The UK's "Online Harms" bill will grievously harm privacy and freedom of speech.

Article 19 also warned of a threat to freedom of speech.

There is currently a moral panic in the UK about a teenager who committed suicide, apparently under the influence of antisocial media sites' recommendation algorithm.

When they saw she was looking at postings of despair, they directed her to more despair, which became overwhelming.

This suggests another approach which could achieve the goal without threatening people's freedom of speech or people's privacy: namely, to restrict the recommendation algorithms only.

The most basic way is to make a rule that the site must not offer any recommendations, any "promoted" posts, except when the user makes an explicit request — "please show me something you think might interest me". Even if the site's algorithm for deciding what to show you when you request this is unchanged, it will operate less often and show you fewer things.

The next step might be to have a way for users to mark a posting as "not nice". A posting thus marked would still be on line, so you could still see it if you ask for it specifically, but the site would never recommend it automatically to anyone.

We can conceive of many variations of this idea. Surely some variation of them will avoid the real danger without causing real repression.