UK introduces exhaustive Online Safety Bill

The government will introduce its long-awaited online security bill in Parliament on Thursday.

The bill aims to address a wide range of harmful content online, such as cyberbullying, pornography, and material that promotes self-harm.

Social networks could be fined or blocked if they don’t remove harmful content, and their bosses could be jailed for non-compliance.

Labor said delays in the bill meant disinformation in the UK was growing.

The bill’s regulator, Ofcom, will have the power to request information from companies, and executives who fail to comply could face up to two years in prison within two months of the bill becoming law.

Senior managers would also be criminally liable if they destroyed evidence, failed to attend an Ofcom interview, provided false information or obstructed office entry to the regulator.

Any business that breaks the rules would face a fine of up to 10% of their turnover, while websites that don’t comply could be blocked entirely.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said the bill meant tech companies were not required to “verify their own homework”.

“Tech companies have not been held accountable when harm, abuse and criminal behavior have spiraled out of control on their platform,” he said.

One of the new aspects of the bill is the introduction of a “right of appeal” for people who feel their social media posts have been unfairly removed.

Large social media companies will be required to assess the risks of the kinds of legal harms against adults that could arise from their services, and they will need to establish how they will consistently treat them and enforce these terms.

Definitions of these statutory harms will be set out in further legislation, but potential examples could include material that promotes self-harm, eating disorders, or bullying.

The legislation has taken some time to reach the stage where a bill will now be brought before Parliament.

Here’s a timeline of how it evolved:

A white paper on online harm was first released in April 2019 by the Conservative government, then led by Theresa May.

He proposed a single regulatory framework to deal with a series of damages.

In essence, it was a duty of care for internet companies to tackle harmful content, with an independent regulator (later designated Ofcom) set up to oversee and make sure they complied.

While children’s charities such as the NSPCC welcomed the move, others felt the term “harms” was insufficiently defined.

Privacy organizations such as the Open Rights Group have warned that the bill could threaten free speech.

The name had changed to the Online Safety Bill when a preliminary version was included in the Queen’s Speech last May and published the following day.

Two months later, a joint committee made up of parliamentarians and members of the House of Lords was created to examine its content.

Among its key recommendations, published in December 2021, were:

The Law Commission also proposed creating a range of new criminal offences, including:

There has been a flurry of changes to the legislation in recent months.

In February, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said it would add additional offenses to the bill, including revenge pornography, hate crime, fraud, selling illegal drugs or weapons, and promoting or facilitation of suicide, human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

Other recommendations related to cyber flashing, hoax calls, encouragement or assistance for self-harm, and epilepsy trolling would be considered.

A few days later, the DCMS announced that pornographic websites would be legally required to verify the ages of their users.

And this month, he said that social networking sites and search engines would be forced to root out investment fraud and romance scammers on their platforms.

Social media platforms would also have a new legal duty to prevent fraudulent paid advertisements from appearing on their services.

Martin Lewis, the founder of the MoneySavingExpert website, whose face is often used in fake ads, said he was “grateful the government listened to me and other activists” and included scams in the legislation.

The Labor Party’s shadow culture secretary, Lucy Powell, said the bill’s delays “allowed disinformation from the Russian regime to spread like wildfire online”.

He added: “Other groups have watched and learned their tactics, with Covid conspiracy theories undermining public health and climate deniers putting our future at risk.”

One of the biggest debates was about online anonymity. Some argued that a crackdown on the use of anonymous accounts should have been included in the bill.

Others point out that the legislation asks for many changes, but does not always offer solutions. For example, it will be up to companies to decide how best to comply with the new rules on age verification.

Campaigners from a range of organisations, including Demos, Carnegie UK and Full Fact, said: “Instead of trying to ban or remove every piece of potentially harmful content, the bill should protect free speech by addressing business models of the big technology platforms that are based on amplifying sensational and extreme content to a large number of people”.

Others argued that the bill was unlikely to live up to expectations.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said: “The fact that the bill continues to change its content after four years of debate should tell everyone that it is a disaster and likely to be a bitter disappointment in practice.” .