UK Considers Toughening up the Online Safety Act after Misinformation Triggers Violent Protests

• A 17-year-old boy attacked and killed 3 children in a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the UK.
• However, social media users wrongly identified him as an immigrant who escaped to the UK in a boat, resulting in violent anti-immigration riots.
• As a result, the government has decided to revisit the Online Safety Act, toughen it up, and get it implemented as soon as possible to curb the spread of misinformation online.

After a series of posts on X containing misinformation sparked riots all across the country, Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour government has decided to toughen up internet safety regulations, i.e., the Online Safety Act.

What Caused the UK Riots?

Before we talk about the laws and the proposed changes to it, let's talk about what caused the riots.

Two weeks ago, a 17-year-old boy barged into a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the town of Southport in Merseyside and attacked several children. Three girls aged 6, 7, and 9, respectively, have died, while others are battling with their injuries.

Soon after the attack, people took to social media to bash the perpetrator. The only problem is that they got the attacker's identity wrong.

Not only did they get his name wrong, but also identified him as an asylum seeker who arrived in the country by a boat in 2023. In reality, the attacker was born in Britain.

However, the false narrative had already gone viral by then, triggering protests from the far-right, anti-immigration groups, which quickly turned very violent. Shops and mosques were attacked and bricks and petrol bombs became a common weapon.

Elon Musk, owner of X, further added to the issue by sharing a few controversial posts. In the first one, he wrote, Civil war is inevitable." This statement has been heavily criticized by the government. The official spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer said there can be no justification for such a statement.

In the second post, Musk shared a fake headline that had been edited to look like it was from The Telegraph's website. It read that the government is apparently building detainment camps on Falkland Island for protestors. This particular post, however, has now been deleted.

How Will the Law Change?

According to industry sources, the UK government is planning to revisit the Online Safety Act - a legislation put in place to ensure social media companies are curbing the spread of illegal and harmful content on their platforms.

Although they aren't supposed to speak about the proposed changes yet, top officials have revealed that rules might be made tougher to fight misinformation, hate speech, and incitement to violence.

What exactly tougher" means here, though, is unclear. New measures might also be introduced, but the bottom line is that nothing concrete has been decided yet.

The bigger issue is that the Online Safety Act was passed very recently - in October 2023, to be precise. So, if any new rules are introduced, they won't come into force until 2025.

For the same reason, Ofcom, UK's media and telecommunications regulator, is also unable to regulate social media platforms in terms of how they handle hate speech and other content that can incite violence.

However, once the new rules do come into effect, Ofcom will be able to impose fines of up to 10% of a company's global annual revenue for breaching the regulations. In case of multiple breaches or repeat offenses, the senior managers of the company can even face jail time.

A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology said that their immediate priority is to get the Online Safety Act implemented as quickly as possible.

However, our message to social media companies remains clear: there is no need to wait-you can and should take immediate action to protect your users," they added.

Once this happens, we can hope that companies will be more cautious about the type of content they allow on their platforms, and hopefully, there won't be a rerun of this incident in the future.

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