Has Online Safety gone Offline?
So soon after receiving Royal Assent on 26 Oct 2023 it is worth asking if the Online Safety Act (OSA) has run out of steam and so effectively gone offline.
On BBC TV on 5 May 2024 the parents of children lost to suicide induced by online material challenged Ofcom that they had been sidelined in over-complex and over-sized consultations on Illegal Harms.
It will be a year before the OSA Codes of Practice are published and the Statutory Effect comes into play. It must feel to some as if the Online Safety Act is still offline.
The Online Realm which operates on the Internet, is like a large algorithmic machine, an industrial revolution in its own right. Like all machines made by human hand, it does a great deal of good and, sadly, a great deal of harm. At the moment it seems like the harm is greater than the good, and some of the public are not happy about government responses. Public discontent is currently aimed at many situations besides online safety.
The infected Blood Scandal 40 years after issues were notified to authorities is resulting in £210,000 payouts with more to come; which won’t help the 3000 who died. Then there is the Post Office Horizon Scandal with issues starting 35 years ago and despite many lives destroyed or lost, financial payouts are yet to be awarded by government.
How similar these backgrounds are – a small issue that if attended to could have prevented a significant safety failing. Instead, those with the knowledge and power spent decades of time and effort in preventing the bad outcome being found and worked on. Which raises the question: will online safety be the next disaster in 10 years time where it is found that something that could have been done now, wasn’t, AND that instead of using public funds to make things work, our money was used against us to ensure that the bad things that had happened, were prevented from proper scrutiny and allowed to get worse?
The original Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain in 1731 was also a source of good which had bad outcomes. It took until 1974 for significant safety law to be created (Health & Safety At Work etc Act 1974) but only after the Aberfan coal disaster killed 116 children and 28 adults. Even now after 50 years of this law, safety in the workplace is far from guaranteed, with some playing Russian Roulette with people’s lives.
The Tech Companies are the modern day equivalent of 1731, overseeing the Information Factories of the world. The only difference is that most of us are inside those factories not outside, often unwittingly within a whisker of being mangled in those algorithmic machines.
Regulators like Ofcom have always had a tough time, on behalf of the public, to obtain some order and protection from things going wrong. Up until now it was accepted that regulators would have to play catch-up with issues. The modern regulator of the online realm does not have that luxury of time because the level of harm generation already far exceeds what was thought possible. Traditional approaches to safety involve an attempt to stifle the production of failure. This has not worked. Safety in the online realm demands a new strategy: a strategy designed to amplify the potential good, such that the potential for harm is stifled by the success of the good.
As Ofcom have said: tech companies have had the opportunity to self-regulate, and the lack of good outcomes means that the online realm needs to be regulated. However, regulation in the traditional way has always provided the opportunity for profit to be put above safety. The online realm is a multi-billion dollar industry which means plenty of money is available to fend off perceived challenges to profit by safety concerns. The message that has not yet struck home in any industry is that Profit and Safety CAN co-exist if we find ways to make that happen.
As the Online Harm Genie is out of the bottle and gone offline, we need a regulator with this never-seen-before way of thinking about safety; for all our sakes. Else the algorithmic machines will chew us all up and there will be nothing left of us. There is no need for this tragic outcome. All of us need to help our online safety regulators create green and pleasant online realms for us.