How the UK government threatens to impose online censorship.

In this paper, I examine Brian Winston's defence of freedom of expression as a key Enlightenment principle and his criticisms of broadcasting regulation in the UK for departing from it. I also focus on the notion of harm, deriving from John Stuart Mill, that Winston employs to indicate where the limits of freedom of expression should lie. Winston complains that notions of offence and insult have increasingly expanded definitions of harm and so narrowed the bounds of freedom of expression. I use this critique as the starting point for an analysis of the regime of online regulation currently being proposed by the UK government in the form of the Online Safety Bill. This, I argue, threatens to create an unwieldy, unaccountable and unnecessary state apparatus of online censorship, operates with far too broad and vague a notion of harm, and will see material expelled from the online world which is entirely legal in the offline world. I conclude by examining recent proposals from the Law Commission for bringing the regulation of certain categories of online and offline communications into line, and for clarifying what is actually meant by harm in certain specific pieces of legislation. I argue that the commission's carefully delimited approach to the issue of harm in the communications sphere is greatly preferable to the regulatory Behemoth proposed by the Online Safety Bill, which would very seriously endanger the communicative freedoms espoused by Brian Winston. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]