Over the past few months there has been a lot of discussion of the impact of the Government’s Online Safety Bill on large providers. Ofcom’s July 2022 Implementation Roadmap (p5) estimates that there are 30-40 of those, to be covered by Categories 1, 2a and 2b. However the roadmap mentions a further 25000 UK services […]
Tag: Online Safety
The UK Government’s attempt (started in 2019) to make Internet hosting platforms “do more” to address “bad stuff”. Probably well-intentioned, but with significant risk of unintended consequences. Note that the title (and tag) changed from Online Harms to Online Safety
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Musing on Federated Platform Regulation
The recent increased awareness of federated social networks has produced some discussion about their status under new “platform regulation” laws, such as the UK Online Safety Bill. Most of this has focussed on whether federated instances might be covered by legislation and, if so, what their operators’ responsibilities are. But this post uses them as […]
When the Government first announced plans to regulate online discussion platforms I wondered whether small organisations would be able to outsource the compliance burden to a provider better equipped to deliver rapid and effective response. Clause 180(2) of the Online Safety Bill suggests the answer is yes: The provider of a user-to-user service is to […]
[21/6: Added more examples of public engagement] [22/3: Updated analysis of why read-only access fits within the para 8 exemption] The Government has now published its Online Safety Bill: the text that will be debated, and no doubt amended, in Parliament. Compared to last summer’s draft, this is somewhat clearer on whether platforms operated by […]
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Draft Online Safety Bill
The Government’s Online Safety Bill proposes to impose duties on “user-to-user services” to deal with harmful (including both lawful and unlawful) content and to protect free speech while doing so. Unlike most operators of on-line discussion platforms, educational institutions already have legal duties in both areas: through legislation on safeguarding, preventing radicalisation, and free speech. […]
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Online Harms White Paper
Tertiary educational institutions have a very specific role in promoting free speech, whether verbal, in writing or on-line. This is set out in general in the Education (No.2) Act 1986, with specific limitations – monitored by the sector regulators – to manage the risk of radicalisation in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 and, for […]
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Regulating Online Harms
This morning’s Westminster e-Forum event on regulating Online Harms contained a particularly rich discussion of both the challenges and opportunities of using regulation to reduce the amount of harmful content we see on the Internet. The Government published a white paper in April 2019 and an initial response to comments in February 2020. A full […]
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Online Harms White Paper
The Government’s new White Paper on Online Harms is strikingly wide in both the range of harms identified, and the range of entities asked to play a part in reducing them. The White Paper envisages that harmful content could be spread through any online facility that allows individual users to share content, to find content […]