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Online Safety Act 2023
Act of Parliament
Parliament of the United Kingdom
Long titleAn Act to make provision for and in connection with the regulation by Ofcom of certain internet services; for and in connection with communications offences; and for connected purposes.
Citation2023 c. 50
Introduced byMichelle Donelan, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Commons)
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Arts and Heritage (Lords)
Territorial extent United Kingdom
Dates
Royal assent26 October 2023
CommencementOn royal assent and by regulations.
Status: Current legislation
History of passage through Parliament
Text of statute as originally enacted
Text of the Online Safety Act 2023 as in force today (including any amendments) within the United Kingdom, from legislation.gov.uk.

The Online Safety Act 2023[1][2][3] (c. 50) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. It was passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant Secretary of State the power to designate, suppress, and record a wide range of online content that is deemed "illegal" or "harmful to children."[4][5]

The Act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be "harmful" to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites. It obliges large social media platforms not to remove, and to preserve access to, journalistic or "democratically important" content such as user comments on political parties and issues.

The Act also requires platforms, including end-to-end encrypted messengers, to scan for child pornography, despite warnings from experts that it is not possible to implement such a scanning mechanism without undermining users' privacy.[6] The government has claimed that it does not intend to enforce this provision of the Act until it becomes "technically feasible" to do so.[7] The Act also obliges technology platforms to introduce systems that will allow users to better filter out the "harmful" content they do not want to see.[8][9]

The Act hands sweeping and highly controversial powers to the relevant secretary of state, allowing them to interfere directly with Ofcom's operations, including the authority to dictate the content of its so-called "codes of practice". Critics argue this represents a dangerous centralisation of power that compromises Ofcom's supposed independence and opens the door to government control over online speech. These powers, which can be exercised with minimal oversight and under vague emergency justifications, have been condemned as authoritarian and dystopian in nature. The legislation has drawn fierce backlash both within the UK and internationally from politicians, academics, journalists and human rights organisations, who warn that it poses a serious threat to the right to privacy and freedom of speech and expression.[10]

Provisions

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Scope

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Within the scope of the Act is any "user-to-user service". This is defined as an Internet service by means of which content that is generated by a user of the service, or uploaded to or shared on the service by a user of the service, may be read, viewed, heard or otherwise experienced ("encountered") by another user, or other users. Content includes written material or messages, oral communications, photographs, videos, visual images, music and data of any description.[11]

The duty of care applies globally to services with a significant number of United Kingdom users, or which target UK users, or those which are capable of being used in the United Kingdom where there are reasonable grounds to believe that there is a material risk of significant harm.[11]

The idea of a duty of care for Internet intermediaries was first proposed in Thompson (2016)[12] and made popular in the UK by the work of Woods and Perrin (2019).[13]

Duties

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The duty of care in the Act refers to a number of specific duties to all services within scope:[11]

  • The illegal content risk assessment duty  
  • The illegal content duties
  • The duty about rights to freedom of expression and privacy
  • The duties about reporting and redress
  • The record-keeping and review duties

For services 'likely to be accessed by children', adopting the same scope as the Age Appropriate Design Code, two additional duties are imposed:[11]

  • The children's risk assessment duties
  • The duties to protect children's online safety

For category 1 services, which will be defined in secondary legislation but are limited to the largest global platforms, there are four further new duties:[11]

  • The adults' risk assessment duties
  • The duties to protect adults’ online safety
  • The duties to protect content of democratic importance
  • The duties to protect journalistic content

Enforcement

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The Act empowers Ofcom, the national communications regulator, to block access to particular user-to-user services or search engines from the United Kingdom,[14][15][16] including through interventions by internet access providers and app stores. The regulator can also impose, through "service restriction orders", requirements on ancillary services which facilitate the provision of the regulated services.

The Act lists in section 92 as examples (i) services which enable funds to be transferred, (ii) search engines which generate search results displaying or promoting content and (iii) services which facilitate the display of advertising on a regulated service (for example, an ad server or an ad network). Ofcom must apply to a court for both Access Restriction and Service Restriction Orders.[11] Section 44 of the Act also gives the Secretary of State the power to direct Ofcom to modify a draft code of practice for online safety if deemed necessary for reasons of public policy, national security or public safety. Ofcom must comply with the direction and submit a revised draft to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State may give Ofcom further directions to modify the draft, and once satisfied, must lay the modified draft before Parliament. Additionally, the Secretary of State can remove or obscure information before laying the review statement before Parliament.[17]

The Act contains provisions allowing eligible entities to bring super-complaints on behalf of consumers.[18] The process for doing so was set out in regulations in July 2025.[19]

Limitations

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The Act has provisions to impose legal requirements ensuring that content removals do not arbitrarily remove or infringe access to what it defines as journalistic content.[14] Large social networks are required to protect "democratically important" content, such as user-submitted posts supporting or opposing particular political parties or policies.[20] The government stated that news publishers' own websites, as well as reader comments on such websites, are not within the intended scope of the law.[14][16] Similarly, one legal commentator has assessed that individual blogs and their reader comments are out of scope.[21]

Age verification

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Section 12 of the Act states that service providers have a duty to prevent children from seeing "primary priority content that is harmful to children". This includes pornographic images, and content that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for eating disorders, self-harm, or suicide. The Act dictates that service providers must use age verification or age estimation technology in order to prevent users from being able to access primary priority content unless they are appropriately-aged: the provision applies to all services that allow categories of primary priority content to be made available, including social networks and internet pornography websites.[1][22]

Other provisions

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The Act adds two new offences to the Sexual Offences Act 2003: sending images of a person's genitals (cyberflashing),[23] or sharing or threatening to share intimate images.[24] The first conviction for cyberflashing under the new law occurred in March 2024 following a guilty plea.[25][26]

The Act also updates and extends a number of existing communication offences. The false communications offence contained in section 179[27] replaces the offence previously found in s127(2)(a) and (b) of the Communications Act 2003.[28] (The existing s127(1) offence remains in force.)[29]

Section 181 creates an offence of sending a message (via electronic or non-electronic means) that "conveys a threat of death or serious harm".[30] This can be tried summarily or on indictment.[31]

Section 183 creates an offence of "sending or showing flashing images electronically" if it is "reasonably foreseeable that an individual with epilepsy would be among the individuals who would view it", the sender intends to cause that person harm, and they have "no reasonable excuse".[32][33] This is intended to try and prevent "epilepsy trolling".[34]

Section 184 makes "encouraging or assisting serious self-harm" a criminal offence. This is similar to the offence of encouraging or assisting suicide contained in the Suicide Act 1961.[35] The first conviction under this section occurred in July 2025. Tyler Webb used the messaging app Telegram to encourage a woman he had met on a mental health support forum to harm herself and send him pictures of the resulting injuries, and to attempt suicide while he watched on camera.[36][37]

Legislative process and timetable

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The draft bill was given pre-legislative scrutiny by a joint committee of Members of the House of Commons and peers from the House of Lords. The Opposition Spokesperson, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, in the House of Lords said, "My understanding is that we now have a timeline for the online harms Bill, with pre-legislative scrutiny expected immediately after the Queen's Speech—before the Summer Recess—and that Second Reading would be expected after the Summer Recess."[38] But the Minister replying refused to pre-empt the Queen's Speech by confirming this.

Section 212 of the Act repeals part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, which demanded mandatory age verification to access online pornography but was subsequently not enforced by the government.[39] The 2021 draft of the Act included within scope any pornographic site which has functionality to allow for user-to-user services, but those which do not have this functionality, or choose to remove it, were not in scope in the draft published by the government.[11]

Addressing the House of Commons DCMS Select Committee, the Secretary of State, Oliver Dowden, confirmed he would be happy to consider a proposal during pre-legislative scrutiny of the Act by a joint committee of both Houses of Parliament to extend the scope of the Act to all commercial pornographic websites.[40][failed verification] According to the then government, the act addresses the major concern expressed by campaigners such as the Open Rights Group[41] about the risk to user privacy with the Digital Economy Act 2017's[42] requirement for age verification by creating, on services within scope of the legislation, "A duty to have regard to the importance of... protecting users from unwarranted infringements of privacy, when deciding on, and implementing, safety policies and procedures."[11]

In February 2022, the Digital Economy Minister, Chris Philp, announced that the bill (as it then was) would be amended to bring commercial pornographic websites within its scope.[43]

The bill was criticised for its proposals to restrain the publication of "lawful but harmful" speech, effectively creating a new form of censorship of otherwise legal speech.[15][20][44] As a result, in November 2022, measures that were intended to force big technology platforms to take down "legal but harmful" materials were replaced with the requirement to provide systems to avoid viewing such content.[8]

In September 2023, during the third reading in the Lords, Lord Parkinson presented a ministerial statement from the government stating that the controversial powers allowing Ofcom to break end-to-end encryption would not be used immediately.[6] This followed statements from several tech firms, including Signal, suggesting they would withdraw from the UK market rather than weaken their encryption. Nevertheless, the provisions pertaining to end-to-end encryption weakening were not removed from the Act and Ofcom can at any time issue notices requiring the breaking of end-to-end encryption technology.

Effects on websites and apps

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A number of websites have stated that they would close. London Fixed Gear and Single Speed, a forum for fixed-gear and single-speed bicycle enthusiasts announced their closure citing the high cost of legal compliance, along with Microcosm, a provider of forum hosting for non-commercial, non-profit communities.[45][46]

Lobsters, a programming and technology focussed discussion site, announced that they would block UK users in order to comply, but following extensive discussion decided not to.[47]

Some websites and apps stated they would introduce age verification for users in response to a 25 July 2025 deadline set by Ofcom.[48] These include pornographic websites,[49] but also other websites and services such as networks Bluesky (verification via Kids Web Services (KWS)[50]), Discord, Tinder, Bumble, Feeld, Grindr, Hinge, Reddit (verification via Persona[51]) and X.[52][51][53][54][55]

Reception

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Supporters have frequently invoked child protection as a justification for its sweeping powers. The National Crime Agency, an arm of the Home Office, insisted the legislation is necessary to "safeguard children" from online harms.[56] The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has similarly championed the Act, calling its passage "a momentous day for children" and claiming it will help prevent abuse.[57] The Samaritans, which had lobbied to expand the Bill's reach under the banner of protecting vulnerable users, also lent the final Act its cautious support. While the organisation acknowledged it as a step forward, it criticised the government for not fulfilling its ambition to make the United Kingdom the "safest place to be online".[58][59]

Following the enactment of this law, there was a significant rise in downloads and usage of VPN services by users in the UK.[60] This was because connecting through a VPN to a country without such regulations could circumvent the age verification requirement. It was also found that photo-based checks on certain third-party age verification services, such as Persona, could be bypassed using images of characters from the video game Death Stranding.[61] A petition calling for the repeal of the law attracted over 400,000 signatures on the UK Parliament petitions website.[62]

Criticism

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The Act has provoked intense criticism from civil liberties and human rights organisations, who argue that it paves the way for authoritarian control over digital expression in the United Kingdom. International watchdog Article 19 warned that the Act is "an extremely complex and incoherent piece of legislation" and constitutes a serious threat to freedom of expression and access to information.[63] The Open Rights Group labelled it a "censor's charter", arguing that the Act imposes sweeping, ill-defined obligations on online services and risks curtailing democratic discourse.[64] Critics argue that under the guise of safety, the Act grants the Government of the United Kingdom extensive powers to regulate speech, set enforcement priorities and pressure platforms into removing content without judicial oversight. In February 2024, the European Court of Human Rights had previously ruled that requiring degraded end-to-end encryption "cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society" and was incompatible with Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.[65]

Major technology firms have expressed alarm over the Act's implications for user privacy and encryption. Apple Inc. called the legislation a "serious threat" to end-to-end encryption, warning that it could force the company to weaken security features designed to protect users from surveillance.[66] Meta Platforms similarly stated that it would rather see its messaging services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger blocked in the UK than compromise encryption standards.[67] Ciaran Martin, founding CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre, cautioned that the bill could cause real-world harm if companies were pressured to install surveillance tools under the label of content moderation. He accused the government of "magical thinking" and said that scanning for child abuse content would necessarily require weakening the privacy of encrypted messages. Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey, described the Act's surveillance provisions as "technically dangerous and ethically questionable", stating that the government's approach could make the internet less safe, not more. He added that the Act mass surveillance "almost an inevitability" as security forces would be liable to mission creep, using the justification of "exceptional circumstances" to extend searches beyond their original remit.[68]

Public interest platforms such as Wikipedia have also raised strong objections, warning that the legislation risks undermining non-profit and community-governed websites. Rebecca MacKinnon of the Wikimedia Foundation called the Act "harsh", warning that it fails to distinguish between commercial tech giants and public knowledge projects.[69] Both the Foundation and Wikimedia UK have rejected calls to implement age verification or identity checks, citing concerns about data minimisation, privacy and editorial independence.[70][71] In June 2023, they issued an open letter urging lawmakers to exempt public interest platforms from the Act's scope.[72][73]

In May 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a legal challenge against potential designation as a "category one" service under the Act, which would subject Wikipedia to the most stringent requirements.[74] The Foundation warned that complying with the law would compromise Wikipedia's open editing model and invite state-driven censorship or manipulation. The Daily Telegraph reported in July 2025 that Wikipedia may restrict access for UK users if the government insists on full compliance.[75]

Political controversy

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On 29 July 2025, the Science Secretary Peter Kyle of the Labour Party criticised Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, one of the bill's most vocal opponents. Referring to Farage, he stated: "We have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence – Nigel Farage is on their side ... if people like Jimmy Savile were alive today he would be perpetrating his crimes online". Farage demanded an apology on a television programme he hosts on GB News, with fellow Reform leader Zia Yusuf also calling for one.[76] Yusuf had previously described the legislation as "an assault on freedom",[77] and Farage had called it "borderline dystopian".[78]

See also

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References

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