Technology Secretary Calls Online Safety Act ‘Unsatisfactory’

Technology secretary Peter Kyle has criticised the Online Safety Act as “very uneven” and “unsatisfactory” on socially harmful content, but stopped short of committing to changes.

Kyle’s comments to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg came after Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell, who took her life at 14 after seeing harmful content online, said the UK was “going backward” on the issue of social harms.

Russell called in a letter to the prime minster for a “duty of care” to be imposed on online companies.

Kyle said he felt “frustration” with the online safety law, calling it “uneven”.

‘Unsatisfactory’

“I inherited a landscape where we have a very uneven, unsatisfactory legislative settlement,” he said.

He did not commit to changing the law but said he was “very open-minded” on the subject.

The law includes “very good powers” the government planned to use to “assertively” handle new safety concerns and ministers would soon get powers to ensure online platforms are keeping inappropriate content away from underage users, with companies that do not comply facing “very strident” sanctions, he said.

The government is not planning to repeal the Online Safety Act or pass a new law, but to work within what are seen as its limitations, the BBC reported, citing unnamed sources.

Ministers are looking to be “agile and quick” to keep up with fast-moving trends, the report said.

Russell’s letter cited “ominous” changes in the tech industry and called out Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms and social media company X as being “at the leading edge of a wholesale recalibration of the industry”.

He said Meta’s ending fact-checking in the US and loosening of moderation guidelines were moving away from safety and toward a “laissez-faire, anything-goes model” that went “back towards the harmful content that Molly was exposed to”.

‘High-severity content’

Meta said in a statement that it was making “no change to how we treat content that encourages suicide, self-injury, and eating disorders” and would “continue to use our automated systems to scan for that high-severity content”.

The Online Safety Act, whose rules come into force this year, compels online companies to actively remove illegal content, and also obliges them to adopt age-verification tools and protect children from harmful material, such as content promoting bullying or suicide.

Last summer the US surgeon general called for warning labels to be included on social media platforms, similar to those attached to cigarettes and other tobacco products, as a step toward addressing a mental health “emergency” among young people.

Writing in the New York Times, surgeon general Vivek Murthy said he wants a warning message on social media platforms informing those who use them that they are “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents”.

This would “regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe”, Murthy wrote.

In November Australia passed a law banning social media for youths under 16, in a move opposed by the industry.