On the trail of the Person of Ordinary Sensibilities

One of the more perplexing provisions of the draft Online Safety Bill is its multi-level definition of legal but harmful content (lawful but awful content, to give it its colloquial name).

The proposal that service providers’ safety duties under the Bill should apply to such content is in itself controversial, when users themselves – who are in the same position as authors of books - owe no duty of care in respect of the safety of their readers. Some campaigners have argued that the proposed service provider duties should be limited to illegal content at most.

But given that legal content is included, how has the government set about drawing a line between innocuous and harmful?

Read more.