UK seeks to ban sharing ‘positive’ Channel crossing videos online

New priority offences around immigration

The immigration offences being incorporated via the government’s amendment include section 2 of the Modern Slavery Act, making it a priority offence to arrange or facilitate the travel of another person online, and section 24 of the Immigration Act, which deals with illegal entry to the UK.

“Although the offences in Section 24 cannot be carried out online, paragraph 23 of the Schedule [7 in the Online Safety Bill] states that priority illegal content includes the inchoate offences relating to the offences that are listed,” said Donelan.

“Therefore aiding, abetting, counselling, conspiring etc those offences by posting videos of people crossing the channel which show that activity in a positive light could be an offence that is committed online and therefore falls within what is priority illegal content.”

In proactively dealing with priority offences, firms must design features, functionalities and algorithms that prevent users from encountering them in the first place, and work to minimise the length of time the content is available on their services.

Donelan added “the result of this amendment would therefore be that platforms would have to proactively remove that content” related to English Channel crossings.

James Baker, campaign and advocacy manager at Open Rights Group (ORG), said: “The government wants to stop people seeing videos that might inspire them to make crossing attempts. However, people thinking of making a crossing will be outside of the UK, viewing videos from outside the UK’s jurisdiction.

“Will this now mean RNLI videos of lifeboats rescuing people face censorship? Is the government just trying to hide the problem from us and our social media feeds?”

Monica Horten, policy manager for freedom of expression at ORG, added that there is also a fundamental question about how platform providers go about detecting and identifying this content in a social media post.

“They could block people smugglers’ accounts, but more likely in the current political climate, they will look for posts containing images of what the government does not want to see – people arriving at UK beaches in small boats – and remove them,” she said.

“The chances are they would rely on artificial intelligence techniques, or content moderation systems based on perceptual hashing. Both options entail risks of over-blocking. Lawful posts could be censored, with serious implications for public discourse in the UK.”

Horten added that section 25 of the Immigration Act, which relates to offences for assisting illegal immigration, has already been included in Schedule 7 since at least September 2022, which raised questions at the time about whether content related to Channel crossings would have to be removed by tech companies.

A previous amendment to the bill tabled by Dover MP Natalie Elphicke in December 2022 is also referenced by Donelan in her statement, which sought to tackle illegal immigration through the Online Safety Bill by adding a clause that, according to the Notices of Amendment published online, “would create a new criminal offence of intentionally sharing a photograph or film that facilitates or promotes modern slavery or illegal immigration”.

Given these previous developments, Horten said while ORG previously suspected the government was angling to use the bill to clamp down on crossings, Donelan’s statement “confirmed our fears” about what they meant in practice.

ORG and other civil society groups previously called for a complete overhaul of the Online Safety Bill in September 2022, on the basis that its measures threaten privacy and freedom of speech.

In March 2022, the UK government came under fire from lawyers, human rights groups and migrant support organisations for spending tens of millions of pounds on border surveillance technologies to deter and help punish migrants crossing the English Channel, rather than using those same resources to provide safe, legal routes into the country.