Child safety and the Online Safety Bill

Content warning: The below article discusses themes of online abuse, child abuse, and sexual abuse, which some readers may find distressing.

The internet can be a very unpleasant place, where harassment, abuse, financial fraud, and sexual exploitation are rife. And even though the internet is a global network, the UK Government is seeking to make it safer with a piece of legislation called the Online Safety Bill.

The Bill’s origins stretch back to the Internet Safety Strategy Green Paper of autumn 2017 which proposed a new regulatory framework to address threats to online safety such as content which is illegal or harmful to individuals, including abusive content and material deemed to be harassing.

Pressure from charities

But charities such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (N.S.P.C.C.) have long held that the Bill should have a stronger focus on the online safety of children, and particularly on the problem of child abuse images which can be distributed over social media networks such as Snapchat and Facebook.

The N.S.P.C.C. says that over 30,000 crimes involving the sharing and possession of indecent images of children took place last year (2021/2022), according to freedom of information data obtained from U.K. police forces. That’s a 66% increase over the last five years.

“We believe that unregulated social media is causing this increase of online child sexual abuse. Social media companies are failing to stop their sites being used to organise, commit, and share child abuse,” the charity said.

Focus on children

Recent revisions of the Bill have dropped various measures to protect adults from harm, so it does now appear that the government has listened to these charities and is focussing on protecting children.

There are now requirements in the Bill for social media networks and other companies to take action to protect children from harmful content, including pornography and other age-inappropriate material, and from child sexual exploitation and abuse material.

When the Bill becomes law, social media companies must show they have done everything reasonably possible to ensure that their services don’t facilitate the spread of this type of  content and, when notified that it is on their service, taken action as quickly as possible to remove it.

The Bill is currently in the Committee stage at the House of Lords following a first and second reading.

The encryption problem

One of the biggest, and as yet unresolved issues, revolves around the question of what to do about encryption. That’s because encryption is a key tool that internet users can make use of to help protect their privacy and ensure that their data and messages are secure. It can also help ensure freedom of speech.

But people who exchange images of child sexual abuse or carry out grooming online can also use encryption to hide their activities from anyone trying to detect it.

Suspending encryption

A coalition of high profile charities including Barnardo’s, N.S.P.C.C., The Children’s Society, The Lucy Faithful Foundation, and The Marie Collins Foundation are currently promoting a campaign called No Place to Hide.

The Home Office-backed campaign wants social media companies to suspend the introduction and use of end-to-end encryption on their messaging services “until they have the technology in place to ensure children will not be put at greater risk as a result.”

“We are not against encryption, but we are against it without safeguards being put in place,” Victoria Green, chief executive of The Marie Collins Foundation told Charity Digital.

Backdoor access

The problem is that it is not clear what safeguards can be put in place. A possible solution would be to use an encryption system which has a master key (known as a back door) that social networks could use to decrypt messages and images to check them for child exploitation.

But Jim Killock, executive director of Open Rights Group, a privacy, data, and digital rights campaigning organisation, says that this simply would not work.  “Any backdoor can be exploited by a third party. Nobody has been able to show how such a system could not be abused,” he explained. “If security is the goal…then interfering with encryption is a simple no go.”

Nonetheless, the N.S.P.C.C. (and other charities) is currently calling on Meta (the owner of Facebook and Instagram) to stop encrypting its social networks. It also wants the House of Lords to:

• Back the creation of a child safety advocate, similar to statutory user advocacy arrangements that the charity says are effective across other regulated sectors
• Hold executives of technology companies criminally liable if their sites continue to expose children to preventable abuse

What does this mean for children’s charities?

The good news about the Bill in its latest form is that there is now much more focus on protecting children from online harm – and the Government appears to be at pains to stress that this is the key aim of the Bill now.

The issue of encryption has still not been resolved, so charities that believe that the use of encryption on social networks should be paused until unspecified “technological solutions” can be introduced should be lobbying hard.

When will the Bill become law?

The truth is that nobody knows for sure. In theory it could become law by the end of this summer, although it is likely to be delayed well into next year or even 2025. In addition, the Labour party has stated that it will revise the Bill if it wins the next election, so in this case the Bill in its final form could take several more years to emerge.