Online Safety Bill

rdf:langString Online Safety Bill

rdf:langString The Online Safety Bill is a proposed Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom intended to improve internet safety, published as a draft on 12 May 2021. Following the earlier 2019 Online Harms White Paper, the Bill gives the relevant Secretary of State the power, subject to Parliamentary approval, to designate and address a wide range of potentially harmful content, which may include online trolling, illegal pornography and underage access to legal pornography, and some forms of internet fraud. The Bill would create a new duty of care for online platforms towards their users, requiring them to take action against both illegal and legal but harmful content. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It would also empower Ofcom to block access to particular websites. Additionally, the Bill would oblige large social media platforms not to remove, and to preserve access to, journalistic or "democratically important" content such as user comments on political parties and issues. The bill has been criticised for its proposals to restrain the publication of "lawful but harmful" speech, effectively creating a new form of censorship of otherwise legal speech. As a result, in November 2022, measures that were intended to force big technology platforms to take down "legal but harmful" materials were removed from the Online Safety Bill. Instead, tech platforms will be obliged to introduce systems that will allow the users to better filter out the harmful content they don't want to see.