The 'final chance' for social media to address unlawful posts

As the Online Safety Act (OSA) goes into effect, online platforms will have to start evaluating whether their services expose users to unlawful content by March 16, 2025, or risk financial penalties. The UK's internet safety regulator, Ofcom, released its final codes of practice on Monday that outline how businesses should handle unlawful online content.Platforms may be fined up to 10% of their worldwide turnover if they don't do risk assessments within three months of discovering possible harms to their services. Dame Melanie Dawes, the director of Ofcom, told BBC News that this was the industry's "last chance" to reform."If they don't start to seriously change the way they operate their services, then I think those demands for things like bans for children on social media are going to get more and more vigorous," she stated. "I'm asking the industry now to get moving, and if they don't they will be hearing from us with enforcement action from March." Platforms must determine when, where, and how illegal content may appear on their services as well as how they will prevent it from reaching users in accordance with Ofcom's regulations.

According to the OSA, this includes anything that promotes or facilitates suicide, self-harm, extreme sexual violence, controlling or coercive behavior, or child sexual abuse material (CSAM).However, detractors claim that the Act ignores a variety of ills that children face. The OSA has "deep structural issues," according to the Molly Rose Foundation, which was established in honor of adolescent Molly Russell, who committed herself in 2017 after seeing pictures of herself harming herself on social media. Its chief executive, Andy Burrows, stated that the organization was "astonished and disappointed" that Ofcom's guidelines did not include explicit, targeted steps for platforms on handling suicide and self-harm content. "Robust regulation remains the best way to tackle illegal content, but it simply isn't acceptable for the regulator to take a gradualist approach to immediate threats to life," he stated.