Source · Select Committees · Petitions Committee
Recommendation 10
10
Accepted
The Government must ensure the Online Safety Bill’s safety duties relating to content harmful to...
Recommendation
The Government must ensure the Online Safety Bill’s safety duties relating to content harmful to children apply across a sufficiently comprehensive range of platforms to prevent young people continuing to be able to access or encounter abusive or other harmful content online once the legislation is enacted. We recommend that the Government reviews the child user condition proposed in the draft Bill to ensure it does not impede this aim by excluding too many platforms from the scope of these duties. (Paragraph 51) 48 Tackling Online Abuse
Government response summary AI-generated
The government states the Online Safety Bill is designed to bring high-risk services into scope, and the child user condition ensures protections for children on any in-scope services they are likely to access. They assert this approach is targeted and proportionate, with enforceable requirements for services to assess and review child access.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government · verbatim extract
Accepted
We thank the Committee for this recommendation. The Online Safety Bill is designed to bring into scope services which pose the greatest risk of harm to users and where there is currently limited regulatory oversight. In order for the regulatory framework to be effective, the scope of the Bill must be targeted and proportionate. This legislation is intended to protect children not only on services which are targeted at them, but on any in-scope services which they are likely to access. All services will need to assess whether their service is likely to be accessed by children and if so, deliver additional protections for them. The child user condition is met if children form a significant number or proportion of users on a service, or if the service, or any part of it, is of a kind that is likely to attract a significant number or proportion of child users. This condition has no relation to a platform’s size; a service will meet the condition if a significant number or proportion of their users are children. Services who do not consider they are likely to be accessed by children will need to record the evidence that they have that children are not accessing their service, and keep this under review. The requirement to undertake, and keep up to date, a suitable and sufficient assessment about child access is an enforceable requirement. Ofcom may take enforcement action where providers do not carry out an assessment and keep it up to date, (and might be alerted to this via user complaints for example), including the potential for fines.
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