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Online Safety Act 2023
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Online Safety Act 2023
The Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) (c. 50) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. It was passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant secretary of state the power to designate, suppress, and record a wide range of online content that they deem illegal or harmful to children.
The act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be harmful to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites. However, it obliges large social media platforms not to remove, and to preserve access to, journalistic or "democratically important" content such as user comments on political parties and issues.
The act also requires platforms – including end-to-end encrypted message providers – to scan for child pornography and terrorism content, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy. The government has said it does not intend to enforce this provision of the act until it becomes "technically feasible" to do so. The act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the harmful content they do not want to see.
The legislation has drawn criticism both within the UK and overseas from politicians, academics, journalists and human rights organisations, who say that it poses a threat to the right to privacy and freedom of speech and expression. Supporters of the act say it is necessary for child protection.
Within the scope of the act is any "user-to-user service". This is defined as an Internet service by means of which content that is generated by a user of the service, or uploaded to or shared on the service by a user of the service, may be read, viewed, heard or otherwise experienced ("encountered") by another user, or other users. Content includes written material or messages, oral communications, photographs, videos, visual images, music and data of any description.
The duty of care applies globally to services with a significant number of United Kingdom users, or which target UK users, or those which are capable of being used in the United Kingdom where there are reasonable grounds to believe that there is a material risk of significant harm. The idea of a duty of care for Internet intermediaries was first proposed in Thompson (2016) and made popular in the UK by the work of Woods and Perrin (2019).
The duty of care in the act refers to a number of specific duties to all services within scope:
For services "likely to be accessed by children", adopting the same scope as the Age Appropriate Design Code, two additional duties are imposed:
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Online Safety Act 2023
The Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) (c. 50) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. It was passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant secretary of state the power to designate, suppress, and record a wide range of online content that they deem illegal or harmful to children.
The act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be harmful to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites. However, it obliges large social media platforms not to remove, and to preserve access to, journalistic or "democratically important" content such as user comments on political parties and issues.
The act also requires platforms – including end-to-end encrypted message providers – to scan for child pornography and terrorism content, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy. The government has said it does not intend to enforce this provision of the act until it becomes "technically feasible" to do so. The act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the harmful content they do not want to see.
The legislation has drawn criticism both within the UK and overseas from politicians, academics, journalists and human rights organisations, who say that it poses a threat to the right to privacy and freedom of speech and expression. Supporters of the act say it is necessary for child protection.
Within the scope of the act is any "user-to-user service". This is defined as an Internet service by means of which content that is generated by a user of the service, or uploaded to or shared on the service by a user of the service, may be read, viewed, heard or otherwise experienced ("encountered") by another user, or other users. Content includes written material or messages, oral communications, photographs, videos, visual images, music and data of any description.
The duty of care applies globally to services with a significant number of United Kingdom users, or which target UK users, or those which are capable of being used in the United Kingdom where there are reasonable grounds to believe that there is a material risk of significant harm. The idea of a duty of care for Internet intermediaries was first proposed in Thompson (2016) and made popular in the UK by the work of Woods and Perrin (2019).
The duty of care in the act refers to a number of specific duties to all services within scope:
For services "likely to be accessed by children", adopting the same scope as the Age Appropriate Design Code, two additional duties are imposed:
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