Social Media Bosses Who Ignore Rules Aimed at Protecting Children Face Jail Under the Online Safety Bill

Conservative Party MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith (House of Commons)

The British Culture Secretary has confirmed plans under new online safety laws that will make tech executives and managers criminally liable for children’s duty of care failures.

Last week, Conservative MPs backed an amendment to the Online Safety Bill that would introduce powers to jail tech bosses.

Former cabinet ministers, including ex-home secretary Priti Patel and former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, were among those backing the change to the Online Safety Bill put forward by Tory MP Miriam Cates.

Cates had pointed to TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, and an investigation by the Centre for Countering Hate in December that found that TikTok was pushing suicide, self-harm, and eating disorder content via its “For You” feed.

A child using a computer in an undated file photo. (Peter Byrne/PA Media)

Cates also mentioned the case of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old girl from Harrow, northwest London, whose father said showed no obvious signs of mental illness, but who took her own life on Nov. 21, 2017. She had viewed online content related to depression and self-harm for months.

On Tuesday, Culture Michelle Donelan said that she had carefully reviewed New Clause 2, which sought to make senior managers liable for a maximum sentence of two years in jail for those who “consent or connive in ignoring enforceable requirements, risking serious harm to children.”

“I am sympathetic to the aims of the amendment,” she said.

“We have already demonstrated our commitment elsewhere in the Bill to strengthening the protections for children in the Online Safety Bill by bringing forward a series of amendments to achieve this at previous stages of passage,” she added.

“In addition, the Bill already includes provisions to make senior managers liable for failing to prevent a provider committing an offence (failure to comply with information notices),” said Donelan.

The Online Safety Bill is going through its final stages in the Commons.

The final government amendment “will be carefully designed to capture instances where senior managers, or those purporting to act in that capacity, have consented or connived in ignoring enforceable requirements, risking serious harm to children,” she said.

“The criminal penalties, including imprisonment and fines, will be commensurate with similar offences.”

“While this amendment will not affect those who have acted in good faith to comply in a proportionate way, it gives the Act additional teeth to deliver change and ensure that people are held to account if they fail to properly protect children,” she added.

Measures in the Online Safety Bill will force Google, Twitter, Meta, and others to abide by a code of conduct overseen by online regulator Ofcom, which will also have the power to fine companies failing to comply with up to 10 percent of their annual global turnover.

Under the current state of the bill, the biggest social media platforms must carry out risk assessments on the types of harms that could appear on their services and how they plan to address them, setting out how they will do this in their terms of service.

Labour Would ‘Go Further’

Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell called the new criminal liability an “additional tool in the armoury” of the regulator.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Labour wants the regulator to have “sufficient teeth” to make Silicon Valley bosses “sit up and take notice.”

Powell added that the current “scaled back” bill only focuses on harm caused to children. She said that Labour would “go further” and hold tech companies accountable for “viral misogyny, racist abuse, state disinformation, far-right disinformation, self-harm promotion.”

There has been fierce debate from free speech advocates around the bill since it was introduced to Parliament on March 17, 2022.

The Open Rights Group, a UK-based organisation that works to preserve digital rights, has criticised the bill, saying that while it seeks to protect children online, “its measures’ effect extends far beyond the policy aim, with unintended consequences for the whole of society.”

“Alongside threats of imprisonment, MPs have also strengthened the age assurance requirements. This will have the effect of making age-gating websites compulsory, restricting access to content and creating new risks to privacy,' said Dr. Monica Horten, ORG Policy Manager for Freedom of Expression.

Horten said that the bill also “fails to safeguard the rights of children and adults to access lawful content.”

“In doing so, it poses a serious risk to Freedom of expression. This is a fundamental human right, enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” she added.

“The amendment proposed by some MPs fails to adequately identify what ‘content harmful to children is’. Providers of online services won’t know what is supposed to be taken down or where they should restrict access to content.”

“Fear of a jail sentence, will lead to over-moderation where content that is lawful is removed. It portends the use of upload filters, where an algorithm sweeps in and censors content before it has been posted,” said Horten.

Access to Online Pornography

Cates, who is part of the Education Select Committee, has also warned of children having access to online pornography.

In an interview with GB News in November, she said: “This is an absolute epidemic and about half of 11 year olds, we think, have seen porn. And so you know, once you get older than that, of course, it’s most children.

“And I think the other thing to say is, as well as it being prolific, the kinds of pornography that that children are seeing is not what we might have seen when we were growing up in a dodgy magazine or something like this.

“This is hardcore, abusive, violent, really horrendous, disgusting stuff that most adults would be absolutely outraged that children have free and easy access to. And it is free and easy,” she added.

PA Media contributed to this report.