Four years in the making, the Government’s long-awaited Bill to ‘rein in’ the tech companies looks set to do precisely the opposite. The Bill, due within weeks, will create new rules for online speech in the image of Silicon Valley, and in doing so, rewrite the rules for free speech in Britain.

Earlier this week, several respected Conservative ex-ministers – Lord Frost, Sir John Hayes, David Davis and Steve Baker – all urged caution about the Online Safety Bill, signalling a growing revolt. Their concerns are echoed by human rights and civil liberties groups. As Lord Frost put it, aspects of the Bill “present a real risk to freedom of expression in this country” and the Government should “pause, have further discussion, and get things right”.

More discussion is indeed needed. But more discussion is precisely what we’ll have much less of under this Bill.

Calls for online regulation have been driven by genuine internet-based harms that concern all of us. Paedophilia, sex crimes, digital stalking, racist abuse, violent threats, and fraud are all rife on the internet and there is a clear need for criminal offences offline to be more effectively dealt with online.

However, the long promise of the Bill has opened an opportunity for it to become the dustbin for unpopular speech. Discussions on anything from self harm and mental health to pandemic policies and vaccines are set to be strictly limited under the Bill, backed by state regulators. Faced with growing zealotry for censorship over recent years, including from the Labour benches and (strangely) from within our free press, ministers have relied on the prospects of online regulation to banish speech from the internet dangled before them in interviews that are too uncomfortable to defend.

The social media companies have been doing this for years. PR and branding concerns have overtaken free speech values at high speed, and we are fast exchanging our long-fought-for right to free expression for Americanised terms and conditions dreamt up by techbros in Silicon Valley.

There are few clearer examples of PR-driven censorship than the gender debates. In my own research of social media censorship for Big Brother Watch’s report, The State of Free Speech Online, I found scores of feminist campaigners, journalists and lawyers suspended and banned from sites like Twitter for posting statements as unremarkable as “men aren’t women”, and scores of trans people censored for using terms like “cis” to describe gender-critical feminists who don’t like the term. People’s careers have been stunted and reputations damaged by this Big Tech silencing, and the debate on sex and gender rights was not cleansed but rather toxified by the added aggravation of foreign companies’ constant censorship – which seemed to be wielded for whichever side of the argument was perceived to have more power at any given time.

And yet, whilst Twitter was censoring and punishing people for their views on sex and gender-based rights, I easily found extreme porn videos depicting rape and kidnap fantasies with women gagged, bound, and drenched in fake blood on the social media platform.

This was not a case of Twitter failing to act on its own policies – it is a correct implementation of Twitter’s policies, which are liberal about extreme porn and illiberal about women’s rights.

The Online Safety Bill would, absurdly, make Ofcom responsible for ensuring tech companies uphold the policies in their terms and conditions. But these are rules that are totally out of step with British law and free speech principles.

The British public want the law upheld online – not the rules of Silicon Valley speech police. We want freedom of expression preserved, not subdued for the brand-driven politics of foreign companies. That’s why Lord Frost is quite right that this Bill must be reviewed. As a starting point, powers which target so-called “legal but harmful” speech, formerly known to you and me as lawful or “free” speech, must be removed from the Bill.

Harm has no serious definition in the Bill and we must recognise the harm of censorship, too. As competing world powers grow ever more draconian, we must walk the walk when it comes to democracy. Now is not the time for a Censors’ Charter, but the time to redouble our commitment to the liberal values British democracy is built on.