The Online Safety Bill puts the onus on online platforms such as social media to protect children from some legal but harmful material.
But the new bill goes beyond child safety by requiring platforms to show that they are committed to removing illegal content including, child sexual abuse, controlling or coercive behaviour, animal cruelty or terrorism.
The new law also creates new criminal offences, such as “cyber-flashing” (sending unsolicited sexual imagery online) and sharing of “deepfake” pornography, which uses AI to insert someone’s likeness into pornographic material.
Communications regulator Ofcom is given extra enforcement powers which could be used to force messaging services to examine the content of encrypted user messages.