Overview

This bill amends the Online Safety Bill, enhancing protections for children and adults online. It introduces new duties for online service providers to assess and mitigate various online harms, including illegal content, content harmful to children, and content affecting specific groups. The amendments also strengthen Ofcom's regulatory powers and introduce new reporting and transparency requirements.

Description

Key Changes and Additions:

The amendments significantly expand the scope of the Online Safety Bill by adding new clauses and modifying existing ones. These changes introduce:

• New duties for online service providers: These include comprehensive risk assessments for illegal content and content harmful to children, focusing on age-appropriate safeguards and user empowerment. This involves summarizing assessment findings in terms of service.
• Enhanced protection for children: The bill clarifies and strengthens the duties to protect children from harmful content, mandating the use of age verification or age estimation for high-risk content ("Primary Priority Content"). There is also a clear definition of what counts as "Primary Priority Content" and "Priority Content".
• Adult user empowerment: New assessment duties aim to empower adult users by assessing how service design and operations impact their exposure to harmful content, and offering early opportunities to adjust settings to control their experience.
• New reporting and transparency requirements: Service providers are required to keep detailed records of assessments and share them with Ofcom, and also make specific details publicly available.
• Expanded OFCOM powers: Ofcom's role is significantly expanded, including creating guidance for providers, conducting reviews, and producing reports on the effectiveness of online safety measures.
• New Offences: The bill creates a new offense for encouraging or assisting serious self-harm, and expands the scope of offenses around sharing intimate images without consent.
• Provisions for deceased child users: A new clause introduces duties for providers to clearly outline their policies regarding access to information about deceased children's online activities, including dedicated helplines and complaints procedures.
• Power to regulate app stores: The Secretary of State gains the power to regulate app stores, but only after OFCOM publishes a report on the use of app stores by children and determines that there is a material risk of harm.
• Media Literacy: New duties are placed on Ofcom to improve media literacy amongst the public, in particular concerning online harms and how to mitigate these.

Specific Clause Amendments:

The amendments involve numerous line-by-line changes across various clauses, primarily focused on clarifying existing duties and incorporating the new obligations described above.

Government Spending

The bill does not specify exact figures for increased government spending. However, it is likely to lead to increased costs for OFCOM in terms of increased enforcement and regulatory activities. The cost of compliance for online service providers will also increase, though the level of these costs is currently not specified.

Groups Affected

• Online service providers: They will face new duties, increased compliance costs, and potential penalties for non-compliance.
• Children: Will benefit from increased protections against harmful online content.
• Adults: Will gain more control over their online experience through user empowerment measures.
• OFCOM: Will have significantly increased responsibilities and regulatory powers.
• Parents of deceased children: Will have new rights to access their children's online data in certain circumstances.
• App store providers: Will potentially face regulation in the future subject to Ofcom reports and Government assessments.

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