In the fight against fake news, pornography and online hate speech, we must be careful not to break the internet

Countries including Britain and Singapore are getting tough on web content, and even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg agrees that governments should help regulate it. But they must guard against excessive Chinese-style censorship

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Governments around the world are getting tough on online hate speech and fake news, and even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg agrees that governments should help regulate content. But how much regulation is too much? Photo: AP

Published: 11:30am, 11 Apr 2019Updated: 10:36pm, 11 Apr 2019

During the Occupy Central protests in Hong Kong in 2014, there was a story of a young man who said he was fighting for the right to, well, use Facebook.

This encapsulated the whole debate, though his comment should not be understood in the context of using Facebook, WhatsApp or the internet to broadcast the establishment’s failings. Rather, it simply illustrated how people want to be left alone to live their lives, for “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

These words are from the US Declaration of Independence but it, like many important texts, articulates fundamental human aspirations. It and the US Constitution were written as a set of principles and rules to organise a new immigrant nation.

Britain, of course, has no constitution and the indecision over Brexit appears to be a systemic failure. Parliament held no less than 12 indicative votes on various alternatives and rejected all of them except the no-deal scenario, which is akin to voting to stop the tide. Fortunately, it was an indicative vote so it can be ignored.

The turmoil is actually indicative of a vibrant, flexible and successful democracy. Britain’s “anything goes” unwritten constitution is particularly able to accommodate change. Our friend from Occupy Central might have felt the future would be less bright if Facebook were banned in Hong Kong, but ironically one of the few non-Brexit issues being discussed by British legislators is internet regulation. Britain is proposing a regulator with strong powers to combat internet abuse, pornography, violent content and false information, and to penalise tech companies and individual executives if necessary.

Calls for restrictions to online communication are being echoed by democracies in New Zealand and Australia after the tragedy in Christchurch. Singapore is mulling anti-fake-news legislation – howsoever defined. Germany has enacted an online hate speech law that requires internet companies to block content including child pornography and Nazi propaganda, or pay huge fines. The European Parliament has followed up on last year’s tough privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, and passed a new law that holds internet companies liable for content that violates copyright.