Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Hello and

no Tom Slater this week.

we have Spiked columnist Ella Wheeling.

Hi.

And no Tom Slater this week,

so we're delighted to welcome writer and broadcaster Emma Webb.

Thank you for having me.

Coming up on the show, the end of the free internet,

the war in Ukraine, and JK Rolling takes on the Labour Party.

So this week the UK government unveiled its long-awaited online safety bill. It's a huge piece of legislation covering all kinds of

internet activity. The government has tried to pretend that somehow this preserves freedom of speech on the internet, but it's quite clear that things are different.

It imposes a duty of care on social media companies to delete harmful but legal content. It creates new

offenses around certain forms of speech. I mean Emma what have you made of this?

I think that you know kudos yes they have tried to you know work into this some free speech protections and I don't think that this is intentional gas lighting or smoke and mirrors by saying

that this bill protects free speech it clearly does not I think that it poses a serious

threat to free speech because what it essentially does is imposes on social media companies a duty to remove content that is regarded as being legal but harmful.

Now they don't actually use the phrase legal but harmful. Now they don't actually use the phrase legal but harmful in the

current draft of the legislation. It was a phrase that was used in the

earlier white paper, but they do have this concept of in the draft

draft bills that were working up to the current piece of legislation that is being

proposed. They did include in that this idea of a content that it has a

has a psychologically adverse effect on adults. So parts of this bill are laudable

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