In November 2023, Ofcom, as new online safety regulator, published the first of four major consultations under the Online Safety Act (“OSA”), which sets out its proposals for how “user-to-user” (“U2U”) services (essentially any online website or app that allows users to interact with each other) and online search services (i.e. Google, Bing and similar) should approach their illegal content duties under the new legislation. The consultation provides guidance in a number of areas including governance, content moderation, reporting and complaints mechanisms, terms of service, supporting chi ..read more

Information warfare abounds, and everyone online has been drafted whether they know it or not.  Disinformation is deliberately generated misleading content disseminated for selfish or malicious purposes. Unlike misinformation, which may be shared unwittingly or with good intentions, disinformation aims to foment distrust, destabilize institutions, discredit good intentions, defame opponents and delegitimize sources of knowledge such as science and journalism. Many governments engage in disinformation campaigns. For instance, the Russian government has used images of celebrities to attrac ..read more

Deceptive online content is big business. The digital advertising market is now worth €625 billion, and their business model is simple: more clicks, views or engagement means more money from advertisers. Incendiary, shocking content – whether it is true or not – is an easy way to get our attention, which means advertisers can end up funding fake news and hate speech. This is not an accident – social media platforms know they profit from the spread of disinformation, while advertisers turn a blind eye. Disinformation aims to confuse, paralyse and polarise society at large for political, milita ..read more

We have reached a key juncture in the debate about online privacy, following Meta’s recent decision to offer some users paid-for ad-free access to Facebook and Instagram. The time has come to decide how much we value keeping our data, tastes and whereabouts to ourselves. The main and often only way that free-to-use online services such as Google, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok make money is by selling data about user preferences to advertisers. And since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in the EU and the UK in 2018, firms have been allowed to track and sell this d ..read more

For many years, the negative and harmful impact of social media platforms on democratic life was common knowledge within the community of critical scholars analysing social media and their impact on political and social life. In October 2021, Frances Haugen, a whistleblower who was a member of the civic misinformation team at Facebook, finally said out loud what everyone already knew, namely that a deep and fundamental conflict exists between “what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook”, but when push comes to shove, “Facebook over and over again chose to optimi ..read more

The Online Safety Bill will shortly become law in the UK as soon as it receives Royal Assent. The legislation will introduce a new regulatory regime for online platforms and search engines which target the UK, imposing wide-ranging obligations on in-scope services with serious consequences for non-compliance. The development After a long and controversial passage through Parliament since the Online Safety Bill was first published in 2021, the Bill completed its final stage in the House of Lords on 19 September 2023.  Royal Assent is expected to be granted by the end of October 2023. The O ..read more

The UK’s long-debated online safety bill (OSB) has been approved by the House of Lords, clearing the way for it to become law. But it has pitted the government, which proposed the bill, against tech companies that provide secure messaging services. Critics say it will allow authorities in the UK to compel service providers to break users’ encryption. In July, 68 cybersecurity academics published an open letter outlining their concerns about the OSB. In it, they argue that the bill undermines the safety and privacy of users online. The OSB has met with significant opposition from industry as w ..read more

Social media platforms have become the “digital town squares” of our time, enabling communication and the exchange of ideas on a global scale. However, the unregulated nature of these platforms has allowed the proliferation of harmful content such as misinformation, disinformation and hate speech. Regulating the online world has proven difficult, but one promising avenue is suggested by the European Union’s Digital Services Act, passed in November 2022. This legislation mandates “trusted flaggers” to identify certain kinds of problematic content to platforms, who must then remove it within 24 ..read more

On 15 May 2023 in the case of Sanchez v France, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) confirmed its earlier Chamber judgment of 2 September 2021 (see Inforrm post here). The ECtHR found that the criminal conviction of a politician for failing to promptly delete hate speech, that was posted by others, from his public Facebook account, did not violate Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The Grand Chamber confirmed that imposing criminal liability on internet intermediaries is capable of having chilling effects for the users of Facebook, other s ..read more

The much-anticipated Online Safety Bill 2022 is currently making its way through Parliament. At the time of writing, the Bill is currently at the Report Stage in the House of Lords. It is not yet known when the Bill will come into force. The Online Safety Bill, as it currently stands, will impose a duty on user-to-user services, defined as ‘any service that enables content generated, uploaded or shared by one user to be encountered by another user’ to remove illegal content from their sites. Although it is not yet fully known who will fall within the scope of the Online Safety Bill, with the S ..read more