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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 was “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 the regulator Ofcom’s implementation of the Online Safety Act 2023 had been a “disaster”.
The act is the UK’s first major legislation to regulate social media, search engine, messaging, gaming, dating, pornography and filesharing platforms.
The legislation gives 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 seek clearance to block access to a site in the UK.
However, Russell said unless there were changes to the act, “the streams of life-sucking content seen by children” would “soon become torrents – a digital disaster”.
Sharing his frustrations with the legislation, Kyle told the BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “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.
“Kemi Badenoch, when she was running for [Tory] leader at that exact point that the bill was passing through parliament, said this was legislating for hurt feelings.
“That entire bit of the bill was taken out, so I have inherited a landscape where we have a very uneven, unsatisfactory legislative settlement.”
Kyle added: “I want to focus on getting all the powers I can have implemented, that will happen in the course of this year. I’m very open-minded and I have said publicly we will have to legislate into the future again. We can’t just wait every decade or so and do a big bang of online harm legislation and also other bits of technological legislation.
“We need to get parliament more into the cycle of updating the law because things like deepfakes, for example, come down the line and in three months they are developed, designed, deployed and they are impacting society.”
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Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced its plans on Tuesday to scrap its longstanding factchecking programme in favour of a community notes system.
The science secretary said British law had not changed and tech companies must still comply with it, and claimed Mark Zuckerberg’s comments was “an American statement for American service users”.
Kyle appeared to defend the Meta chief executive, pointing to other comments in which Zuckerberg had “mentioned the need to take down illegal activity” and “keep children safe online”.
Meta, which also owns WhatsApp and Threads, plans to “work with President [Donald] Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”, Zuckerberg said in his statement.
He said Meta would also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender” that were “out of touch with mainstream discourse”.
Kyle said: “There is one thing that has not changed and that is the law of this land and the determination of this government to keep everyone safe.”
He added: “Access to the British society and economy is a privilege, it is not a right. If you come and operate in this country you abide by the law, and the law says illegal content must be taken down.”
