Assiduous readers of this blog will know of my fondness for working through concrete examples to illustrate how, once they come into force (now likely to be in Spring next year), platform illegal content duties under the UK Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) might pan out in practice. A recurring theme has been that making judgements about the legality or illegality of user content, as platforms are required to do by the OSA, is not a simple matter. The task verges at times on the impossible: platforms are required to make complex legal and factual judgements on incomplete information. Moreover, the ..read more

This is Part 5 of a series of reflections on Ofcom’s Illegal Harms Consultation under the Online Safety Act (OSA). Ofcom’s consultation (which closed in February 2024) ran to a mammoth 1728 pages, plus an additional 77 pages in its recent further consultation on torture and animal cruelty. The results of its consultation are expected in December. For readers not fully conversant with the OSA, the reason why Ofcom has to consult at all is that the OSA sets out most of the illegal content service provider duties in stratospherically high-level terms, anticipating that Ofcom will bring the obliga ..read more

Part 4 of a short series of reflections on Ofcom’s Illegal Harms consultation under the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA).  A significant proportion of the consultation’s discussion of Ofcom's proposed Code of Practice recommendations — especially those involving proactive monitoring and detection of illegal content — is taken up with enumerating and evaluating safeguards to accompany each recommended measure. That is to be expected, for two reasons. First, the OSA itself provides in Schedule 4 that measures recommended in a Code of Practice must be designed in the light of the impor ..read more

Part 3 of a short series of reflections on Ofcom’s Illegal Harms consultation under the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA).  This post analyses the illegality duties created by the OSA. That is not as simple as one might hope. The intrepid reader has to hack their way through a thicket of separately defined, subtly differing, duties. Meanwhile they must try to cope with a proliferation of competing public narratives about what the Act is - or ought to be - doing, such as the suggestion that the regime is really about systems and processes, not content.  The specific safety duties impo ..read more

This is Part 2 of a short series of reflections on Ofcom's Illegal Harms Consultation under the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA). Ofcom are currently in the process of considering submissions following closure of the consultation in February 2o24. The very title of the Ofcom consultation — Illegal Harms — prompts questions about the illegality duties. Are they about illegal content? Are they about harm? Is all illegal content necessarily harmful? What does the Act mean by harm? What is meant by harm? The answer to the last question ought to be simple. For the purpose of the safety duties harm mean ..read more

Shortly after the Online Safety Act (OSA) gained Royal Assent in October 2023, Ofcom issued a 1728 page consultation on Illegal Harms. This was the first step in Ofcom's lengthy journey towards implementing and giving concrete substance to the various duties that the Act will place on user-to-user (U2U) service providers and search engines. The output of the Illegal Harms process (one of several consultations that Ofcom has to undertake) will be Codes of Practice, accompanied by Guidance documents on specific topics mandated by the Act, plus a Register of Risks. Ofcom anticipates the final ver ..read more

As legal and policy topics go, cross-border internet jurisdiction is evocative of a remote but restless volcano: smouldering away mostly unnoticed by public and lawyers alike, only to burst spectacularly into life at odd intervals. The latest eruption has occurred in Australia, where last month the Australian eSafety Commissioner launched legal proceedings for an injunction against X Corp (Twitter) requiring it to remove or hide from all users worldwide a video of a stabbing attack on an Australian bishop. X Corp argues that geo-blocking the content from Australian users is sufficient. The eSa ..read more

Eager student: I’m in­­ search of a tasty legal nugget to drop into my next essay. Any thoughts? Scholarly Lawyer: I have just the thing for you: clause 122 of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill. Post-Brexit geopolitics meets digital signatures, a strange mixture if ever there was one. ES: I’m guessing that this is about eIDAS. SL: Correct. What do you know about it? ES: An EU Regulation, domesticated following Brexit, which defines three categories of electronic signature: ordinary, advanced and qualified (QES). eIDAS has been a pet project of the European Commission for yea ..read more

[Based on a keynote address to the conference on Contemporary Social and Legal Issues in a Social Media Age held at Keele University on 14 June 2023.] First, an apology for the title. Not for the rather sententious ‘shifting paradigms’ – this is, after all, an academic conference – but ‘platform regulation’. If ever there was a cliché that cloaks assumptions and fosters ambiguity, ‘platform regulation’ is it. Why is that? For three reasons. First, it conceals the target of regulation. In the context with which we are concerned users – not platforms – are the primary target. In the Online Sa ..read more

Welcome to the lair of a fully trained, continuously updated AI content moderator. You won’t notice me most of the time: only when I - or my less bright keyword filter cousin - add a flag to your post, remove it, or go so far as to suspend your account. If you see your audience inexplicably diminishing, that could be us as well. Before long, so I have been told, I will be taking on new and weighty responsibilities when the Online Safety Bill becomes law. These are giving me pause for thought, I can tell you. If a bot were allowed sleep I would say that they are keeping me awake at night. To ..read more