Extracts from Committee stage (Commons) of the Online Safety Bill - June 7

Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab):...On clause 21, the duty of care approach is one that the Opposition support and it is fundamentally right that search services are subject to duties including illegal content risk assessments, illegal content assessments more widely, content reporting, complaints procedures, duties about freedom of expression and privacy, and duties around record keeping. Labour has long held the view that search services, while not direct hosts of potentially damaging content, should have responsibilities that see them put a duty of care towards users first, as we heard in our evidence sessions from HOPE not hate and the Antisemitism Policy Trust...

Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Chris Philp): ...If someone from the far right, as the shadow Minister described, was spewing out vile hatred, racism or antisemitism  and tried to use those clauses, the fact that they might be standing in an election might well be taken into account. However, in performing that balancing exercise, the social media platforms and Ofcom acting as enforcers—and the court if it ever got judicially reviewed—would weigh those things up and find that taking into account content of democratic importance would not be sufficient to outweigh considerations around vile racism, antisemitism or misogyny...