In the past fortnight, Parliament returned from recess after the National Mourning Period and rose for recess shortly afterwards for party conferences without further news from the Government on the future of the Online Safety Bill, though five former DCMS Secretaries of State have gone public with a call to the new Government to move to bring it back quickly, without “watering it down”. Elsewhere, we’ve seen a major new report from CCDH on inceldom, the Children’s Commissioner has published her survey of “Digital Childhoods” and the inquest into the death of Molly Russell continued to focus on the scale and nature of the harmful content she was able to access on social media platforms before taking her own life.

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• Five former DCMS Secretaries of State have written an op-ed setting out why the Government must preserve the “legal but harmful” provisions in the Bill: Nadine Dorries, Baroness Morgan, Sir Jeremy Wright, Karen Bradley and Dame Maria Miller urge the new PM and new DCMS Secretary of State to proceed “swiftly” with the Bill, without watering it down, reminding them it was a 2019 Conservative manifesto commitment and has already received significant levels of Parliamentary scrutiny. The co-signatories argue that those who are against the “legal but harmful” provisions “misrepresent this section as setting too low a bar for harm, and being an attack on free speech. Neither is the case. The promotion of self-harm, pro-anorexia content, legal hate speech or anti-Semitism are just some categories of legal content which no one can defend as being harmless … The Bill represents an important step towards correcting the massive power imbalance by ensuring that there is more democratic oversight of our online spaces, both from Parliament and from Ofcom, the independent regulator.”
• Do check out our dedicated OSB resource page for our all our recent commentary and analysis of the Bill.

• There was no further news from the Government on the timing for the return of the Online Safety Bill during Parliament’s brief return between the National Mourning period and party conference recess. Penny Mordaunt, the new Leader of the Commons, in response to a question from Sir Jeremy Wright, said: “I know that the new Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is looking with great urgency at the legislation she wants to bring forward”, and suggested that Michelle Donelan write to him with further detail. (Wright subsequently went on to co-sign the Daily Telegraph op-ed, above.)

• EE and Glitch, following on from their joint event in the House of Lords on online abuse, published an open letter co-signed by an array of prominent sports stars calling for the OSB to be implemented in full and for women and girls to be named on face of it.
• The OSB was under discussion at many events at last week’s Labour conference, including an Antisemitism Policy Trust discussion with Angela Rayner MP and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who both flagged their own experience of online abuse; and a Barnardos/NSPCC panel with Alex Davies-Jones.
• Index on Censorship have written to the DCMS Secretary of State with proposed amendments to the Bill, including the removal of clause 13 and the dropping of the powers granted to the Secretary of State; the Bill’s “radical revision” along these lines was also supported by a number of Tory Peers (including Lord Frost and Baroness Stowell). The Open Rights Group’s most recent blog focused on the inclusion in Schedule 7 of the Bill of the offence of “assisting illegal immigration”. ” WhatsApp’s Chief Executive Will Cathcart  has called for the Government to revise its proposals on end-to-end encryption, citing threats to national security. The Telegraph, in a comment piece, has called for the OSB to go back to its “original purpose” of protecting children.
• Lord Grade, the new Chair of Ofcom, has set out his stall in relation to the regulator’s future role on online safety in a series of interviews (Daily Telegraph, LBC) ahead of his RTS speech, which is worth reading in full for detail on how the regulator will approch its new role; meanwhile, Claudia Collins, the daughter of Tech and Digital Minister Damian Collins MP, has produced a short film for the BBC on her own experience of social media.

• Ofcom has published a report, commissioned from Revealing Reality, which tests out a framework for assessing how people are harmed online and finds the following: there are multiple routes to experiencing harm as a result of online experiences (an isolated experience of a hazard (eg, a fraudulent advert); cumulative exposure to multiple hazards over time, either through passive exposure or active, self-reinforcing engagement with hazards; harms resulting from an isolated incident that has an immediately harmful impact appear to be much easier for respondents to recognise but the cumulative route to harm appeared to cause the most severe harm experienced by respondents; and a wide range of risk factors were documented that appeared to make harm more or less likely to occur.
• Meanwhile, Ofcom has published three tenders for media literacy projects in communities at risk of online harms, focusing on older people and digital exclusion; mental health challenges and disabilities; and children 10-14. The deadline for applications is 25 October.
• The Government has published its response to the DCMS select committee report on influencer culture; the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum has also published a summary of the responses from its call for views on algorithmic processing; and the Health and Social care Committee has published its report on body image. The committee took the view that legislation was needed to address the potential harm from online content that promotes an “idealised, often doctored, and unrealistic body image”, linked to low self-esteem and related mental health conditions.

• The Behavioural Insights Team has reported on the results from a series of citizens assemblies it carried out for Meta, which “aligned” around the main policy options and recommended that “Meta should be taking some action to curb the spread of problematic climate content”.
• Two recent analyses have looked at the impact of design features on Twitter and YouTube: the first suggests that Twitter’s “see less often” button might not be doing as it seems; and the second – a large-scale user experiment by Mozilla – on YouTube’s “dislike” button reported that it often does not work at all.
• A Meta-commissioned report from the Business for Social Responsibility, whose delayed publication was criticised by a number of civil society organisations, found: “Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred”. Here’s Facebook’s response.
• With tackling discrimination in artificial intelligence (AI) a key part of its three-year strategy, the Equality and Human Rights Commission have published guidance for AI use for public services. This guidance aims to help public services avoid breaches in equality law when using AI, including the Public Sector Equality Duty.
• News from the platforms: Meta’s Oversight Board have criticised the platform’s automated image takedowns. TikTok has announced it will require verification of accounts from US government departments, politicians and political parties ahead of the midterm election. Twitter shareholders have voted to approve a deal with Elon Musk to buy the company for $44 billion, giving shareholders the go-ahead to pursue Musk in court for changing his mind on buying the company. The decision came just after whistle-blower Pieter Zatko’s testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the platform’s alleged security flaws. Finally, following PayPal’s decision to block a number or organisations, including the Free Speech Union, from its platform, Conservative Peers are proposing an amendment to either the OSB or the Financial Services Bill to prevent them doing so again.
• Finally, 5 Rights Foundation has published the latest in its series of “Risky By Design” case studies, this time on anonymity; and for researchers into online safety, don’t miss this helpful round-up from Rewire’s Bertie Vidgen of open sources of data.

• TikTok could face a fine of £27m from the ICO for breaching UK data protection law with respect to protecting children’s privacy, in the first major “notice of intent” issued by the regulator under the Children’s Code; TikTok disputes the provisional findings.
• The inquest into teenager Molly Russell’s death, which ran for two weeks, concluded last Friday; executives from Meta and Pinterest provided evidence on the self-harm and suicide-related material Molly had viewed on the platforms before she took her own life.
• The Children’s Commissioner has published Digital Childhoods: a survey of children and parents which looks at experiences of online safety and concludes that “self-regulation by tech firms has failed. There is an enormous opportunity with the Online Safety Bill to protect future generations of children from harm online.” Coming soon: the Nominet Digital Youth Index, now into its second year, which will be launched on 17 October with new data and insights on young people’s experience of the digital world, including the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, online safety and levels of digital literacy and digital skills.

• The Mayor of Leicester, Paul Soulsby, has identified social media disinformation as a cause of recent unrest between Muslim and Hindu groups in the city
• The “Norms for the New Public Sphere Project” has released its final report, ‘Shaping Democracy in the Digital Age’, which takes a philosophical approach on the role of social media in sharing political ideas; a systematic examination of the accuracy of tweets by parliamentarians in the UK, Germany and the United States has shown that US politicians are more likely to tweet misinformation than their UK and German counterparts.
• Psychologists at the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge have worked in partnership with Jigsaw, within Google, on a social media experiment revealing the potential to ‘inoculate’ users against misinformation online. 

• The Competition Appeal Tribunal has certified Coll’s claims against Alphabet under Section 47B of the Competition Act 1998. The original claim regarded the technical and contractual restrictions and networks by Alphabet, and their elimination of competition in the App Store, Google Play Stores.
• A claim has been brought against four cryptocurrency exchanges (Binance, Bittylicious, Kraken and Shapeshift) - the first time that competition law has been applied to the digital asset space in the UK. The claim alleges these found exchanges to have colluded in the delisting of Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) currency and converting this currency to other cryptocurrencies without investor consent. 
• Google is facing legal action in the UK and the EU, with its digital advertising practices being accused of posing unfair competition advantage over rival advertisers.

• In another major piece of research on trends in online hate, abuse and extremism, CCDH’s report on “The Incelosphere” found – over an 18-month period – a 59% increase in the use of terms and codewords relating to mass violence, mention of rape every 29 minutes and misogynistic, racist, antisemitic, or anti-LGBTQ+ language in one in five posts; the BBC’s report on the research is here.
• Guardian journalist Aina J Khan has posted a Twitter thread on her experiences of Islamophobia on social media; and broadcaster Jeremy Vine has publicly criticised social media platforms for their failure to counter online hate in the wake of the sentencing of Alex Belfield for stalking using online methods. Watch his video interview here.

• In an unexpected intervention, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has tweeted in support of regulation of social media harms.  
• In Europe, the European Council and Parliament have signed the Digital Markets Act, aiming to ensure a ‘competitive and fair digital sector’; the European Media Freedom Act was put forward by the European Commission on 16 September; and the European Commission’s AI Liability Directive and its proposal for a product liability directive have been published.  You can read a summary of developments here.
• In France, the Data Protection Authority (CNIL) has carried out analysis of age verification on the Internet and made several recommendations; meanwhile, in Germany, the KJM, its Commission for Protection of Minors, has also recently approved age verification through biometric age verification software based on machine-learning. AGCOM, Italy’s communications regulator, has issued fines to YouTube for the first time due to its failure to remove illegal gambling advertising content.
• In the US, a split in approach between two federal circuits has arisen with regard to “must-carry” laws: in one circuit, the district court said Florida's must carry law was unconstitutional but this has not (yet) been overturned by the circuit court; in Texas the district court came to this conclusion too and issued an injunction, but then the relevant circuit court overturned that, it went to the Supreme Court and back again, with the companies now expected to appeal again to the Supreme Court. 
• Elsewhere, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ (ACHPR) passed a resolution on the Protection of Women Against Digital Violence; activists have raised concerns in Iran about the restriction of social media platforms after protests have broken out about the death of a Kurdish woman in police custody; New Zealand’s digital government strategy has been published and Jacinda Ardern has announced an initiative to research social media algorithms.

• Bingham Centre call for evidence on Counter-Terrorism Commission – deadline 15 November.

• CCDH has launched a petition for action on online incel activity, following its latest report (see above).
• Mozilla has launched a petition calling on YouTube to act on the findings of its latest report on the dislike button (see above).

• From Discovery to Recovery: Tackling Technology-Assisted Child Sexual Abuse - Sharing Challenges and Considering Solutions – Marie Collins Foundation conference – 4/5 October.
• Digital Youth Index Year 2 – Nominet – 17 October.
• Digital Families Conference – Parentzone – 18 October.
• Online Safety Bill briefing – The House – 20 October.
• Regulating the metaverse – Global Counsel - 25 October.
• UK internet Governance Forum 2022 - 1 November.

• 10 October – Lords returns.
• 11 October – Commons returns.
• 13 October – Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee – oral evidence session with Martin Lewis.
• 17 October - Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee – oral evidence session.
• 18 October – PICTFOR roundtable on the Future of Regulation.
• 20 October – DCMS Questions.