Internet security padlock for VPN and online privacy. Image via Flickr by Mike MacKenzie (CC BY 2.0). This article by Sajini Wickramasinghe was originally published on Groundviews, an award-winning citizen media website from Sri Lanka. An edited and shortened version is published here as part of a content-sharing agreement with Global Voices. On September 18, the Sri Lankan government issued a gazette notification announcing a bill entitled “Online Safety” to establish the proposed Online Safety Commission and to regulate certain content from online spaces. Amid the heightened attention on, discourse around and criticism of the bill, it was tabled in parliament on October 3. At this juncture, it is pertinent to compare and contrast the essence and purpose of the Sri Lankan bill with the Online Safety Bill of the UK passed by their parliament on September 19, and at the moment awaiting royal assent. As the UK bill is an extensive document, a few key features of it will be discussed in the article to embody how certain serious concerns highlighted in the Sri Lankan bill can be addressed and tackled. From the outset, the UK bill is sponsored by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport while the line ministry for the Sri Lankan bill is the Public Security Ministry, although Sri Lanka has two separate ministries for mass media and digital technology. The removal of these two ministries from the picture is questionable, given that the bill claims to ensure online safety. In the current context of the Sri Lankan bill, tasks such as appointing experts on information technology to conduct investigations (Section 37), the retention and interception of data and information, including traffic data for investigations (Section 39 (2)) and overall making of regulations under the Act (Section 54), will be executed by the minister of public security without any involvement of the media and technology related ministries. The Online Safety Bill is yet another Sri Lankan legislation which includes vagueness because of the lack of definitions. For instance, Section 3 (a) of the Lankan bill states that an objective shall be “to protect persons against damage caused by communication of false statements or threatening, alarming or distressing statements.” These terms are used again in Section 22, to define harassment, where it states: Harassment means an act or behaviour which has the effect of threatening, alarming or distressing a person or violating a person’s dignity or creating an intimidating, degrading, hostile, humiliating or offensive environment or, which has all such effects. The words “threatening,” “alarming” and “distressing” remain undefined, allowing for interpretation. Words such as “intimidating” and “offensive” are vague terms that cannot remain undefined in legislation. A statement that is hilarious to one could be distressing and offensive to another and, thereafter, in this case, to the Online Safety Commission. Aspects such as the context, intent and extent are paramount in determining whether certain online content should be prohibited and its publishers should be penalised. Another example is in Section 36, which is on counteracting coordinated inauthentic behaviour and inauthentic online accounts. Coordinated inauthentic behaviour is defined to be “coordinated activity carried out using two or more online accounts, in order to mislead the end users in Sri Lanka of any internet intermediary service as to any matter but excludes any activity carried out using online accounts: (a) that are controlled by the same person; and (b) none of which is an inauthentic online account or is controlled by a bot. In this context, would using a filter to alter your appearance on Instagram and someone being distressed or offended by it fall under this provision? As such, the bill has several ambiguities that hinder the reasonable comprehension of the legislative intention or positive purpose of incorporating it. The UK bill has been meticulous and precise in defining the terms used. Without using terms such as distressing, intimidating or offensive, the bill has included the “threatening communications offence” in Section 162. The threshold of threatening requires the message conveyed to be a threat of death or serious harm, and at the time of sending it, the person: (i) intended an individual encountering the message to fear that the threat would be carried out, or (ii) was reckless as to whether an individual encountering the message would fear that the threat would be carried out.