Online Safety Act: Implementation

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

I thank you for chairing this debate, Mr Stringer, and I congratulate the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) on bringing this debate to Westminster Hall. It is a subject we have talked about many times.

I want to make a number of points. The first is about safety by design. Page 1 of the Act states that the internet should be “safe by design”, yet everything that has happened since in the Act’s implementation, from the point of view of both Ofcom and the Government in respect of some of the secondary legislation, has not been about safety by design. It has been about regulating specific content, for example, and that is not where we should be. Much as I was happy that the Online Safety Act was passed, and I was worried about the perfect being the enemy of the good and all that, I am beginning to believe that the EU’s Digital Services Act will do a much better job of regulating, not least because the Government are failing to take enough action on this issue.

I am concerned that Ofcom, in collaboration with the Government, has managed to get us to a situation that makes nobody happy. It is not helpful for some of the tech companies. For example, category 1 is based solely on user numbers, which means that suicide forums, eating disorder platforms, doxing platforms and livestreaming platforms where self-generated child sexual abuse material is created are subject to exactly the same rules as a hill walking forum that gets three posts a week. In terms of proportionality, Ofcom is also failing the smallest platforms that are not risky, by requiring them to come to a three-day seminar on how to comply, when they might be run by a handful of volunteers spending a couple of hours a week looking after the forum and moderating every post. It will be very difficult for them to prove that children do not use their platforms, so there is no proportionality at either end of the spectrum.

In terms of where we are with the review, this is a very different Parliament from the one that began the conversations in the Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill. It felt like hardly anybody in these rooms knew anything about the online world or had any understanding of it. It is totally different now. There are so many MPs here who, for example, have an employment history of working hard to make improvements in this area. As the right hon. and learned Member said, we now have so much expertise in these rooms that we could act to ensure that the legislation worked properly. Rather than us constantly having to call these debates, the Government could rely on some of our expertise. They would not have to take on every one of a Joint Committee’s recommendations, for example, but they could rely on some of the expertise and the links that we have made over the years that we have been embedded in this area to help them make good decisions and ensure some level of safety by design.

Like so many Members in this place, I am concerned that the Act will not do what it is supposed to do. For me, the key thing was always keeping children safe online, whether that is about the commitments regularly given by the Government, which I wholeheartedly believe they wanted to fulfil, about hash matching to identify grooming behaviours, or about the doxing forums or suicide forums—those dark places of the internet—which will be subject to exactly the same rules as a hill walking forum. They are just going to fill in a risk assessment and say, “No children use our platform. There’s no risk on our platform, so it’s all good.” The Government had an opportunity to categorise them and they choose not to. I urge them to change their mind.