Soon, Melanie Dawes will be in charge of social media regulation in Britain. But as a result of online harassment she’s experienced, Twitter Inc., one of the most well-known platforms under her supervision, is hardly ever used by the chief executive officer of watchdog Ofcom.
Her experiences—including becoming the target of a well-known conspiracy theorist—reflect a study by Ofcom that found the majority of Britons have encountered “potentially harmful” online interactions, such as bullying, fraud attempts, or exposure to posts encouraging suicide.
I decided that it wasn’t something that was going to be worth it, to be honest, Dawes said of Twitter and other social media platforms in an interview. There are a lot of people in public life, including a lot of women in public life, who’ve had a worse time of it than I have.
The UK is getting ready to enact contentious and sweeping new legislation meant to safeguard the public. The Online Safety Bill, which gives Dawes and Ofcom major new powers, took five years and six Conservative party culture secretary to draft.
Years before Dawes, a 56-year-old career civil servant, started working at Ofcom, the bill was being developed. She was the highest senior bureaucrat in the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government when it was first presented. She had previously worked for the UK Treasury for 15 years.
Therefore, her personal experiences had no bearing on how the legislation was developed or created.
But once it’s approved by the UK Parliament and receives royal assent, her intimate experience with the harmful content that abounds on social media will make her a more knowledgeable auditor.
The Online Safety Bill gives Ofcom the authority to ask social media and search engine businesses for details on how they’re handling illegal and other allegedly harmful content, subject to parliamentary approval. Senior managers who violate the law risk receiving hefty fines and perhaps criminal accusations. Speculation that Silicon Valley executives like Mark Zuckerberg might go to jail has been sparked by the latter threat.
As is the case in the UK banking industry, Dawes predicted that Ofcom would target designated high managers more frequently.However, as a result of his violations, Jes Staley, the former CEO of the British bank Barclays Plc, was fined £642,430 in 2018.
When Dawes visits CEOs of technology companies in the US later this year, the law will be the main topic of debate. The Online Safety Bill covers the following in addition to its goal of holding CEOs and other top executives more accountable for deleting harmful and illegal content from their platforms:
- Age verification should be required on all websites that host pornography
- Measures against anonymous abuse and unwanted social media interaction
- The making of so-called cyber-flashing a crime
- An obligation to disclose any evidence of child sexual abuse to the National Crime Agency of the UK
When Dawes visits, West Coast founders shouldn’t anticipate a stereotypical culture clash with a buttoned-down British bureaucrat because the CEO frequently strolls around Ofcom’s riverside London office barefoot while Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy Prime Minister and current global affairs director of Meta Platforms Inc., still favors suits.
But she warns that they may expect to hear a simple message:
Too many of the platforms have prioritized growth and revenues over safety.
Ofcom intends to announce how and when the complicated Online Safety Bill will go into effect in the upcoming weeks. Ministers have provided the regulator with an additional £89 million ($107 million) in funding to implement its expanded responsibilities over the next two years. Ofcom now employs approximately 1,000 workers to keep an eye on Britain’s television, broadband, and postal services; it will hire roughly 340 more.
The watchdog has been drawn into political debate as a result of this expanding influence. Prime Minister Boris Johnson requested Paul Dacre, a former editor of the right wing Daily Mail, to preside over it in 2021 and, in Dacre’s words, “appoint your own chief executive.” That apparent strategy ultimately failed.
We’re always acting independently, Dawes said, refusing to comment on any political specifics. But of course it’s the case a lot of what we do is politically very interesting.
The Online Safety Bill is outcomes-focused rather than specific and prescriptive since technology is developing so quickly, according to Dawes. The live-streamed mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, is a recent example. It was aired even after restrictions were put in place following the live-streamed 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand.
We’re thinking about whether to take that forward with individual companies, Dawes said. International conversations about raising standards here might be another route through, to actually try to prevent this sort of material being so easily available.
The Online Safety Bill is outcomes-focused rather than specific and prescriptive since technology is developing so quickly, according to Dawes. The live-streamed mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, is a recent example. It was aired even after restrictions were put in place following the live-streamed 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand.
