The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology has issued a further warning to online service providers that they must do more to make their platforms safer for women and girls.

Echoing calls made at a recent roundtable with tech companies (discussed here), the Secretary of State has written an open letter to online service providers operating in the United Kingdom, pointing out the steps that the Government has recently taken in this area, many of which we have discussed previously. They include, for example, making the non-consensual creation of sexually explicit deepfake images a criminal offence, a proposed ban on so-called ‘nudification’ tools, and making cyberflashing and the sharing of sexually explicit deepfakes priority offences under the Online Safety Act 2023.

However, she is clear that there is “more to do”. She draws particular attention to Ofcom’s recent report ‘A Safer Life Online for Women and Girls’ which not only sets out guidance for how services can comply with their duties under the OSA, but also recommends ‘good practice’ that they can take to deliver “ambitious and meaningful changes towards a safer life online for women and girls and all those impacted by online gender-based harms”.

In her letter, the Secretary of State says that she “expect[s] all platforms to implement Ofcom’s guidance by the end of this year at the latest” and highlights specific steps that she expects them to follow, including the following:

• conducting risk assessments that focus on harms to women and girls;

• conducting ‘abusability’ evaluations before launching new features and services;

• setting strong and customisable default settings around user interaction and privacy;

• demonetising user-generated content which promotes misogynistic abuse and sexual violence;

• reducing the prominence of misogynistic abuse and sexual violence in search results and from content recommender feeds;

• implementing rate limits to prevent mass-posting in pile-ons.

The letter concludes by saying that platforms’ progress will be monitored closely to ensure that they comply with these requirements.

To read the letter in full, click here.