The Online Safety Act 2023 (the Act) is a set of laws that protects children and adults online. It puts a range of new duties on social media companies and search services, making them more responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms.

The Act gives providers new duties to implement systems and processes to reduce risks that their services are used for illegal activity, and to take down illegal content when it does appear.

The strongest protections in the Act have been designed for children. Platforms will be required to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content and provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise.

The Act will also require major platforms to be more transparent about which kinds of potentially harmful content they allow and give people more control over the types of content they want to see.

Find out more about what the act does, who it applies to and how it is being implemented here.

Ofcom is now the independent regulator of Online Safety. It will set out steps providers can take to fulfil their safety duties in codes of practice. It will have a broad range of powers to assess and enforce providers’ compliance with the framework.

Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom’s job is to make online services safer for the people who use them.  To support this, they make sure companies have effective systems in place to protect users from harm.

Ofcom’s focus is on the services and features that pose the greatest risk of harm to UK users. This will involve ongoing regulatory supervision of the largest and riskiest services.

You can find out more about Ofcom’s approach to implementing the Online Safety Act here.

Readers are directed to further information sources below:

• Illegal and Harmful Content
• Protecting Children
• Online Abuse
• Safety Technology
• Online Fraud

New family-run business The Flirty Foal is a fully functional mobile horse box bar, holding a full personal licence and insurance to sell cocktails, prosecco and spirits to a host of events and venues across Cumbria and beyond.

As they approach their busiest season over the summer months, entrepreneur Amy Johnston who owns and runs this business alongside her partner Dan and their family talked to us about how online connectivity supports them in what they do.

Read the full story here.

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Are you a business in either the Westmorland and Furness or Cumberland Council areas using fixed line or mobile connectivity to support what you do?  We are really keen to talk to you about this with a view to creating our next case study story. 

If you would like to get involved, benefiting from local and possible national publicity through our programme, then please contact the team at info@connectingcumbria.org.uk.  We look forward to hearing from you.