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UK - Online Safety Act 2023 (the Act) is a new set of laws regulating social media companies and search services in and outside of the UK
The Online Safety Act 2023 (the Act) is a new set of laws that protects children and adults online. It puts a range of new duties on social media companies and search services, making them more responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms.
The Act will give providers new duties to implement systems and processes to reduce risks their services are used for illegal activity, and to take down illegal content when it does appear.
The strongest protections in the Act have been designed for children and will make the UK the safest place in the world to be a child online. Platforms will be required to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content and provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise.
The Act will also protect adult users, ensuring that major platforms will need to be more transparent about which kinds of potentially harmful content they allow, and give people more control over the types of content they want to see.
Ofcom is now the independent regulator of Online Safety. It will set out steps providers can take to fulfil their safety duties in codes of practice. It will have a broad range of powers to assess and enforce providers’ compliance with the framework.
Providers’ safety duties are proportionate to factors including the risk of harm to individuals, and the size and capacity of each provider. This makes sure that while safety measures will need to be put in place across the board, we aren’t requiring small services with limited functionality to take the same actions as the largest corporations. Ofcom is required to take users’ rights into account when setting out steps to take. And providers have simultaneous duties to pay particular regard to users’ rights when fulfilling their safety duties.
The Act also introduced some new criminal offences – details are set out below.(1)
Who the Act applies to
The Act’s duties apply to search services and services that allow users to post content online or to interact with each other. This includes a range of websites, apps and other services, including social media services, consumer file cloud storage and sharing sites, video sharing platforms, online forums, dating services, and online instant messaging services.
The Act applies to services even if the companies providing them are outside the UK should they have links to the UK. This includes if the service has a significant number of UK users, if the UK is a target market or it is capable of being accessed by UK users and there is a material risk of significant harm to such users.
(1)The criminal offences introduced by the Act came into effect on 31 January 2024. These offences cover:
encouraging or assisting serious self-harm
cyberflashing
sending false information intended to cause non-trivial harm
threatening communications
'''intimate image abuse
epilepsy trolling
These new offences apply directly to the individuals sending them, and convictions have already been made under the cyberflashing and threatening communications offences.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer