The UK’s Online Safety Bill has been approved by the Houses of Parliament and is set to pass into law.

The aim of the bill is to offer more provisions to help protect children when browsing the internet, but has been criticised for disregarding personal privacy online and threatening to break end-to-end encryption.

Once it becomes law, the UK government said social media platforms will be expected to fulfil requirements such as removing illegal content quickly or preventing it from appearing in the first place, including content promoting self-harm; ensuring the risks and dangers posed to children on the largest social media platforms are more transparent, including by publishing risk assessments; and enforce age limits and age-checking measures.

“Our common-sense approach will deliver a better future for British people, by making sure that what is illegal offline is illegal online,” said technology secretary Michelle Donelan. “It puts protecting children first, enabling us to catch keyboard criminals and crack down on the heinous crimes they seek to commit.”

Chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Peter Wanless recently urged tech companies to throw their support behind the bill, stating it will finally result in the “ground-breaking protections they [children] should expect online,”

Earlier this year, messaging app WhatsApp published an open letter warning that the bill could lead to tech firms being forced to "break end-to-end encryption" on private messaging apps.

The letter, which was also signed by executives of encrypted messaging service Signal and Japanese messaging platform Viber, claimed the bill could result in the “indiscriminate surveillance” of personal messages friends, employees, executives, journalists, human rights activists, and politicians.

WhatsApp chief executive Will Cathcart also warned that plans to change rules around encryption in the UK’s upcoming Online Safety Bill could “threaten the security of government communications”.

Meanwhile, the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has refused to perform age checks on users under the terms of the bill.

Rebecca MacKinnon, vice president, global advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation that operates Wikipedia, told the BBC this would go against the organisation’s commitment to “collect minimal data about readers and contributors”.

An earlier version of the bill which was previously championed by former prime minister Theresa May featured a nationwide age verification system for viewing online pornography. This would have required anybody accessing such websites to submit a form of government ID, leading to an outcry over personal privacy and the storage of this personal information. This plan however was abandoned in 2019, and the bill has been through various different guises in the interim.

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