The Secretary of State’s Draft Statement of Strategic Priorities (SSP) for Online Safety was published in November 2024. Our response, a version of which was submitted to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in December 2024, is available as a PDF below and reflects some of the themes and concerns that have emerged in discussions facilitated by the Network since the publication of the SSP.
We do not speak on behalf of the organisations we work with but we are grateful to the following organisations for their contributions and support for this response:
Our full response to the Ofcom consultation on their draft transparency guidance is available as a PDF below.
Our response to the UNESCO consultation on AI governance is attached as a PDF below.
Our full response to Ofcom’s consultation on the animal cruelty and torture offences, an extension of its illegal harms proposals, along with an updated measures table at Annex A, are attached as PDFs below.
Response to Ofcom’ s Online Safety Act protection of children’s consultation from: NSPCC, Refuge, End Violence Against Women Coalition, 5 Rights Foundation, Centre for Protecting Women Online, Glitch, Suzy Lamplugh Trust, Safe Lives, UCL Gender and Tech Research Unit, Prof Lorna Woods (University of Essex), Prof Clare McGlynn (University of Durham) and the Online Safety Act Network.
Executive Summary
1. Ofcom’s powers were not designed to provide individuals with redress. Their powers are inadequate to respond to the need for thousands of images, across many websites to be removed. Any orders made would relate to the service overall not individual items of content and would come at the end of a lengthy enforcement process and are designed to be exceptional.
2. Suggestions to add intimate image abuse offences to the priority offences in the Online safety Act therefore will not solve the problem of failing to get specific material removed from the internet.
The OSA Network submission to the call for evidence from the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy to inform its inquiry into “Defending Democracy” can be found as a PDF at the bottom of this page.
Our submission to the Pornography Review Call for Evidence is provided as a PDF below.
Our response focuses on the regulatory, legislative and enforcement context for the Government’s review of Pornography. While we we know that there is a line drawn between the scope of the Online Safety Act and the interests of this Review, we would recommend that it is not taken as read that the OSA will deliver the step change envisaged in the online environment – at least not in the short-to-medium term - and we would encourage Baroness Bertin and the review team to consider where gaps remain.
Our full response to Ofcom’s consultation on its draft guidance for service providers publishing pornographic content is available as a PDF at the bottom of this page and summarised below. This is the guidance that will support regulated services’ compliance with part 5 of the Online Safety Act. There are a number of concerns that we raise below that have relevance to those we flagged in our response to Ofcom’s Illegal Harms consultation - in particular, the approach to proportionality and the focus on costs. We also set out in our analysis the problematic decision that Ofcom has made to use a similar approach to age assurance to that already contained in the Video Sharing Platform (VSP) regime and the On-Demand Programme Services (ODPS) regime - despite the fact that the Online Safety Act requires a higher threshold – that such measures be “highly effective”. This difference in threshold is not reflected in the draft guidance.
