LONDON — The U.K.’s controversial “Online Safety Bill” has been removed from the House of Commons business schedule next week, reportedly to be revisited “in the autumn.”
This was only hours after a motion by anti-porn activist Labour MP Dame Diana Johnson, Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, to insert amendments which in her words, “would place a legal duty on online platforms hosting pornographic content to combat and remove illegal content through the specific and targeted measure of verifying the age and consent of every individual featured in pornographic content on their sites,” was narrowly defeated 285-220.
Parliamentary insider newsletter Politics Home reported today that the Online Safety Bill — sharply criticized by privacy and digital rights advocate and promoted by supporters with overt anti-porn propaganda and generalizations — “was removed from the government’s agenda to make space for a motion of no confidence in the government due to be put to the House on Monday.”
The outlet also noted that “concerns have been raised by supporters of the bill that it could be subsequently scrapped as its return later this year will be dependent on the focus of the new Prime Minister.”
Conservative party leadership contender Kemi Badenoch, Politics Home noted, has warned the Online Safety Bill “is going to have some serious implications for free speech”.
“Free speech is no longer something we can take for granted as a commonly shared value and this shift in attitudes has [caused] some dramatic, real-world events,” Badenoch noted. “
A Labour MP Enters Religiously Inspired US Propaganda in the Parliamentary Record
Yesterday, Dame Diana Johnson took to the floor to promote amendments that implicitly created a legal category of “pornography websites,” which then would be subject to record-keeping mandates.
Those mandates would potentially also force open platforms which tolerate adult content, such as Twitter or Reddit, to reevaluate their content policies in order to not be categorized by Johnson’s amendment as “a pornography website” and forced to keep records of the age and identity of anyone appearing on any piece of sexual content posted onto the site.
In order to promote her amendments, the anti-porn Labour MP referred to blatantly tendentious “investigations” by mainstream publications and also to the work of Laila Mickelwait, a religiously inspired U.S. anti-porn activist who was until recently the mouthpiece of homophobic ministry Exodus Cry.
“Legislation requiring online platforms to verify the age and consent of all individuals featured in pornographic content on their sites,” Johnson told the House of Commons, “is backed by leading anti-sexual exploitation organizations including CEASE—the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation—UK Feminista and the Traffickinghub movement, which has driven the global campaign to expose the abuses committed by, in particular, Pornhub.”
Parroting the War on Porn rhetoric of NCOSE (formerly Morality in Media), Exodus Cry and Mickelwait, Johnson added that “Some of the world’s biggest pornography websites allow members of the public to upload videos without verifying that everyone in the film is an adult or that everyone in the film gave their permission for it to be uploaded. As a result, leading pornography websites have been found to be hosting and profiting from filmed footage of rape, sex trafficking, image-based sexual abuse and child sexual abuse.”
An Labour Advocate for Direct State Intervention on Online Content
Johnson also entered into the British Parliamentary record the words of former New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof in his sensationalistic attack on Pornhub published in December 2020.
“In 2020, The New York Times documented the presence of child abuse videos on Pornhub, one of the most popular pornography websites in the world, prompting Mastercard, Visa and Discover to block the use of their cards for purchases on the site,” Johnson said yesterday aping Kristof’s dramatic characterization of Pornhub as a site “infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.”
Advocating for direct state intervention on online content, Johnson alleged that “the owners and operators of pornography websites are getting very rich from hosting footage of rape, trafficking and child sexual abuse, and they must be held to account under the law and required to take preventive action.”
Yesterday, Dame Diana Johnson tweeted, “Today I tried to amend the #OnlineSafetyBill to require pornography websites to verify the age & consent of those featured in pornographic videos on their site. It’s time to stop these sites profiting from videos of rape, trafficking and child abuse. @APPG_CSE @LailaMickelwait”
She added, ”We lost the vote on a legal duty for age verification and consent for those featured on pornographic websites 220 votes to 285 votes. Tories voted against.”
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