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Britain’s media regulator will take “strong action” against tech companies that break new rules on content moderation, even if it has limited powers to stop the spread of lies online, the agency’s head has told the Financial Times.
Ofcom chief executive Melanie Dawes said the UK’s Online Safety Act, which will largely come into force next year, directly addressed much of the internet activity that caused violence across Britain in August.
“We have got some pretty strong powers here,” she said in her first interview since the far-right unrest, adding that Ofcom would be fully prepared to enforce the legislation quickly.
“There will be some [websites] who we need to take strong action against and we’re gearing up for that now so that we can be really fast,” she said.
Asked what this may mean for Elon Musk’s X platform, Dawes said Ofcom would “make sure that X follows the rules that have been set down in the act . . . and that action needs to take place next year”.
The UK’s online safety regime, the first of its kind globally, will require websites to set and enforce clear content moderation policies, and to quickly remove illegal content.
Ofcom can levy fines on websites that violate the Online Safety Act or shut them down in extreme cases. “We will absolutely be prepared to use them,” Dawes said of the new powers.
X has been blamed for enabling the spread of misinformation in the UK this summer that stoked tensions during what was the worst unrest in England for more than a decade.
During the riots in August, UK government officials complained that X had resisted requests to remove what they viewed as harmful content.
Musk has accused Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government of censorship and recently falsely claimed it was “releasing convicted paedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts”, a reference to a policy of releasing some offenders early to ease prison overcrowding.
The OSA criminalises the act of sending a message known to be false with the intention of causing “non-trivial psychological or physical harm”. Several people were prosecuted for this offence after the riots.
But the act has been criticised in the wake of the riots for lacking powers to deal with “legal but harmful” content, a category omitted from the legislation when it was passed last year over free speech concerns.
Dawes, a former senior civil servant who has led Ofcom since 2020, accepted that the regulator could not “require” social media platforms to have policies on disinformation when they set content moderation rules.
She also said Musk’s posts were not a matter for Ofcom, noting it was up to parliament to decide whether there should be a law against spreading falsehoods. Dawes cautioned about the need to protect freedom of speech.
“It isn’t entirely straightforward to know how you create rules here that deal with harmful disinformation while also allowing people to have their voice [and] maybe make mistakes,” she said.
Some lawyers and MPs remain sceptical about Ofcom’s ability to take the fight to some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world, given it has struggled to date to hold GB News — a lossmaking rightwing broadcaster — to account for breaking its impartiality rules 12 times.
Dawes said Ofcom was “moving to sanctions” against GB News, in a signal that the broadcaster, which is co-owned by hedge fund boss Paul Marshall, could be facing a fine this year.
GB News was found in May to have failed to preserve due impartiality in a live TV debate with former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak — a breach that Ofcom said was “serious and repeated”.
Dawes defended the speed of Ofcom’s decision-making, saying: “I don’t think anyone wants a regulator that shoots from the hip, particularly when there are questions of freedom of expression.”
She noted that the regulator had not opened up any investigations into GB News in the past few months, adding that she was “glad that they have been making some improvements”.
Dawes is tipped as a candidate for the role of head of the UK’s civil service after the resignation of cabinet secretary Simon Case on Monday. In the interview Dawes said, “I’m very happy in my current role and have a lot more still to do at Ofcom.”