On 7 January, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was ending the company’s partnerships with fact-checking organisations, removing a series of protections from its content moderation policies and ceasing automated detection and proactive enforcement in key policy areas. Meta’s own Oversight Board has raised questions as to the effects the change in proactive enforcement would have in practice.

On 24 January, we wrote to the Home Secretary and Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, to raise the alarm about what this announcement might mean for the safety of UK users and to recommend a number of urgent amendments to the Online Safety Act (OSA) to protect them.

Nearly six weeks on, we have not had a reply to that letter, which we are publishing in full today.

The letter - co-signed by nine of our Network partners, including the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Molly Rose Foundation, NSPCC and the Samaritans - explained clearly that there was nothing in the OSA to stop Meta diluting its protections in the UK in the same way. While category 1 services - which are likely to include Meta’s platforms - will have a duty to enforce their Terms of Service when the OSA is fully in force, there are no minimum standards for these ToS.

As we say in the letter, the previous Government - in passing the OSA - had:

“a kind of complacency that existing terms of service protections were immutable and that all that was required by law was their consistent enforcement.

See for example, DCMS Minister Lord Parkinson talking about the category 1 duties at Lords Committee stage: ‘This will allow Ofcom to hold them [the services] to account when they do not follow through on their promises regarding content they say that they prohibit or to which they say that they restrict access. Major platforms already prohibit much of the content listed in Clause 12 [now section 16], but these terms of service are often opaque and not consistently enforced. The Bill will address and change that.’”

The world has now changed - as has the Government. There is nothing to stop the current DSIT Secretary of State introducing the amendments we recommend in our letter via the Data (Use and Access) Bill, currently in the Commons and likely to complete its Parliamentary stages in the coming weeks. Until we receive a reply from him, we do not know what is stopping him taking this action - which is entirely within his gift. We therefore renew our calls on him to do so - and fast.

There is also much that Ofcom can do in the meantime to plug gaps in their enforcement proposals in the light of this changed reality: the Molly Rose Foundation wrote to their Chief Executive on 27 January to set out many of these changes but there is little indication, to date, that the regulator will take them on board - either through speeding up changes to its existing codes of practice, or bolstering the upcoming children’s codes.

The case for action

Since we wrote to the two Secretaries of State, the case for urgent action has become even more compelling. Last week, CCDH published research showing that Meta’s content policy changes could stop 97% of content enforcement in key areas, including hate speech, bullying and harassment, and violence or incitement of violence. CCDH estimates this will amount to a “tidal wave of nearly 277 million pieces of hate speech and other harmful content flooding unabated onto the platform each year, threatening public safety, the integrity of our elections and democracy, as well as public health and the mental health of our children”. They have set out in this blog what this means for UK users and are backing our calls for the Government to bring forward urgent OSA amendments.

The Government’s mission to halve VAWG in a decade is also directly undermined by Meta’s moves: as we flag in our letter, one of the well-publicised implications of Meta’s decision is the fact that users can now refer to women “as household objects or property”. Since we wrote to the Home Secretary and the DSIT Secretary of State, the impact of violent and misogynistic content on the Southport attacker - Axel Rudakubana - has been under the spotlight and the Molly Rose Foundation has this week highlighted significant public concern over the impact of “fluid ideologies” on young people, influenced by what they see online into committing acts of violence.

Parliamentary pressure

The risks to UK users from Meta’s decision were also raised in Parliament last week during the Westminster Hall debate on OSA implementation, with both Labour’s Jess Asato MP and the Liberal Democrats’ Bobby Dean MP raising risks arising from the rolling back of protections and the increasing normalisation of violent content online. Yet, when the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee questioned Meta’s UK representative, Chris Yiu, about the companies’ policies at its hearing last week, his response was far from reassuring:

“We have had feedback over the years that topics that have become part of mainstream discourse—conversations around some of these issues happen among members of the public and happen in newspapers—were being suppressed on our platforms in a way that was too aggressive.”

He went on to say: “we have set community standards and policies that we enforce, and we are clearly subject to the laws of the countries in which we operate. In the UK, that is the Online Safety Act, which is not fully in force but will be shortly, and we expect to be compliant with that. In terms of how we set this up, standards continuously evolve in line with what is happening in society. We want to have a space where people can express themselves and we want to make fewer mistakes around the way we moderate.”

Amending the OSA

The Online Safety Act is the only backstop we have against our public discourse and our public safety being threatened by the recklessness of US Big Tech companies. Meta knows this - and also knows that, under the OSA, it can make its recently announced changes with impunity here. The Online Safety Act does not prevent them.

It is in the Government’s gift to stop them: to ensure there is no rolling back from the online protections that all UK users had at the time the legislation was passed and to impose minimum standards of service to provide an ongoing baseline for user protections going forward.

There is still time for the Government to use the Data (Use and Access) Bill to do this.

What is stopping them?