Draft UK Online Safety Bill published

The UK government will today publish its long awaited draft Online Safety Bill. This comes only weeks after English football's boycott of social media in protest against racist and hateful abuse targeted at players online.

What can we expect to see in the draft Bill? 

The devil will of course be in the legislative detail but the government’s press release does give some indication of what we can expect to see when the draft Bill is published later today.

Notable developments since the government announced its final proposal for regulating online harms in December 2020 include: 

• Additional protections for freedom of expression, for example Category 1 services (described by the government as ‘the largest and most popular social media sites’) will be required to conduct and publish assessments of their impact on freedom of expression.
  
   
• A new duty on Category 1 services to protect ‘democratically important content’. Such services will have to set out in ‘clear and accessible’ terms and conditions how they will protect such content and will need to apply protections equally to a range of political opinions.
  
   
• Companies will have a duty to protect users against a sub-set of online scams, in particular fraudulent user-generated content such as romance scams. However, fraud committed via advertising, emails and/or cloned websites will not be within scope.
  
   
• A criminal offence for senior managers will be included in the legislation, but as a deferred power. A review into this power will take place at least two years after the regime is fully operational, and will be introduced if ‘tech firms don’t step up their efforts to improve safety’. If individual liability is introduced, it will only apply if companies do not comply with Ofcom’s requests for information.
  
   
• Although not in the version to be published today, the final legislation will require companies to report child sexual exploitation and abuse identified on their services.

What happens next?

Once published, the draft Bill will be scrutinised by a joint committee of MPs before a final version is formally introduced to Parliament.

Tech companies will want to watch the progress of the Bill carefully as they start to plan their compliance programmes in anticipation of this, and other significant online harms regimes coming into force. For our comparative analysis on key online harms regimes, including the UK, see our recent flagship Online Harms publication.