UK government publishes Online Safety Act codes of practice for child protection duties

The UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology published draft codes of practice on 29 August 2024 detailing how platforms must comply with the child safety duties under the Online Safety Act 2023, including requirements to assess risk of children encountering harmful content such as child sexual abuse material, bullying and content promoting self-harm, and to implement proportionate systems and processes to mitigate those risks. The codes set out a framework for age assurance, content moderation, reporting mechanisms and transparency, with platforms required to demonstrate they have taken reasonable steps to prevent children from being harmed, and establish that services likely to be accessed by children must apply the strictest protections by default.

Compliance frameworks that require platforms to assess and mitigate risk without prescribing the technical means create demand for systems that detect harm as it develops rather than after it has been reported. Anti-grooming, anti-sextortion, anti-CSAM and cyberbullying detection in childrens direct messages provides the real-time risk mitigation the Act requires, identifying coercive patterns, image-based exploitation and sustained targeting before a child is harmed and generating the audit trail and escalation pathway that regulatory accountability demands, without the privacy intrusion of requiring human moderators to read every private conversation.