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Originally Posted by Paul M
"harmful" as decided by who exactly ?
Just another colossal waste of money to create a huge bureaucracy that will not really achieve anything useful.
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We need to do something.
We haven't needed to do anything like this in the past because while paedophiles, terrorists and all sorts of bad people have existed as long as humans have, modern technology has made it easy for those people to communicate with each other and potential victims. Frequently using methods that cannot easily be monitored by other people who can help. Take bullying. When you and I were kids, any bullies would be able to upset their victims by insulting them and making them look bad in front of their friends (or any group). They may have been able to do so in or out of school, in the local town or where-ever the person hung out. Once the bullying was sorted out, there would likely be little physical evidence it had every occured and the victim could get on with their life.
Now, Bullies have access to all the previous physical locations they used to bully victims. They can also bully the victim on many social media websites (facebook, twitter, thousands of forums etc), the evidence may well be publicly available and, unless the websites can be persuaded to delete the evidence, it will stay for years, possibly even coming up in any social media searches done by prospective employers (which, for the record, is something I don't like, but happens).
Also, insulting people based on their gender, race, any disabilities, and a whole range of other reasons is already illegal, but what can the authorities in this country do if the poster refuses to delete the offensive content, the site is hosted abroad and the owner of the site refuses to do anything? I believe the changes in the law are designed to help get something done. Let's face it, Google, Facebook and Twitter can make it very difficult to get content deleted even if includes beheadings.