KUALA LUMPUR: Two non-governmental organisations have raised concerns over the proposed 'harmful content' guideline in the Online Safety Bill (OSB), urging legislators to revise the bill and address key issues, including potential censorship.
The two rights groups—Article 19 and the Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ)—in a joint statement, warned that the broad and vague definitions of harmful content could lead to extensive censorship and undermine freedom of expression.
"This will likely result in increased 'lawful content' being taken down from the Internet.
"We also see a risk that this opens the door for the government to exploit or manipulate companies' content moderation systems to censor unwanted speech, for example, by political opponents or social movements that are critical of those in power," the statement said.
The New Straits Times has reached out to Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil for a comment.
The rights group also said without clear definitions, the term harmful content would be difficult to enforce, prone to abuse and open to challenge on legal grounds.
"As the Malaysia Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) will be the regulator of this act, the long list of harmful content without a clear definition opens the room for MCMC to use the bill to remove or filter contents.
"This also means that MCMC will be in a position to impose an obligation of general proactive monitoring or filtering of content by service providers under the guise of a duty of care or safety by design premise," they said.
However, while the establishment of an Online Safety Appeal Tribunal might appear to be a fair process offering people a chance to be heard, the rights groups argued that the tribunal's power to impose punishments for contempt is reserved solely for courts.
"No individual, entity, or institution other than the court itself may sit in and decide on such proceedings. The overreach of the powers would usurp the role of the courts."
They also raised concerns about the liability of the Licensed Application Service Provider (ASP) and Content Application Service Provider (CASP).
"Given the OSB's main focus on requiring ASP and CASP to reduce certain types of content, coupled with the financial penalty the OSB provides for non-compliance - it will inadvertently provide ASP and CASP with a strong incentive to over-censor their users to limit their liability exposure.
"This is particularly true given the vague concepts and definitions like harmful content," they said.
The aspects highlighted represent just a few of the many issues in the bill that, if unaddressed, would fail to ensure users' online safety, they said.
"Therefore, we urge legislators to overhaul the bill and carefully consider and address the key concerns we raised in this preliminary analysis," they said.