online safety legislation

The Online Safety Act 2023 (c. 50) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. It was passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant Secretary of State the power to designate, suppress, and record a wide range of online content that the United Kingdom deems illegal or harmful to children.
The act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be harmful to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites. However, it obliges large social media platforms not to remove, and to preserve access to, journalistic or "democratically important" content such as user comments on political parties and issues.
The act also requires platforms, including end-to-end encrypted messengers, to scan for child pornography, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy. The government has said it does not intend to enforce this provision of the act until it becomes "technically feasible" to do so. The act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the harmful content they do not want to see.
The legislation has drawn criticism both within the UK and overseas from politicians, academics, journalists and human rights organisations, who say that it poses a threat to the right to privacy and freedom of speech and expression. Supporters of the act say it is necessary for child protection. The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia UK have said they will not implement age verification or identity checks, and in 2023 requested that lawmakers exempt public interest platforms from the act's scope. In August 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation lost a challenge to aspects of the act in the High Court.

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