Report from the Guardian
In Brief – Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, has released a set of Online Safety Act (OSA) regulatory proposals headlined by rules directing the largest platforms to combat scam advertisers. The requirements will apply to large social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X and YouTube, as well as Google and ChatGPT. Proposed duties include reducing the risk of accounts being hijacked and turned into hosts for scams and ensuring that ads for banking or financial services have legal clearance. While the Ofcom scam ads consultation runs through October, and final decisions will not be made until next year, the regulator urged the platforms to improve their anti-fraud measures immediately. Other OSA consultations announced by Ofcom include updating the list of “category 1” tech companies and proposing draft rules for them on topics including the treatment of journalistic content by content moderation regimes, how to limit user exposure to harmful content regarding suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, or hate and abuse, and rules explaining what sort of material is allowed on a category 1 service and how a platform should implement those terms consistently.
Context – In the UK, fighting online frauds, including phony investment schemes and romance scams, has been a high-profile digital safety issue for years and consistently part of the Online Safety Act regime. A draft of the OSA required digital platforms to pay financial compensation to victims of scams and frauds, a requirement that was dropped in 2023 as too threatening to digital investment and innovation. However, the government announced a National Fraud Strategy at the time that included major tech companies pledging to take a more proactive approach to fighting fraud. The European Commission is using the EU Digital Services Act to investigate how Apple, Booking, Google and Microsoft address financial scams, including how they detect and prevent them, how app stores prevent fake financial apps from imitating legitimate financial services apps, and how search engines police links and ads that direct users to scam sites.