UK Riots: How the Right-Wing Press Fought to Stop Laws to Combat Online Disinformation

Given the entirely false online claims about the murders in Southport, followed by widespread rioting, the question that has been asked persistently over the past few days is: “Aren’t there any laws against spreading disinformation online?”

The concise answer is: none, specifically. However, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003 and the Defamation Act 2013 all contain provisions that can be used against disinformation of certain kinds, albeit in a very limited range of instances.

As for the new and much-cited Online Safety Act 2024, its “false communications offence” is far too narrowly drawn to engage the kinds of online material which have given rise to such concern in recent days.

But as disinformation has been a subject of widespread consternation since long before the riots, how come at least its most serious manifestations are not proscribed by law?

A good part of the answer lies in a virulent campaign against any such legislation conducted by bodies representing Britain’s most powerful press interests, namely the News Media Association (NMA) and the Society of Editors (SoE).

The most recent chapter of this story goes back to the publication of the Online Harms White Paper in April 2019 which announced the Government’s intention to create a new statutory regulatory framework for the online world.

This would involve imposing a “duty of care” on online providers and requiring them to remove materials “that may not be illegal but are nonetheless highly damaging to individuals or threaten our way of life in the UK”.

You’d have thought that much of the national press, which had been campaigning for internet censorship ever since the World Wide Web opened to the public in the early 1990s, would have been delighted.

However, when the press bosses discovered that “threats to our way of life” included “disinformation” and “false or misleading information”, it dawned on them that those who have for so long campaigned against the debased standards of many of our national newspapers would need no invitation to invoke any such measure against their online editions.

So war was declared. In its submission to the consultation initiated by the White Paper, the SoE stated that “there must be a clear and stated total exemption from the proposed laws and regulations/regulator for recognised media” and insisted that steps must be taken “to ensure no future government can tamper with the Online Harms law to attempt to regulate the media”.

This was as nothing compared to the furious and declamatory response from the NMA which ran to 17 pages and featured copious bold type, sometimes even with the addition of underlining.

This commanded the Government to exclude the press entirely from the online harms arrangements (“exemption” and its cognates occur no less than 52 times), stating that it was “imperative” that news publishers and their content are “wholly exempt from the proposed regime”.

Exemptions must be “all-encompassing and enduring, without any potential loophole that could be exploited to induce regulatory action, or legal claim, or state repression, or over- cautious censorship by third party distributors”.

Entirely unsurprisingly, the Conservative Government did its utmost to give the Conservative party-in-the-press exactly what it wanted. Just how comprehensively they did so can be gathered by examining the press exemption clauses in the Online Safety Act, which was the eventual offspring of the Online White Paper.

The Act completely exempts from its remit content produced by a “recognised news publisher”, defined as one whose principal purpose is the publication of “news-related material”.

To qualify for exemption, this material has to be created by a number of different people, be subject to editorial control, and published in the course of a business (profit-making or otherwise). The publisher must be subject to a standards code, have policies and procedures for handling and resolving complaints, and have a registered business address in the UK.

“News-related” material is defined sufficiently broadly to encompass exactly the kind of tendentious opinion-mongering, dog-whistling and truth-stretching that passes for “journalism” in much of the national press.

Accordingly, such material consists of “news or information about current affairs, opinion about matters relating to the news or current affairs, and gossip about celebrities, other public figures or other persons in the news”.

Furthermore, the Act specifically exempts what many would regard as the most poisonous and hate-filled sections of online national titles, namely “comments and reviews on provider content”.

The requirements for a “standards code” and “policies and procedures for handling and resolving complaints” are clearly satisfied by the existence of industry body, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), even though its record of upholding standards and dealing with complaints is lamentable.

Apart from giving British newspaper publishers a free online pass, what this broadly-worded exemption also does is effectively create a loophole that could quite easily be exploited by unscrupulous actors simply masquerading as “news publishers” in order to spread disinformation – or worse.

A possible candidate could be Channel3 Now, the shadowy “news outlet” which was the first to spread disinformation about the Southport murders.

It wouldn’t be difficult formally to comply with the requirements for exemption as such a publisher, and by the time the scam was discovered, the damage could well have been done.

But there’s more. Content from a recognised news publisher which has been posted and shared on social media, whether in full or in the form of a link, is still exempt from the terms of the Act.

If a platform wishes for some reason to remove or moderate such a post it will first have to go through a lengthy and laborious process informing the publisher of the nature of the action that they’re considering taking, giving reasons for that action and explaining how they’ve taken into account the importance of the free expression of journalistic content when deciding to take it.

Bearing in mind the aggressive and bellicose attitude of the NMA and SoE to any form of regulation of their online titles, it would be a brave – or foolhardy – platform to take on one of their members.

This aspect of the press exemption is of particular concern because so much of the inflammatory material that appears on social media, particularly with regard to refugees, asylum seekers, Muslims and other hate groups, actually has its origins in Britain’s right-wing national press.

This may be in the form of specific stories, many of which are wildly inaccurate, when not downright false, or in the steady drip-drip-drip of poison over the past 40 years or so.

It’s utterly immaterial that fewer and fewer people actually read these papers – it’s what leeches out of them into the online world that really matters.

And whilst newspapers are past masters at keeping within the law – just – or simply presuming that no-one will be willing or able to take them on, no such restraints are shown by those who amplify their bigotry and bile on social media.

Such papers know better than to openly incite violence and racial hatred, but behind the barricades they’re assiduously pouring petrol into the Molotov cocktails, ready for others to throw.

Effective online regulation is most certainly necessary – although it’s not going to be delivered by the Online Safety Act, particularly as overseen by Ofcom- but even more important is effective press self-regulation, as recommended by the Leveson Inquiry.

However, as our Prime Minister is now being treated with utter contempt by tech titan Elon Musk and the Government has abandoned any commitment to Leveson 2, neither seems exactly likely. And thus we reap the whirlwind.