Ministers threatened Wednesday night to derail a Labour attempt to regulate the British press through government control.
Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary, is guiding an Online Safety Bill through Parliament to combat online hate speech.
The bill offers exclusions for the media, making it more difficult to delete their content.
However, a Labour MP has proposed an amendment to the Bill that would limit the protection to periodicals that are members of a “authorized regulator.”
This is a reference to one of the most divisive sections of the Leveson Inquiry into Press Standards, which was the need that newspapers join a state-approved regulator.
According to critics, the amendment indicates that Labour is attempting to sneak the Leveson Inquiry’s recommendations through Parliament.
‘Labour wants to silence a free press,’ a government source claimed. We will not accept this amendment, which seeks to implement Leveson through the back door.
‘The Online Safety Bill was designed to protect children safe online and make big companies accountable, but Labour has chosen to play political games instead.’
All of the main national newspapers have refused to join a state-approved regulator, claiming that doing so would imply government control of the press.
The majority of newspapers, including The Daily Mail, have instead joined the Independent Press Standards Organisation, which supervises the press but is not controlled or funded by the government.
Impress, a state-authorized regulator, has been approved by a state agency established after the Leveson probe. However, no big national newspaper is involved in this scheme.
Kim Leadbeater, MP for Batley and Spen, has proposed an amendment to the Online Safety Bill.
It claims that the provisions in the act against the removal of online media content should only apply to newspapers that are “members of an approved regulator (as specified in section 42 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013).”
This proposal, according to the MP, is intended to “extend the definition of a recognized news publisher to include any company that is a member of an approved regulator.”
‘This appears to be a Labour attempt to introduce legislation through the back door, and the Government must stand hard against it,’ said former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith.
Mrs Dorries stated that the Government would publish its own legislation, which would protect legitimate journalistic information by barring digital giants from blocking or removing it until any appeals are heard.
There are fears that it will now be published in the Lords, where the Conservatives do not have a majority, making passage more difficult.
Senior executives at major tech companies will be prosecuted if they violate their duty of care to consumers under the Online Safety Bill.
The harsh measures are being enacted in response to growing concerns that corporations like YouTube and Facebook are failing to remove damaging information.
Children’s groups and concerned families have long called for social media companies to be penalized if they fail to crack down on self-harm content.
After the death of Molly Russell, 14, who committed suicide in 2017 after viewing graphic self-harm images on Instagram, the calls grew louder.
Defenders of free speech, on the other hand, are afraid that the prospect of criminal prosecution may lead to tech corporations censoring valid information, restricting public discourse on vital matters.