Ofcom cannot be trusted to regulate our speech
by Andrew Tettenborn, spiked:
The suspension of its online-safety director over an Israelophobic rant needs to be a big wake-up call.
Ofcom is expanding. On top of regulating all radio and TV licensed for broadcast in the UK, it’s now set to receive yet more powers. Under the Online Safety Bill (currently awaiting royal assent) and the draft Media Bill, Ofcom can look forward to getting oversight over social-media giants like Facebook and X, as well as streaming services like Netflix.
Ofcom may have jumped the gun slightly by going on a hiring spree. On Monday, a new online-safety director, Fadzai Madzingira, had to be suspended. Why? It suddenly surfaced that she had liked an Instagram post accusing Israel of ‘the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians’. She even apparently posted a lengthy rant on her own Instagram calling Israel an ‘apartheid state’.
This has been a particularly embarrassing episode for Ofcom. Madzingira was appointed with great fanfare just four months ago. She was billed as a star recruit from Zimbabwe. She had a Rhodes scholarship, two master’s degrees from Oxford University and had worked at Meta (the owner of Facebook) and software giant Salesforce.
One bad apple, you might say. Possibly. But this should still worry us. Ofcom is the body tasked with deciding what large swathes of our media are allowed to tell us. In other words, it is the outfit responsible for deciding how much free speech we are permitted to hear. And soon, it will have those powers enormously augmented.
Under the new legislation, Ofcom’s powers over social media and streaming will be wide-ranging. A great deal of discretion will be given to it in how it enforces its new duties. And as things stand, once Ofcom has given an order to censor something, the rights to appeal against it are deliberately restrictive.
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