The government is facing renewed pressure to strengthen online safety laws after rejecting key recommendations designed to curb the viral spread of misinformation, despite agreeing with most of MPs’ findings on the scale of the problem.
The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee today published the government and Ofcom’s responses to its July report, which concluded that the Online Safety Act (OSA) does not tackle the algorithmic amplification of false content and leaves users exposed to rapidly spreading misinformation — much of it supercharged by generative AI.
Both the government and Ofcom accepted the committee’s assessment that misinformation poses significant risks, yet ministers declined to adopt several major recommendations, including calls to extend online safety legislation to explicitly cover generative AI platforms. The committee argued such platforms are capable of spreading large volumes of false content and should be regulated in line with other high-risk online services.
The government rejected that proposal, insisting AI-generated content is already covered under the OSA — a position that contradicts Ofcom’s earlier testimony to the committee, in which the regulator said the legal status of generative AI was “not entirely clear” and suggested more work was needed.
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