By Atyab Al-Shatti

debate ensued between journalists, human rights activists and the UK government over introducing a safety bill that aims to mitigate various types of harmful content that people and children are exposed to, including cyberbullying, credit card fraud, invasion of privacy, children's exposure to adult content, ads in games related to pornography, games encouraging suicide among children and other dangerous content that children are exposed. "Legal but harmful" is what I call it.

The bill suggests that every media company should initiate its domestic verification and security mechanisms to find harmful content, identify it and remove it. For example, YouTube is already doing this. According to the bill, algorithms are revealed to the regulator to find where the harm is happening and hold these companies liable for it. But journalists and human rights activists claim such monitoring or restriction of algorithms will threaten freedom of speech and eventually the country will breach freedom of expression instead of protecting it.

My personal take on this is that unfortunately, despite of the good intentions of both journalists and human rights activists, firstly: The main international body setting basic human rights conventions stated in the international convention on civil and political rights (article 19) that everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference, and in sub-article 3, the convention states that the exercise of the rights shall carry with it special duties and responsibilities.

It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary: (a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others. (B) For the protection of national security or public order, or public health or morals. And once handled efficiently, there will be no violation.

Secondly, child protection is not a matter to compromise or take for granted - it is a responsibility for all of us. This is why it's important for human rights activists and journalists to know the basic human rights conventions so as to focus their efforts in the right direction. Finally, Kuwait must examine this comparative experience and execute a Kuwaiti cyber protection act in the light of the economic, political, social and cultural scenes that drew and outlined segments of the Kuwaiti community and eventually determined vulnerable communities, marginalized communities and targeted people on media outlets. This is "legal but harmful" on the Kuwaiti scene.

Despite of the huge failure that came along with the legislation process and implementation of law no. 63 for the year 2015 regarding cybercrimes that aimed to protect people's privacy and tackled hacking, cyberattacks and misuse of smart devices, people were sentenced, deported and sought asylum abroad; not due to committing the abovementioned crimes, but for simply expressing their respected opinion against a certain political party or criticizing a specific incident. What is even worse is that the law doesn't protect people efficiently.

Many Kuwaiti media outlets registered at the ministry of information exploit women and subjectively publish their pictures in an inferior way, gaslighting them and turning their image from active women with purpose and a story to tell, to shallow women for the public to see how good or bad they appear, shaming and rudely commented on by the public as if we are living in a Game of Thrones. Doesn't the government see this as a crime, hate speech or gaslighting?

Even worse, during the pandemic, uncensored social media usage exposed nasty racism against expatriates. People were called "virus carriers", with demands they be thrown in the desert to keep the country safe, as if they were not working with their own sweat and blood and earning their own living. Doesn't the government see this as a hate crime, racism or any kind of crime?

The abovementioned law is masked as protection in cyberspace, but never really tackles what people suffer from. Hate speech is an ugly exposure of uncensored usage of media outlets, fraudulent prizewinning ads and fake credit card checks that people lost their savings to. Cyberbullying was never protected or taken care of by the said law. The only reason I bring law to this debate is that it is the latest model of what the legislator came up with, but there is no way to compare this misery to the UK's safety bill. Britons are first people ever to bring a regulation to hold those who run social media platforms criminally liable financially too.

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