Online Safety

Lord Markham Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

My understanding of this is that the Online Safety Act applies to all small companies and nobody is exempt. The things that would not apply would be the specific things in category 1, or indeed in category 2A and 2B, which are to do with the ability to apply and monitor a service contract, and the ability to ensure that users can exempt themselves from seeing certain activities. Those would not apply, but everything else does apply, including all the force of the Act in terms of the application to illegal content and the priority harms that have been identified.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I must admit that, probably like many noble Lords, I had to do a bit of research into 8chan and the others as part of this. In fact, I got a bit worried that I might get into trouble doing it on House of Lords servers. What I saw was that, before 8chan, there was 2chan and then 4chan, and 8chan is now 8kun. It is like whack-a-mole: while we can try to do all the technical moves, it is very difficult. So, coming at it from the other end of the telescope, the user end, I think we have done a lot of good things about getting messaging out about anti-fraud and I wonder whether there are things we can learn from that, to educate and equip young people, teachers and parents so that they are aware, and attacking it from that end as well.

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I hope the noble Lord does not get caught out from his search terms. Of course, he is absolutely right that part of this is about education and making people aware of what is there. I suspect that, as this gets introduced over the course of this year and enforcement starts, awareness will rise, and it will be incredibly important to include education as well.