TheEconomistNovember 9th 2019 491I
n 2016 theWorld Health Organisation
(who) declared Britain to be officially
free from measles, a highly infectious ill-
ness that killed about 110,000 people
around the world in 2017. The success was
short-lived. After 991 infections were re-
corded in England and Wales in 2018, the
whorevoked Britain’s disease-free label.
Cases of measles are rising in many
countries, fuelled in part by conspiracy
theories claiming that vaccines given to
children cause autism (they do not). “Anti-
vaxxers” have long used internet forums
and social media to spread their nonsense.
Matt Hancock, Britain’s health minister,
would like to see that stopped. In March he
said that internet giants such as Facebook
and Google should have a “duty of care” to
their users, putting them in the same legal
position as schools or doctors. If firms
would not stop the spread of anti-vaccina-
tion messages voluntarily, said Mr Han-
cock, he would consider changing the law
to force them to do so.
An election is due in December, so Mr
Hancock may not get his way—though the
opposition Labour Party is also keen. ButBritain is far from alone. In recent months
attention has focused on the threat to big
internet companies from trustbusting pol-
iticians in America. Now they face a second
regulatory assault elsewhere. Citing rea-
sons ranging from combating terrorism to
safeguarding elections to discouraging
self-harm, politicians around the world are
increasingly eager to censor the material
that appears on the tech giants’ platforms.
Many authoritarian governments al-
ready restrict what their citizens see on-
line. China has heavily censored the inter-
net since its early days; Twitter and
Facebook are banned outright. Iran also
outlaws Facebook. Saudi Arabia restricts
access to information on everything from
gay rights and evolution to Shia Islam. Atti-
tudes are hardening in democracies, too.
Rather than simply being blocked, big tech
firms face a raft of new laws controlling
what they can host on their platforms.
This marks a big change for a global in-
dustry that has, until now, been run on
techno-libertarian assumptions. “Most of
the big internet companies come from an
American speech tradition,” says OwenBennett of the Mozilla Foundation, which
campaigns for an open internet. There was,
he says, an assumption that the liberal atti-
tude to speech embodied in the First
Amendment to America’s constitution
would spread as the internet did. When the
internet was young and unimportant, the
frictions that it caused in countries with
other ideas about free speech could mostly
be ignored. Now that it is enormous and vi-
tal, they are pushing back.
In June, for instance, Singapore passed
the Protection from Online Falsehoods and
Manipulation Act. The city-state’s bossy
government presented it as an anti-“fake
news” bill. It bars the dissemination of on-
line lies deemed to be against the public in-
terest, on pain of fines of up to $1m or ten
years in jail. Singapore’s government de-
fines the public interest expansively. The
law penalises falsehoods that would inter-
fere with “public tranquillity” or “diminish
public confidence in the performance of
any duty or function of...the Government”.
Firms can be required to block access to
content found to be in breach of the law,
and to tell users that such content is false,
even to the point of getting in touch with
them after they have already seen it.
Britain’s proposed laws are notable for
their focus on things that are merely unde-
sirable, rather than downright illegal. Be-
sides demanding more effort to combat
child pornography and the promotion of
terrorism, they take aim at hard-to-define
things such as hate, abuse and misogyny,
as well as the glamorisation of suicide. TheThe splinternetNet loss
Countries are increasingly willing to censor speech online.
That will make life hard for the tech giantsInternational