Tag Archives: 2022 spring conference

Last conference, I moved a vote to reference back the paper on the Nature of Public Debate. Referring a paper back – a procedural move that returns the paper to a federal committee for six months’ reworking before the next conference – is designed for cases where conference believes that the broad approach of the paper is correct but that there are notable flaws with the detail that need reworking. That was the case here, with a number of issues around the thorny issue of regulating speech on the internet that needed working out or tightening up. In my speech last autumn to move the referral back, I said that I’d be happy to sit down with the working group to iron out some of those details – that’s what I did, and members voting for that reference back has led to a far more robust paper.

The changes made to the paper are in the detail, but online regulation is a world where details can have immense ramifications. A more effective definition of algorithms has ensured that proposals to give people more control of their content viewing online are workable and effective, where the paper’s previous versions would have been impossible to enforce and risked weakening our reputation as a party able to make effective proposals on tech issues. We also clarified language on online content provision and built more explicit alignment with EU regulations into the proposals, ensuring we’re better in step with the front line globally on these issues.

We also worked to improve the focus on who the proposals are aimed at. We tightened up the definition of social media in the paper to ensure our proposals only hit companies big enough to account for them – a looser definition risked new regulations hitting smaller companies and communities, stifling competition and hurting diversity of spaces online. We clarified much more effectively, too, that people’s speech rights in online communities of any size exist with regard to the rules of those communities, not an external legal precept. As liberals, we should never want to force companies or communities to host, for example, racist speech, and we shouldn’t want it to be possible for the wealthy to threaten smaller outlets with legal battles for moderating or refusing to publish their views. The changes to the paper protect smaller forums and communities from the full scope of the new regulations, better protecting free speech and our ability to build a diverse array of different spaces for which varying rules on members’ speech will be appropriate.