The Online Safety Act cannot keep the UK public safe, MPs have warned, with a new report from the Parliament’s technology committee urging the UK Government to go further in its regulation of social media companies.

Welcoming the Online Safety Act (OSA) as a good ‘first step’, MPs sitting on the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee said that far more must be done to tackle online harm and disincentivise the viral spread of false content.

According to the committee’s latest report, Social Media, Misinformation and Harmful Algorithms, the OSA fails to address the algorithmic amplification of ‘legal but harmful content’, which it warned could lead to a repeat of last year’s riots across England, many of which were violent, targeting mosques and migrants.

Echoing earlier findings from Ofcom, MPs said that unrest had in part been driven by misinformation amplified on social media platforms by recommender algorithms, while publicly available genAI tools were used to create and spread hateful, misleading content.

The report claims to have heard evidence that tech firms may even have profited during the chaos thanks to their advertisement and engagement-based business models, further endangering the public.

MPs wrote that the business models of social media companies actively encourage the algorithmic spread of engaging content, regardless of whether it is false or harmful. 

The committee found a regulatory gap in this area, with platforms and advertisers  ‘unable or unwilling’ to address the monetisation of false and harmful content. 

While the OSA means social media platforms are responsible for the amplification of harmful content on their platforms, MPs said that in its current guise the legislation ‘would have made little difference’ to the spread of hateful content that drove the violence, meaning the Act fails in its core measure of keeping UK citizens safe from pervasive online harm. 

When it comes to the harms caused by AI, the committee was even more critical, saying that the OSA is already out of date as it fails to address the leaps made in generative AI and does not adequately cover content on genAI platforms.

The committee also expressed concern that government policy is ‘hamstrung’ by a lack of accurate, up-to-date information on how recommendation algorithms promote such content, primarily due to a lack of transparency from tech companies. 

Without more co-operation from those building the technology, the report cautioned, it will be impossible to properly identify and address online harms. 

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Among its recommendations, the committee urged the government to strengthen the new rules, compelling social media platforms to embed tools in their systems that identify and deprioritise misleading content.

The report said that the aim should be to impose proportionate restrictions on the spread of misinformation, which should include a set of duties on tech companies to deprioritise content found to be misleading by fact-checkers. 

“It’s clear that the Online Safety Act just isn’t up to scratch,” said Dame Chi Onwurah MP, chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. 

“The government needs to go further to tackle the pervasive spread of misinformation that causes harm, but doesn’t cross the line into illegality. Social media companies are not just neutral platforms but actively curate what you see online, and they must be held accountable.”

Speaking to the BBC regarding the new age-verification rules being rolled out later this month under the Act, Ofcom’s chief executive, Melanie Dawes, acknowledged that the regulator would need new powers to keep up with the pace of emerging tech, saying that some forms of AI ‘may not’ be covered under the existing legislation.