What is the UK Online Safety Act and what powers does it give? | Law

Online safety laws are once again in the spotlight after a week of violence led by far-right groups who collaborated online across services including Telegram, TikTok and X.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan told the Guardian on Thursday that changes to online safety laws were needed. “I don’t think it’s fit for purpose,” he said.

But the bill is a massive piece of legislation, running to 286 pages and 241 clauses. Amending it is no easy task, and even today, nearly a year after it passed Congress, it is hard to figure out what it actually means.

Here we look at the key areas covered by new legislation expected to come into force in the UK in 2025.

Obcom

The bulk of the Online Safety Act concerns Ofcom, giving the regulator powerful new powers to clamp down on social networks in particular. The law targets Category 1 user-to-user services, the internet’s largest platforms that host user-generated content, and imposes a number of new duties and responsibilities on them. For example, they must protect the content of news publishers by giving them specific notice before reviewing material, and they must also protect the free expression of democratically important content by including provisions in their terms of service designed to take this principle into account.

However, these requirements are filtered through Ofcom. The law is designed so that the regulator cannot take action against individual content. Instead, Ofcom must focus on the rules that the platforms themselves set and check that they do what they say they will do. In theory, this means that platforms that want to censor at a minimum can do so, as long as they don’t give users a false sense of security by claiming otherwise.

But for now, these powers are purely conceptual. Ofcom will publish its own code of practice and guidance later this year before regulated services can take responsibility for their platforms. Even then, they will have three months to assess the risks of illegal content before taking action.

Terrorism and child abuse

Ofcom will also gain new powers to tackle online content that is already illegal. The regulator can now issue notices requiring companies to actively tackle terrorist content and child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) content. These notices can require regulated services to use authorised technology to find and remove such content, or to actively develop or source it themselves.

The provisions have been controversial over concerns that they would require messaging services like WhatsApp to effectively disable end-to-end encryption or enable so-called “client-side scanning,” where AI tools on users’ phones monitor their communications.

However, these powers will only come into effect after Ofcom has issued guidance and consulted the Information Commissioner.

Aggressive communication

Not all aspects of the new law are relevant to Ofcom. The law also creates new communications offences, giving police powers to take direct action against online speech. Both were intended to replace the previous offence of malicious communication. This very broad law covers causing distress using almost any communications system. The new law is much narrower, making it a crime to send false or threatening communications with the intent to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a potential audience.

The other offence is entirely new. The law makes it a crime to encourage or assist in serious self-harm. It also makes it a crime to intentionally send flashing images to a known person or to the community in general with the intention of inducing epileptic seizures.

Sex crime

The law introduces new provisions into the Sexual Offences Act to ban so-called revenge porn, or non-consensual explicit images, and cyberflashing. Each offence now carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison.

In particular, the ban on non-consensual explicit images is forward-looking enough to cover many cases of AI-generated deepfake pornographic explicit images, which simply look like photos of someone else in an intimate state.

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