Four legal scrapes are currently lumbering through the courts, each one a slap in the face to the already bewildering Online Safety Bill. Think of them as a quad of angry badgers gnawing at the leg of a government that tried to regulate the internet using a photocopied crayon drawing.
First up: the defamation kerfuffle between a Lola spreadsheet and a politician who claimed the spreadsheet's opinion was 'a pack of lies'. The court will decide if an automated Google Sheets cell can commit libel. My money's on the sheet. It has better syntax.
Second: an onlyfans creator versus a lender who used her social media likes to calculate her credit score. The judge will have to opine on whether a 'heart' for a cat video counts as financial stability. The prosecution argues that if a like can buy love, it can certainly pay a mortgage.
Third: a local council sues a comedian for calling their new pothole-filling machine 'a bodge job in a tin hat'. The council claims the comedian's tweet incited hatred against tarmac. The comedian counters that the machine looks like it was designed by a committee of headless chickens.
Finally, the big one: a group of parents versus a platform that let their children see an advert for an adult gameshow called 'Guess the Genital'. The parents argue that the platform's algorithm is a moral sewer. The platform's barrister, wearing a tie that screams 'I also defended a pirate streaming service', claims it is 'simply a statistical reflection of the child's own sordid curiosity'.
These cases are shaping up to be a right old farce, but they could actually force the government to rewrite the Online Safety Bill into something that doesn't look like it was drafted by a committee of hamsters on a treadmill. The bill currently attempts to ban everything from terrorism to hurt feelings, all without a clear definition of either.
As a gonzo observer of this judicial folly, I can only hope the judges bring the same sense of the absurd to the bench that these cases demand. Until then, I'll be in the pub, raising a glass to the death of common sense and the birth of legislation that looks like a Dr. Seuss book written by a robot having a stroke.
