Source · Select Committees · Petitions Committee
Recommendation 14
14
Rejected
Paragraph: 66
The Government’s regulatory proposals should encourage social media companies to prevent or reduce the risk...
Conclusion
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.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government rejects reformulating the regulatory framework, arguing its current design creates specific duties for platforms to assess and mitigate risks for different harm categories, and provides proportionate systems to remove illegal and child-harming content. They believe this approach is effective and clear, rather than a broad foundational duty for proactive adult protection.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
66
Government Response
Rejected
HM Government · verbatim extract
Rejected
We thank the Committee for its suggestion. However, we do not believe that reformulating this regulatory framework around a single foundational duty would be desirable or effective. It would leave Ofcom with very high-level duties to enforce against which would likely create an uncertain and unclear operating environment. Such an environment could also lead to a reduction in legal certainty for services, Ofcom and users as well as potential delays to the vital safety benefits for users that this legislation will bring. The framework will improve user safety by creating duties on platforms to assess risk for specific categories of harms, and to put in place systems and processes to mitigate identified risks. The Bill directly requires service providers to assess the risk of harm linked to how their services are designed and to consider how a comprehensive range of functionalities and the way in which people use their services affect risk. For example they will have to look at how users can send messages to or play games with other users and express views on content through “likes” or voting. The duties include specific requirements to put in place proportionate systems to remove and limit the spread of illegal content and to protect children from harmful content. The largest services will also need to set and enforce clear terms of service for tackling legal but harmful content.
Read the full response on Parliament ↗