I feel this is important to share on this site but not sure where else to share it.
Relevant extracts:
While the US, as it stands, is currently a vacuum for both online safety legislation and federal privacy protection laws, what’s happening elsewhere will undoubtedly impact how platforms behave globally.
This was the backdrop for the one-day FOSI event, sponsored by tech giants like Amazon, Google, and TikTok, which brought in high-profile guests like UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology and keynote speaker Michelle Donelan; Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter; and Ofcom Group Director of Online Safety Gill Whitehead. Industry vendors and consultants, like Crisp and GoBubble, also spoke alongside public policy representatives from YouTube, Epic Games, and more.
The panel's moderator – Unbossed Creative Founder Bridget Todd – asked what role the government should have in transparency, content moderation, and more. Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project, prefaced her response with an explanation that, as a US First Amendment lawyer, she has a “very deep skepticism of government involvement” and is aware that transparency legislation “can actually be a Trojan Horse” for governments to put pressure on platforms to moderate content in their favor. “That being said, the DSA exists. And it is going to have profound effects on online content,” Ruane said.
“The DSA and other types of regulation are not about ‘what is allowed’ and what is not, it’s more about how you do things and the procedures,” said ActiveFence CEO and Co-founder Noam Schwartz. This means looking under the hood of how shadowbanning works, and allowing users to flag and appeal issues they have around content moderation. “The DSA is going to be a major thing. The GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] changed everything for the internet, and the DSA will also change everything. It is this thing that cannot be stopped,” he added.
While Ruane thinks much of the DSA wouldn’t pass constitutional muster in the US, such as requirements to audit speech moderation decisions or measurements of systemic risk, what platform policies and decisions are made in the European Union could soon be applied in the US, too. “To some extent, what I think the government's involvement in content moderation should or shouldn't be, doesn't matter, even though I wish it did. It's already happening. We are already seeing governments involving themselves in content moderation in the EU. We’ve got some good safeguards, but there are also some significant concerns,” Ruane said.
Mike Pappas, CEO of Modulate, which provides studios like Activision with AI-driven voice chat moderation software, believes that the best means for solving regulatory fracture is likely through industry-informed government entities. “Given that we have the DSA, the UK Online Safety Act, the eSafety Commission out in Australia, the Singapore Online Safety Bill, we have other bills in India and other places, something needs to bring all those things together into a consistent story for industry and platforms,” Pappas said. He hopes increased engagement with government players will help bring clarity to industry on how to straddle those different lines, and “find some way to bridge that together into something more consistent and less fractured.”
Make a note of the name Gill Whitehead, a key attendee of the conference. She's Ofcom's "Group Director for Online Safety". Coincidentally, she also just so happens to be a senior executive over at the NatWest Group, a British bank partnered with Visa and Mastercard. If you allow me to wear my tinfoil hat for a moment, this is slightly concerning. Why?
Because it means someone who has a role in shaping and enforcing such mandates in the UK under the Online Safety Act, is now:
* Engaging in cross-border collaboration with other regulators (e.g, FTC, EU Digital Services Act (DSA) officials).
* Doing so in a space heavily influenced by corporations with strong incentives to harmonize speech controls globally in ways that align with their bottom lines.
What we essentially have here is proof that governments are outsourcing censorship to corporations, corporations are welcoming regulation to standardize compliance and lock out competitors, and independent democratic oversight is being bypassed.
Add in her NatWest background, and a bigger picture emerges:
* Online safety regulation influences what people are allowed to say.
* Financial networks (Visa, Mastercard, banks) increasingly influence who can earn, spend, or participate online.
* When the same figures or networks are active in both domains, it creates the capacity for coordinated suppression.
For example: A "harmful" speaker or platform flagged by an online safety regulator might soon find themselves deplatformed not just from social media, but also from their bank or payment processor. We've already seen this happen in other contexts (e.g. WikiLeaks, OnlyFans, Canadian trucker protests, etc.).
TL;DR: This is an international effort that won't stop at the UK. It simply passed in the UK first because of its weak protections for freedom of speech. The Family Online Safety Institute's primary aim appears to be to spread this top-down Internet regulation multinationally. If successful, this would create a consolidated system where governments, corporations, and banks quietly coordinate to control both what people can say online and how they access money, all with little transparency or democratic input.
EDIT: Slight correction. Gill Whitehead is no longer in the position as Group Director for Online Safety. She's currently chair of the Global Online Safety Regulators Network, which Ofcom is affiliated with and includes online safety regulators in numerous other countries. In other words, she has
advanced her position since the article I linked was published.
