Recommendation 14

The Government’s regulatory proposals should encourage social media companies to prevent or reduce the risk of users being harmed by abusive and hateful content in the first place, not just remove or otherwise deal with such content as it arises. However, the draft Online Safety Bill gives Ofcom very limited scope to ensure platforms are taking positive steps to protect adult users from this risk where abuse falls below the criminal threshold. Where content has been identified as harmful, users should be able to expect platforms to take proportionate steps to proactively protect their safety and wellbeing, and the regulator should be able to ensure this expectation is being met.