Thank you for contacting me about the Online Safety Bill and online child sexual abuse.
I appreciate your concerns and I would like to pay tribute to the NSPCC and other organisations for their work in raising awareness of this very important issue.
The Online Safety Bill will make sure that the UK is the safest place to be online. As part of this, measures included in the Bill will tackle the growing and evolving threat of child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), including the transmission of sexually explicit material of children online.
I welcome the fact that the Government has tabled an amendment to the Bill which will give Ofcom extra tools to ensure technology companies take action to prevent, identify and remove harmful CSAE content. As a result, Ofcom will be able to demand that technology companies, such as social media platforms, roll out or develop new technologies to better detect and tackle harmful content on their platforms. If they fail to do so, Ofcom will be able to impose fines of up to £18 million or 10 per cent of the company’s global annual turnover, depending on which is higher.
The amendment will support innovation and the development of safety technologies across the technology industry and will incentivise companies in building solutions to tackle CSEA which are effective and proportionate.
In conjunction with the legislation, I welcome efforts to improve technology to tackle online child sexual abuse. For example, GCHQ is collaborating with the tech industry to identify and develop solutions to crack down on large scale online child sexual abuse and the government-funded Safety Tech Challenge Fund is demonstrating that is it is possible to detect child sexual abuse material in end-to-end encrypted environments, while respecting user privacy.
Thank you again for taking the time to contact me.