The digital secretary has announced that the draft Online Safety Bill will include a set of new criminal offenses and an additional list of illegal content for tech firms to remove “as a priority”.

Nadine Dorries said that the new list will include online drug and weapons dealing, people smuggling, revenge porn, fraud, promoting suicide, and inciting or controlling sex work for gain.

Several new criminal offenses will be added to the upcoming law, which aim to tackle domestic violence, threats to rape and kill, and the deliberate sharing of “dangerous disinformation about hoax Covid-19 treatments”.

The government is also considering recommendations from the Law Commission which call for specific offences to be created relating to cyberflashing, encouraging self-harm, and epilepsy trolling - where someone deliberately sends flashing images to someone with the condition to trigger a seizure.

Terrorism and child sex abuse are already included in the draft legislation.

Currently, social media platforms and tech businesses are forced to take down such content after it has been reported by users. Under the new bill, they will have to be “proactive” by preventing people being exposed to this kind of content in the first place.

The government said that the Online Safety Bill will clamp down on “pimps and human traffickers, extremist groups encouraging violence and racial hate against minorities, suicide chatrooms and the spread of private sexual images of women without their consent”.

It added that, by naming these offences at this stage, it will remove the need for them to be set out in secondary legislation and Ofcom can “take faster enforcement action against tech firms which fail to remove the named illegal content”.

The regulator will have the power to dish out fines of up to 10 per cent of annual worldwide turnover to non-compliant sites or block them from being accessible in the UK.

“This government said it would legislate to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online while enshrining free speech, and that’s exactly what we are going to do,” said digital secretary, Nadine Dorries. “Our world leading bill will protect children from online abuse and harms, protecting the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content, and ensuring there is no safe space for terrorists to hide online.

“We are listening to MPs, charities and campaigners who have wanted us to strengthen the legislation, and today’s changes mean we will be able to bring the full weight of the law against those who use the internet as a weapon to ruin people’s lives and do so quicker and more effectively.”

Under the legislation, technology firms will need to make sure the features, functionalities and algorithms of their services are designed to prevent their users encountering harmful content and "minimise the length of time this content is available". The government said that this could be achieved by automated or human content moderation, banning illegal search terms, spotting suspicious users, and having effective systems in place to prevent banned users opening new accounts.

The new offences

The Law Commission was asked by ministers to review existing laws relating to abusive online communications - the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003 - finding that these laws have kept up with the significance of smartphones and social media in today's society.

The independent body said that the legislation was "ill-suited" to address online harm because they "overlap" and are often unclear for internet users, tech companies and law enforcement agencies. It found that current laws "over-criminalise" and capture ‘indecent’ images shared between two consenting adults where no harm is caused, but also under-criminalises, which results in harmful communications without appropriate criminal sanction.

The new harmful online communications offences include:

> A ‘genuinely threatening’ communications offence, where communications are sent or posted to convey a threat of serious harm.
> A harm-based communications offence to capture communications sent to cause harm without a reasonable excuse.
> An offence for when a person sends a communication they know to be false with the intention to cause non-trivial emotional, psychological or physical harm.

The government said that the maximum sentences for each offence will differ.

If someone is found guilty of a harm based offence they could go to prison for up to two years, up to 51 weeks for the false communication offence, and up to five years for the threatening communications offence. The maximum sentence was six months under the Communications Act and two years under the Malicious Communications Act.

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