The ministers of UK government said technology platforms will be banned from blocking the news content in the United Kingdom until an appeal has been heard against the decision. A change to the online safety bill means that articles in breach of terms and conditions of a service cannot be removed until the publisher has been notified and has also received the verdict of any appeal to the technology platform.
The amendment to the legislation is intended to avoid a repeat of an incident in 2021 when YouTube has suddenly banned the digital station ‘TalkRadio’ from its platform for violations of YouTube’s content guidelines.
Nadine Dorries, culture secretary of the United Kingdom, said democracy mainly depends on access to high-quality journalism of the people. She added that they have seen technology companies arbitrarily removing legitimate journalism with a complete lack of transparency, and this can severely impact public discourse.
The amendment is applied to the large technology platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and is also designed to address concerns that the provisions of bill on protecting users from the harmful content can possibly encourage technology companies to remove or downgrading the content.
This new provision does not apply to the illegal content, which is known as priority offences in the bill, which is covering content like child sexual abuse and terrorist material that can be taken down without any appeal.
