Online abuse must be curbed. But who decides where the line is drawn? | Owen Jones

Few would deny the importance of tackling online hatred or child abuse content. The internet, after all, has become a key weapon for those who disseminate and incite hatred and violence against minorities, and for those who pose a horrifying threat to children. It is difficult, though, not to feel discomfort about three rightwing newspapers – the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Times – all leading on the perils of social media.

The Daily Mail’s dramatic headline reads: FACEBOOK ‘RIPPING SOCIETY APART’: this, from the newspaper that routinely whips up hatred against minorities and denounces those deemed opponents as “Enemies of the people”, “saboteurs” and “collaborators”. There is another fear, though. Where will the crescendo for online regulation end?

As the Times reports, the government’s independent ethics watchdog is recommending fines or prosecution if social media companies fail to remove racist, child abuse or “extremist” content. Many have noted the double standards of Facebook’s policy on removing content: deleting, for example, the famous Vietnam war image of a child burned by napalm, while permitting all manner of misogynistic, antisemitic and racist posts. Some form of action is clearly needed. But where is the line drawn?

It’s worth noting precedents from the past. In the aftermath of the Battle of Cable Street – when anti-fascists confronted Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirt mobs under the banner of “They Shall Not Pass” – the Tories passed the Public Order Act. It introduced, for example, the need to get police consent before demonstrations and banned “political uniforms” from being worn in public. And yet this legislation ended up being deployed against the left, including during the miners’ strike nearly 50 years later. Similarly, we’ve seen sweeping anti-terrorism legislation enacted in the face of opposition from critics who raised concerns about civil liberties, only to be dismissed as namby-pamby sandal-wearing terror-appeasing liberals. And yet such legislation has repeatedly been deployed against peaceful activists, my own twin sister among them.

Another example: when the Tories were hit with a lobbying scandal in 2013, David Cameron introduced the so-called lobbying bill. It became known instead as the gagging bill: rather than targeting the wealthy individuals and corporations which the Tory party relies on, it instead went after non-government organisations and trade unions.

All of these crackdowns were sold with laudable intentions. But note what happened in practice. We already have rightwing commentator Toby Young – a poundshop Katie Hopkins, though repeatedly wheeled out on television – who disgracefully compared democratic socialist movement Momentum to a far-right thuggish organisation like Britain First, whose leading members have convictions for their criminality. A press that routinely whips up hatred and bigotry repeatedly portrays the left as the perpetrators of online abuse, ignoring the open sewer of rightwing hatred online. You don’t have to wear a tinfoil hat to see how this could all end.

Yes, we need action to deal with online hatred and abuse. But let’s make sure there are clear safeguards, or history will repeat itself, and peaceful opponents of an unjust status quo will suffer the consequences.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist