Latest updates: bereaved families say bill has been ‘watered down’ but Michelle Donelan says it has ‘common-sense tweaks’
China’s ambassador to the UK, Zheng Zeguang, has been summoned to the Foreign Office to be told about the government’s anger about the arrest and assualt of a BBC journalist covering the protest in Shanghai, the Evening Standard’s Nicholas Cecil reports.
Michelle Donelan, the culture secretary, is being accused by the leading online safety campaign Ian Russell of watering down the online safety bill. (See 9.26am.) But Big Brother Watch, a libertarian group campaigning for freedom of speech, says Donelen has not changed the bill enough. In a statement on the changes, Mark Johnson, its legal and policy officer, said:
The government’s revival of plans to give state backing for social media companies’ terms and conditions in the online safety bill is utterly retrograde, brushes aside months of expert scrutiny, and poses a major threat to freedom of speech in the UK …
The government promised a revised online safety bill that would protect free speech. We welcome the secretary of state’s willingness to make changes to the legislation but the reheating of a junked policy that merges the censorship powers of the state and Silicon Valley is neither good for civil liberties nor safety online.
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