Online Safety Act Workshop

About this workshop

The Online Safety Act 2023 is the UK’s legislative response to the problems of ‘online harms’, a term that is difficult to define narrowly. The Act places duties on ‘user-to-user’ and search services to require that they eliminate ‘illegal harms’ from their services, ensure that children cannot access potentially harmful content, and empower adult users to selectively determine the kind of content they will potentially encounter online. It mandates the positive promotion of journalistic content and content of democratic importance, creates several new criminal offences in online communication, imposes certain national security duties on regulated, and can require services to develop specific filtering technologies if the regulator deems it necessary.

The Act is the UK’s version of a global wave of attempts to legislate for the regulation of social media. It raises important questions for human rights, the social lives of children and young people, the development of algorithmic communication technologies, and ultimately, how law and regulation can protect or damage the integrity of the democratic public sphere. In this respect, it also has geopolitical dimensions.

This workshop brings together a group of lawyers, NGOs, regulators, and scholars from a range of disciplines at UCL and beyond to share perspectives on the Online Safety Act 2023 as it comes into force. The aim is to facilitate the sharing of research and experience, and to identify outstanding questions for future research, and to foster connections among academia, policymaking, and legal practice in this emerging field.

Speakers include

• Eliza Bechtold, Bonavero Institute, University of Oxford
• Neil Brown, Decoded Legal
• Ricki-Lee Gerbrandt, UCL Digital Speech Lab
• Jonathan Hall KC, Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation
• Jon Higham, Director of Online Safety Policy Development, Ofcom
• Jeffrey Howard, UCL Digital Speech Lab
• Bernard Keenan, UCL Laws
• Jim Killock, Open Rights Group
• Kaitlyn Regehr, Programme Director of Digital Humanities, UCL Information Studies
• Graham Smith, Bird and Bird
• Jessica Shurson, School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex
• Mark Warner, UCL Computer Science
• Lorna Woods OBE, Professor of Internet Law, Essex Law School

Programme

9.00 – Arrival, coffee

9.30 – Welcome and Introductory remarks
Bernard Keenan, UCL Laws
 
9.45 Panel 1 Regulating content in a democracy
Jeffrey Howard, UCL Digital Speech Lab
Ricki-Lee Gerbrandt, UCL Digital Speech Lab
Eliza Bechtold, Oxford
 
10.45 – 11 Coffee break
 
11:00 Panel 2 Technological governance in the OSA
Graham Smith, Bird and Bird
Jessica Shurson, Sussex
Mark Warner, UCL
 
12:00 Lunch
 
13:00 Panel 3 Harm and the protective aims of the OSA
Lorna Woods OBE, Professor of Internet Law, Essex Law School
Kaitlyn Regehr, Programme Director of Digital Humanities, UCL Information Studies
Bernard Keenan, UCL Laws

14:00 Coffee
 
14:30 Panel 4 Regulation, oversight, and the OSA in practice
Jonathan Hall KC, Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation
Neil Brown, Decoded Legal
Jon Higham, Director of Online Safety Policy Development, Ofcom
Jim Killock, Open Rights Group
 
15:30 Roundtable: challenges and opportunities for future research.
 
16.30  Close.

About the Speakers

Dr Eliza Bechtold is the Programmes Manager and a Research Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford.  She researches in the area of freedom of expression at the national, regional, and international levels and is particularly interested in the regulation of extreme speech in the digital age and how free speech frameworks can function to undermine democratic norms and institutions. Prior to entering academia, Dr Bechtold practiced law in the United States for nearly a decade, working as a litigation associate for law firms, including DLA Piper LLP, and serving as the Legal Director of the ACLU of New Mexico, litigating human rights cases before federal and state courts and engaging in advocacy efforts throughout the state in relation to LGBTQ rights, immigrants' rights, and reproductive freedom.

 

Ricki-Lee Gerbrandt is a Fellow in Law & Platform Governance at University College London's Digital Speech Lab. Her scholarly work concerns platform governance, the regulation of social media, digital freedom & digital safety, and media freedom. She is interested in all areas of politics, philosophy and law concerning freedom of expression from domestic, comparative, and international perspectives. She is also an experienced constitutional and media lawyer, where she has represented and advised governments, social media and technology companies, news organisations, journalists, and public figures.

 

Jonathan Hall KC has extensive experience in legal practice at the intersection of criminal law and public law. He was appointed as Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation in 2019 to scrutinise and report on terrorism legislation, and re-appointed in 2022 and 2024. In 2024 he was additionally appointed as the first Independent Reviewer of State Threats Legislation. His role now extends to the reviewing the national security provisions of the Online Safety Act 2023. He has published five annual reports on UK terrorism legislation and has published numerous papers on current terrorism issues such as terrorism and protests, the position of former British residents who went to fight for Islamic State/Da'esh, the classification of extreme violence used at Southport in July 2024, generative AI and terrorism, and threats of foreign interference in UK politics.

Jon Higham is Director of Online Safety Policy Development at Ofcom, UK's communications regulator. He oversaw the development and delivery of Ofcom’s recent consultation on protecting people from illegal harms online. Jon has worked on online safety since 2020 and has played a central role in developing Ofcom’s approach to online regulation. Prior to working on online issues, Jon spent 12 years working in a variety of regulatory policy roles across Ofcom focusing on a range of sectors.

Jeffrey Howard is a Professor of Political Philosophy and Public Policy at University College London. He is director of UCL’s Digital Speech Lab, which hosts research projects on the governance of online communications. He is also Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University and co-edits the journal Political Philosophy.

 

 

Dr Bernard Keenan is a lecturer in the Faculty of Laws at UCL. His research focuses on the regulation of digital technologies at the intersection of surveillance, security, and human rights and legal theory. He has published on the UK's legal oversight system after the Snowden revelations, the deployment of Automated Facial Recognition systems by police, state access to encrypted communications, and the regulation of social media and search engine content moderation systems under the rubric of online safety. His book Interception: State Surveillance from Postal Systems to Global Networks is published in May 2025.

 

Jim Killock is Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, where he has led campaigns on a range of legislative and policy issues, including three strikes and the Digital Economy Act, pervasive government surveillance powers, the integrity of encrypted communications in the UK, and the protection of freedom of speech online

 

 

Dr Kaitlyn Regehr is an Associate Professor and the Programme Director of Digital Humanities in the Department of Information Studies at UCL. Her research is focused on the cultural impacts of social media, particularly on children and youth. Her work has informed legislation on children’s safety online, most recently feeding into the Online Safety Act. She has provided consultation in the House of Lords, and Members of Parliament, the Metropolitan Police, Scottish Government, and Prevent on the digital echo-chamber effect and the indoctrination of young people into online extremism. Her book Smartphone Nation: Why We’re All Addicted to Screens and What We Can Do About It was released in May 2025.

 

Dr Jessica Shurson is an Assistant Professor in Law in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology (LPS) at the University of Sussex. Her research is focused on the balance of security and privacy in the context of digital surveillance and cybercrime law. She has addressed legal and policy issues surrounding law enforcement access to data across borders. Her forthcoming book, "Transnational Digital Investigations: Regulating Extraterritoriality, Investigative Jurisdiction, and Conflicts of Law" (Routledge 2025), explores concepts of jurisdiction in international law, the extraterritorial application of human rights, and the conflicts of laws that result when government authorities obtain data with a cross-border element. Her recent publications include analyses of law enforcement access to encrypted data across borders, the emergence of a European right to end-to-end encryption, and the competing demands of data protection laws and criminal investigations. Dr. Shurson also maintains "Issues in Cybercrime Law," a blog/newsletter exploring developments in cybercrime law and digital investigations.

Graham Smith is of counsel at Bird & Bird LLP, and one of the UK’s leading cyberlaw experts. He is the co-author of Internet Law and Regulation, a leading practitioner’s textbook that was updated four times between 1996 and 2019. He has advised many kinds of internet actors on a wide range of legal issues. He has publicly commented extensively on the UK’s surveillance legislation and online safety legislation via his blog Cyberleagle and via evidence to Parliamentary committees and independent reports.

 

Dr. Mark Warner is a human-computer interaction (HCI) researcher working at the intersection of online safety, privacy, and security. With many years of experience in reactive digital forensic roles within policing, he is now focused on enhancing safety in online social systems to help prevent harm before it occurs. His research is particularly interested in the role of design in computer-mediated communication systems and how it can be used to promote prosocial behaviour especially through the integration of AI models into communication platforms. More recently, he has been examining the governance stance of social platforms to understand how they define harms, how they report to respond to harms, and how they balance platform versus user responsibility towards safety. This work aligns with his broader interest in the design of content reporting tools (or user flagging mechanisms) within online social platforms, and how these tools can be designed to better serve the needs of diverse users.

Lorna Woods OBE is Professor of Internet Law at Essex Law School. She started her career as a practising solicitor in a technology, media and telecommunications practice in the City of London. She has extensive experience in the field of media policy and communications regulation and has given oral evidence to numerous Parliamentary inquiries across the technology, media and telecommunications sectors both in the UK and abroad. Her research led to the systems-based approach to social media, rather than an approach focusing on direct content regulation, and proposed that platform operators be subject to a statutory duty of care. The proposal was adopted in the Online Safety Act 2023. The impact of her work has been recognised in both Houses of Parliament and in recognition of her work she was awarded an OBE in 2020 for her services to internet safety policy. She continues this work with the Online Safety Act Implementation Network

 

Fees and Booking

Standard Ticket = £70
Public Sector  (government legal / NGOs) = £40
Academics (full time) = £10
Students (non-UCL) = £5
UCL Students - free of charge (limited places)

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