Will new laws frighten away social media giants from the UK?

Could new online safety laws cause Reddit to abandon the United Kingdom?

Could Reddit be leaving the UK? (Picture: Unsplash).

The US social media giant Reddit has reportedly told Ofcom that holding less well-resourced companies to the same standards as giants such as Facebook and Google could lead them to pull out of the market altogether.

Reddit said: “If smaller companies are held to the same compliance standards as the largest players, their competitiveness may be diminished, they may opt to withdraw from the market, and newer entrants may be discouraged.”

According to the Government: The Online Safety Bill, which will shortly be passed to the Palace for the formality of Royal Assent before finally becoming law, marks a major step forward in regulating the big social media platforms.

Already the principle underpinning the legislation - the idea that platforms such as Facebook, TikTok and others owe their users a "duty of care and have responsibility for the potential harms inflicted by their products - has inspired legislation across Europe and around the world.

A similar duty was introduced in the UK in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, to ensure that factory bosses, mine owners and others took responsibility for the safety of work environments. Once the new legislation bites, it should make the internet - currently a "Wild West" - a much safer place for those under 18 in the UK.

No longer will the big internet platforms be able to shrug off harms caused to children as "nothing to do with us" in cases, such as Molly Russell's, where those platforms had a part to play.

The idea for the legislation - championed by The Telegraph since 2018 - came from Prof Lorna Woods and William Perrin of the Carnegie UK Trust. Both have since been honoured with OBEs for their groundbreaking work. The Act will mark the end of the era of "self-regulation" for social media companies and give users a powerful and independent regulator (Ofcom) to appeal to when things go wrong.

As reported in the Telegraph, Reddit said: “If thresholds are premised on certain characteristics and functionalities alone, small-to-medium sized platforms will bear disproportionate economic, operational, and competitive disadvantages when placed in the same category as much larger companies.

“A company’s capacity to shoulder the compliance requirements of demanding categories should be included in threshold criteria to protect competition and innovation.”