The UK Online Safety Act is a Step Forward: How Social Media Companies Have a Role in Protecting Children’s Online Sexual Exploitation

“The Online Safety Act’s strongest protections are for children. Social media companies will be held to account for the appalling scale of child sexual abuse occurring on their platforms and our children will be safer,” said UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman. “We are determined to combat the evil of child sexual exploitation wherever it is found, and this Act is a big step forward.”

The bosses of companies who fail to comply with the act could be in jail for up to five years and face fines of up to 22% of their global annual turnover.

Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation has said that the bill’s strict obligations for protecting children from inappropriate content could create issues for a service like Wikipedia, which chooses to collect minimal data on its users, including their ages.

Jeremy Wright was the first of five UK ministers charged with pushing through the British government’s landmark legislation on regulating the internet, the Online Safety Bill. The current UK government likes to brand its initiatives as “world-beating,” but for a brief period in 2019 that might have been right. The bill back then recognized that social media platforms were already de facto arbiters of what was acceptable on large parts of the internet, but it did not acknowledge that they should have a say in what is allowed on the internet. Tech companies were pilloried for things that they missed, but also, by free speech advocates, for those they took down. “There was a sort of emerging realization that self-regulation wasn’t going to be viable for very much longer,” Wright says. Governments were needed to be involved.

Ofcom said in June that it would begin consultations with industry after royal assent was granted. It is unlikely that enforcement will start immediately but the law will apply to platforms with a high number of users in the UK. Companies that fail to comply with the new rules face fines of up to £18 million ($21.9 million) or 10 percent of their annual revenue, whichever is larger.