Westminster eForum policy conference on identifying and tackling the key issues in the online space and assessing the industry’s response so far, Professor Victoria Nash, deputy director, associate professor and senior policy fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said she admired but “was anxious about the breadth” of the Online Harms whitepaper, and the lack of distinction between legal and illegal online harms.

She said she had been very pleased to see a “clear distinction between the attention that will be given to the illegal harms and an approach in the context of legal but harmful which focuses more on procedure and governance and encouraging responsible behaviors by companies rather than focusing on specific pieces of content and having them removed.”

In particular, she argued there was room to establish the role of the regulator in being able to consider how to credit those technology companies who are proactive, as well as take action against problematic issues.

Highlighting recent events, Nash said that some of these represent the issues for regulators and technology companies going forward. She flagged the issue of hate speech, as reports continue around Facebook removing adverts, which she called “a failure to deal with the rise in hateful content,” and she said that the Oxford Internet Institute’s own research has seen a rise in hate speech since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

“At a time when we are asking companies to do more and to step up and reduce this content online, the nature of that cont ..

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