Online harms bill 'fails to prevent sharing of abuse images', warn MPs
Derren Hayes
Monday, January 24, 2022
Proposed government legislation to tackle online harms would fail to prevent the sharing of some of the most “insidious” images of child abuse and violence against women and girls, according to an influential group of MPs.
Scrutiny by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee of the Draft Online Safety Bill has found that in its current form, the legislation is neither clear nor robust enough to tackle certain types of illegal and harmful content on user-to-user and search services.
Chair of the DCMS committee Julian Knight MP said: “In its current form what should be world-leading, landmark legislation instead represents a missed opportunity.
“The Online Safety Bill neither protects freedom of expression nor is it clear nor robust enough to tackle illegal and harmful online content.
“Urgency is required to ensure that some of the most pernicious forms of child sexual abuse do not evade detection because of a failure in the online safety law.”
In a report by the committee, MPs call on the government to address types of content that are technically legal - including parts of child abuse sequences like “breadcrumbing” and types of online violence against and women and girls such as tech-enabled “nudifying” of women and deepfake pornography - by bringing them into scope either through primary legislation or as types of harmful content covered by the duties of care.
“Breadcrumbing” refers to public content and activity, designed or calculated with a clear sense of subverting online content moderation rules, but does not meet the criminal threshold for removal.
In the report, Andy Burrows, head of child safety online policy at the NSPCC, described the problem posed by breadcrumbing for children’s safety: “They know what they can post and what they cannot. This could be tribute sites, pictures of a child that to you and me would be perfectly innocuous but if you are an abuser you will recognise the context behind it. These are carefully edited child abuse sequences, so they are edited in such a way that they are on the right side of what platforms will keep up rather than take down.
“They effectively allow child abusers to use platforms as an online shop window to advertise their sexual interest in children and then in turn to form networks that will go off platform to encrypted sites, to less scrupulous platforms where abuse material can be shared.”
The committee recommends reframing the definition of illegal content to explicitly add the need to consider context as a factor, and include explicitly definitions of activity like breadcrumbing, on the face of the bill.
- CYP Now is holding its Safeguarding Children in the Digital Age online conference on 26 & 27 January. To see the programme and register click here
