The government announced this week it has accepted Law Commission recommendations to strengthen online safety and stamp out illegal content through an Online Safety Bill. It will create a list of criminal content for tech firms to remove as a priority, including drug and weapons dealings online, people smuggling, revenge porn, fraud, promoting suicide and inciting or controlling prostitution. Ofcom will be given powers to issue fines of up to 10% of annual worldwide turnover to non-compliant sites or block accessibility in the UK.
New criminal offences will be added to the Bill to tackle domestic violence and rape and death threats. These are: ‘genuinely threatening’ communications, such as online threats to rape or kill, punishable by up to five years in prison; harm-based communications, intended to cause serious distress, punishable with up to two years in prison; and knowingly sending false information with the intention of causing non-trivial harm, such as hoax bomb threats, punishable by up to 51 weeks in prison.
Law Commissioner Professor Penney Lewis said the proposals would ‘create a more nuanced set of criminal offences’.
According to Nick Grant, Senior Associate at Payne Hicks Beach, the Bill could also lead to a rise in civil claims brought by victims of online abuse.
Grant said: ‘Importantly, the Joint Committee has recommended that the government create further legislation to allow users to sue providers for failure to meet their obligations under the proposed new act.
‘At the moment, if social media platforms are unwilling to co-operate, it can be expensive and time consuming to remove unlawful content from their platforms and many do not have the resources or resilience to battle with social media giants. In particular, we can see that the revolutionary proposal that social media platforms must proactively prevent the posting of certain types of harmful content (such as revenge porn) rather than to respond reactively to complaints will likely have a substantial impact on the landscape of civil claims against social media platforms more generally.’
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