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.

The House of Lords will debate the Draft Online Safety Act 2023 (Category 1, Category 2A and Category 2B Threshold Conditions) Regulations 2025 on 24 February. Lord Clement-Jones has tabled a regret motion. This note, which is also available as a PDF at the bottom of the page, sets out a number of issues with the regulations as drafted, which are based on advice from Ofcom that does not follow the intent of Parliament, as well as the scrutiny procedure the Government has followed.

It was way back in March 2017 that the UK Government first made that commitment - to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online - in the Digital Strategy. Theresa May was Prime Minister; Karen Bradley was the DCMS Secretary of State; TikTok didn’t exist in the UK; and it would be a number of months before the first deepfake was created. Ofcom reported that “most parents continue to say that their child has a good balance between screen time and doing other things”; and the theme of that year’s Safer Internet Day was - rather optimistically - “unite for a better internet”.

We are publishing this statement with the support of the organisations and individuals listed below. Last February, the OSA Network published a statement in response to Ofcom’s consultation on its illegal harms proposal. It was signed by 23 organisations and experts representing the breadth of interests across our membership and was the culmination of many months of discussion with Ofcom on the issues. The headlines we raised in the statement were explored in more detail in the OSA Network’s full response and reflected in the public letter, and supporting evidence, from groups campaigning against Violence Against Women and Girls.

The publication, by Ofcom, of its illegal harms codes may have garnered all the media attention yesterday (16 December) but - as per the Written Ministerial Statement from the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology - DSIT has also published its response to Ofcom’s advice on categorisation of servicesand has laid the regulations along with an explanatory memorandum and an impact assessment. The Secretary of State’s decision to accept the advice, which excludes small but risky platforms from category one and therefore exempts them from the strongest possible duties under the Act, goes against strong exhortations from a variety of campaigners - including mental health and suicide prevention charities, as well as campaigners against racist and misogynistic hate and abuse.

Ofcom has today published its illegal harms statement which comprises the final illegal harms risk assessment guidance along with the final codes of practice for user-to-user services and search, setting out the measures regulated services will need to take to comply with their illegal harms duties under the Online Safety Act 2023. Alongside this, it has published its register of risks and its illegal content judgements guidance, along with the regime’s final record keeping and review guidance and the final enforcement guidance. All these products were initially published in draft for consultation last November.

A little bit of historical context for the announcement by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology that they had launched a new research project “to boost the evidence base” on online harms. “The first stage of the project will examine what methods will best help the government understand the impact of smartphones and social media use on children after a review by the UK Chief Medical Officer in 2019 found the evidence base around the links to children’s mental health were insufficient to provide strong conclusions.”

Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, today published his draft Statement of Strategic Priorities for Ofcom, accompanied by a forthright interview in the Telegraph which refers to his statement telling the regulator they need to “look again at whether they are being assertive enough in certain areas”. The press release - which also announces a review into the evidence on smartphone and social media use by children - is here. But what is a Statement of Strategic Priorities (SSP) and why is the Secretary of State issuing it now?

 The Online Safety Act 2023 celebrates its first birthday this week - as does the OSA Network. So it would be remiss of us not to mark the occasion with a review of what’s happened in the past 12 months and to look forward to the year ahead. We could of course talk about the growth of our Network, which now counts over 70 organisations in its membership - from the largest national charities to grassroots organisations, expert academics and individual campaigners - and whose contributions to our regular discussions and support for our collective endeavours are hugely valuable. But we hope they know that already and we’re proud to work alongside them on this issue.

Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg recently that he was going to “close loopholes” in the Online Safety Act and went on to talk about the importance of building in safety into the online world in order to ensure the opportunities of tech can be realised. He said that as far as he was aware, the tech sector was the “only sector .. that can release products in to society without proving they’re safe before release”; he wanted to take steps “to try and make sure safety is there at the start, not picking up the pieces afterwards” promising that increasingly the Government would be working with the US and others “to make sure safety is proven before the release of products”.