UK’s Online Safety Bill To Criminalize Dick Pics… And Hold Social Media Companies Liable For Any That Are Sent

The UK’s euphemistically named Online Safety Bill is a disaster waiting to happen. The crux of the bill: any time anything bad happens online, we blame internet companies for it and take some of their money. As the bill has continued to go through discussions, it’s been getting worse and worse. The latest is that in an effort to criminalize the sending of unsolicited dick pics, the UK is going to add that to the Online Safety Bill. They refer to it as “cyberflashing” and liken it to other forms of indecent exposure.

And you can make an argument that sending unsolicited dick pics should be a criminal offense, but you do have to wonder about how this is all going to turn out when rather than focusing the blame on, you know, the people sending the dick pics, you instead blame social media companies.

The culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, said: “The forthcoming online safety bill will force tech companies to stop their platforms being used to commit vile acts of cyberflashing. We are bringing the full weight on individuals who perpetrate this awful behaviour.”

If you’re bringing the full weight on “individuals who perpetuate this awful” behavior, then, um, why are you putting it in a bill that holds the tools they use responsible, rather than focusing it on the actual individuals? It really doesn’t sound like you’re putting the full weight on the individuals. It sounds like you’re putting it on the companies with a lot of money which have no way to completely stop idiots from sending dick pics.

Everything about this is silly and backwards. The government’s own announcement cites two studies with somewhat conflicting results (one says 76% of girls between 12-to-18 have been sent unsolicited dick pics and the other says 40% of women aged 18-to-34 have been sent such images — which, at the very least, perhaps suggests that dick pic sending is more common among… kids?). So first off, either number is crazy and I think it’s fair to say that no one should be receiving unsolicited dick pics. Second, if it’s true that it’s that prevalent, it certainly suggests some much larger underlying issue is happening here, and I’m not at all sure that’s solved by… fining social media companies (or, honestly, throwing idiot dick pic senders to jail).

Either way, dumping things like this into the Online Safety Bill seems ridiculous. How, exactly, are internet companies supposed to magically stop idiot teens whose frontal cortex hasn’t fully developed enough to learn how to talk to girls, from sending photos of their junk to those girls?

Once again, this all seems to go back to the same point that we’ve discussed before: so many of these internet regulations are implicit admissions from governments that there are these large societal problems that the government has no idea how to solve and, rather than admitting or recognizing that, it’s just throwing it at tech companies and saying “you guys solve this impossible societal problem, or we’ll fine you massively.”