Jimmy Wales: Online Safety Bill doesn't make sense
Government's blind pursuit of big tech endangers the free access web, say Wikimedia executives Jimmy Wales and Fransizka Putz
Executives at the Wikimedia Foundation took aim at the Online Safety Bill this week, claiming that sites like Wikipedia and small tech platforms are in danger of becoming collateral damage in the government's war on big tech.
Speaking at OpenUK's StateOfOpen event on Tuesday, Fransizka Putz, policy and advocacy manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, said the government's simplistic, top-down approach ignores the way the wider web works.
"Maybe the UK Online Safety Bill right now is trying to hold big tech to account for harmful content that they may host on their platforms," she said.
"That is objectively a good thing to try to do, except when you design a regulation with the idea that big tech equals the entire internet. Then platforms like Wikimedia fall to the side, and certain aspects of this regulation would be detrimental to the way that free and open knowledge projects like Wikipedia actually exist."
Wikipedia's community-based moderation could come under pressure from "stringent top-down content moderation policies that require a centralised actor," she said. "That is the exact opposite to how Wikipedia has been running as a very successful and trustworthy source of information for the past 20 plus years."
See also: The Online Safety Bill is doomed to fail
Putz continued: "Collective action and democratic participation can actually work to govern content online and to create something that at the end of the day is a public good for information. It's not information that's behind paywalls. And if we only stick to regulations like the UK Online Safety Bill, which also is going to be one of the first actor so could easily have a ripple effect in terms of influencing public policies and other countries around the world, what's going to happen to the rest of the internet, the sites that aren't big tech that we get a lot of joy from?"
Online safety is a societal issue
In a separate talk on Wednesday, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, said the effect on smaller sites and those managed by communities does not seem to have entered the government's thinking.
Could children be blocked from using Wikipedia, the web's fifth most visited site, for their homework? After all, the online encyclopedia has information on many topics that might be considered unsuitable for young people.
"Michelle [Donelan, secretary of state for science, innovation and technology] assures us this is not going to happen, but there's nothing in the bill that I can find that says why we would be exempted from this. And so that's problematic."
The government is looking to lean on tech platforms to police access, but this will require mechanisms that many smaller platforms, or community-based ones like Wikipedia, either don't have or don't want.
"She says, 'oh, we're not going to mandate which technology [they should use] but they've got lots of ways'. Well, we don't have lots of ways. We don't have lots of ways because we don't do that kind of data gathering.
"Facebook or Google or any of the major ad-serving companies have probably got a pretty good idea of a lot of things about you, your age, demographic, your income, your interests and so on. But guess what? Wikipedia deliberately gathers almost no information on anyone. It is part of our principles. And in fact, we think it's an important safety principle and a human rights principle. Go on Wikipedia, and what you're reading is your own personal private business. And we don't look into it. We don't care.
"It's the same with a lot of libraries. They are very keen not to keep records on which books people are reading, because that's just dangerous information to have. Even in safe, calm Western democracies, you don't necessarily want people knowing what books you read, that's kind of your own business."
Online safety is more of a broad societal issue than a purely tech one, he went on, that includes pressures for teenagers to look a certain way.
"It's a classic 'think of the children' debate, where it's hard to be against it because online safety for children in particular is incredibly important, and I'm very much in favour of it, but I'm not in favour of attempting it in ways that actually don't make sense.
"Certainly, young girls do get on Instagram and they start following influencers who are not healthy and all that true. But guess what? It's a deeper, more fundamental social problem. I'm not sure what the solution is, I wish I could tell you, but that's a cultural problem that we all need to struggle with."