Online safety laws ‘unsatisfactory’ and ‘uneven’, says UK science minister
Share:
Peter Kyle frustrated at bill inherited from Tories and says parliament should legislate faster to protect public. Online safety legislation is “unsatisfactory” and “uneven”, the science secretary has said as he expressed hopes for parliament to learn to legislate faster on the issue.
Peter Kyle said he had given a “very personal commitment to making sure that everybody, particularly people with vulnerabilities and every child is vulnerable, has protection”, after Ian Russell, whose daughter killed herself after viewing harmful content on social media, told Keir Starmer the UK is “going backwards” on online safety.
Russell, who is also the chair of the Molly Rose Foundation (MRF), said in his letter to the prime minister on Saturday that regulator Ofcom’s implementation of the Online Safety Act has been a “disaster”. The Online Safety Act is the UK’s first major legislation to regulate social media, search engine, messaging, gaming, dating, pornography and filesharing platforms.
The legislation gave Ofcom the power to fine firms that fail to meet these duties – potentially up to billions of pounds for the largest sites – and in serious cases can seek clearance to block access to a site in the UK. However Russell said unless there are changes to the legislation, “the streams of life-sucking content seen by children will soon become torrents: a digital disaster”.
Sharing his frustrations with the act, Kyle told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg: “The frustration I have is that the bill was conceived with a whole set of principles, including taking down illegal [content] but also tackling the area where the volume of interaction could have a negative impact – legal but harmful.
