In April 2020, BT chief executive Phil Jansen reported that 39 of his engineers had recently been assaulted by conspiracy theorists who imagined a connection between 5G networks and the spread of Covid-19. Over the same period, 80 separate attacks were reported on UK mobile network infrastructure. Of the 2,000 respondents to a 2020 Ofcom survey, half claimed that, in the past week alone, they had encountered disinformation online that made fantastical assertions as to the origins of Covid-19. Just as the suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell ushered a powerful reminder of the vulnerability of young children on online platforms that accommodate graphic content, recent events have exposed how perpetrators can easily exploit these platforms to tap into our natural propensity for wishful thinking, confirmation bias, inattention, and groupthink.
There is growing popular support for the increasing regulation of online content on social media platforms. An Ofcom report from 2019, aptly titled ‘Online Nation’, found that as many as 70% of adults in the UK would support additional regulations. The size of the FANG and other companies – Facebook has 45 million users in the UK, Instagram 24 million and Twitter 14 million – has contributed to growing popular support for more robust controls over what we see and read.
By contrast to the relatively stringent regime that governs radio and television broadcasting, the regulation of digital content platforms in the UK is remarkably sparse. During an address to the Royal Television Society in September 2018, former OfCom chief Sharon White (now CEO at John Lewis) lamented a ‘standards lottery’. Although there is statutory law that encompasses anticompetitive behaviour, advertising practices and data protection, there is minimal legislative oversight of user-generated online content. At present, the EU e-Commerce Directive of 2000 is the central authority. Mirroring the much-maligned Section 230 of America’s Communications Decency Act of 1996, the directive classes user-generated content platforms as ‘neutral, merely technical and passive’ intermediaries, rather than direct publishers. As a consequence, their only obligation under the law is ‘to act expeditiously to remove or to disable access to’ illegal content that has been brought to their attention. Article 15 of the e-Commerce Directive explicitly prohibits the UK government from introducing measures that compel such platforms ‘to monitor the information which they transmit or store’. In other words, current legislation enforces a ‘notice and take down’ approach – and solely in the context of illegal content. As for activities that are “legal” but harmful, such as intimidation, cyberbullying and disinformation, online content platforms are, effectively, at liberty to regulate themselves.
Although Brexit may make it easier for the UK government to depart from the law of the European Union, the government has made clear that there are ‘no current plans to change the UK’s intermediary liability regime or its approach to prohibition on general monitoring requirements’. At least for the time being, the UK is set to continue to operate under the auspices of decades-old legislation originally introduced to facilitate the expansion of the fledgling internet during the dot-com boom.
But movement, whilst slow, is happening. In April 2019, the ‘Online Harms White Paper’ (OHWP) was published by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and the Home Office. Spurred by aspirations to make the UK the ‘safest place in the world to go online’, the OHWP advocated for a new regulator to supervise the activities of ‘social media platforms, file hosting sites, public discussion forums, messaging services and search engines’. Among proposals for transparency reports and more austere penalties for non-compliance, the OHWP devoted a large part of their report to a new statutory duty of care that would ensure online content platforms ‘take reasonable steps to keep their users safe and tackle illegal and harmful activity on their services’. If, as is likely, the scope of the new measures bears any resemblance to Germany’s NetzDG, only internet users based in the UK will be able to take advantage of the additional protections; it is also likely that the measures will apply exclusively to those platforms that command a significant usership.
Public consultation on the OHWP, which ran from 8 April 2019 to 1 July 2019, attracted 2,400 submissions, and the government’s response to the consultation, spearheaded by Baroness Morgan and Priti Patel, was published in February 2020. Media and some public concern viewed it as the stifling of free speech, and the government response pared back the detail of the new duty of care. Proposals now state that relevant companies will need to ensure that ‘illegal content is removed expeditiously’, but they will retain full autonomy as to ‘what type of legal content or behaviour is acceptable on their services’. Plans for the online harm’s regulator – i.e. OfCom – to draw up ‘codes of practice relating to all forms of abusive behaviour online’ have since been moderated. Proposals now state that ‘we do not expect there to be a code of practice for each category of harmful content’. Diluted ambitions aside, much of the material remains unclear (not least, which organisations will actually be caught by the regulatory changes), and the interim report on the OHWP is consciously framed as an ‘iterative step’ in an ongoing debate.
Writing in the Evening Standard in 2018, Matt Hancock declared that ‘the days of an unregulated Wild West are over’. Hancock’s move to the Department of Health, and his absorption by the pandemic, has understandably deflected his interest. In May 2020, Minister Caroline Dinenage indicated to the Home Affairs Committee that a full response to the OHWP, to supplement the interim findings from February, would ‘probably’ emerge in the autumn. It has not done. Wary of the optimism trap, Chair of the Lords Democracy and Digital Committee, Lord Puttnam, has suggested that a functional bill may not enter the fray until 2023 or 2024.
Legislators will be negotiating the delicate balance between freedom of expression and online safety. There will be further calls for assurance that the cure is not worse than the disease – that the greater regulatory burden will not incentivise risk-averse behaviour from online platforms; in particular, frequent and heavy-handed content takedowns. Not only will stricter time pressures evoke human error, but some perceive a danger that online content platforms will leverage imperfect AI and machine-learning algorithms to intervene at the scale that new laws demand. In March 2020, Facebook’s head of safety, Guy Rosen, attributed the false flagging of creditable posts about Covid-19 to a ‘bug in an anti-spam system’. Against strong public pressure for change, the problem is that there are no clear regulatory or technical solutions that yet have a consensus.
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We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email webrequests@digitalis.com
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to webrequests@digitalis.com