Plans to add additional offences to the draft Online Safety Bill have been announced by Digital Secretary Nadine Dorries.

The move will add revenge porn, hate crime, fraud, the sale of illegal drugs or weapons, the promotion or facilitation of suicide, people smuggling and sexual exploitation to the list of prohibited activity, alongside terrorism and child sexual abuse.

The government is also considering the Law Commission’s recommendations for specific offences to be created relating to cyberflashing, encouraging self-harm and epilepsy trolling.

In addition, the new Online Safety Bill will require organisations to take a proactive approach to ensure their users are not exposed to prohibited content. Under the old rules, firms would have been forced to take content down after it had been reported to them.

This means that firms will need to make sure the features, functionalities and algorithms of their services are designed to prevent their users encountering banned content and minimise the length of time this content is available.

The government noted that this could be achieved by automated or human content moderation, banning illegal search terms, spotting suspicious users and having effective systems in place to prevent banned users opening new accounts.

Ofcom will be able to issue fines of up to 10% of annual worldwide turnover to non-compliant sites or block them from being accessible in the UK.

Digital Secretary Nadine Dorries said: “This government said it would legislate to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online while enshrining free speech, and that’s exactly what we are going to do. Our world leading bill will protect children from online abuse and harms, protecting the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content, and ensuring there is no safe space for terrorists to hide online.

“We are listening to MPs, charities and campaigners who have wanted us to strengthen the legislation, and today’s changes mean we will be able to bring the full weight of the law against those who use the internet as a weapon to ruin people’s lives and do so quicker and more effectively.”

By specifying the new offences on the face of the bill, secondary legislation will not be needed to define them once the bill is introduced. In addition, Ofcom can take faster enforcement action against tech firms which fail to remove the named illegal content.

Three new criminal offences, recommended by the Law Commission, will also be added to the Online Safety Bill to make sure criminal law is fit for the internet age.

These include the ‘genuinely threatening’ communications offence, where communications are sent or posted to convey a threat of serious harm. This is designed to better capture online threats to rape, kill and inflict physical violence or cause people serious financial harm.

It will also add a harm-based communications offence to capture communications sent to cause harm without a reasonable excuse. This aims to make it easier to prosecute online abusers by abandoning the requirement under the old offences for content to fit within proscribed yet ambiguous categories such as “grossly offensive,” “obscene” or “indecent”.

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An offence will also be created for when a person sends a communication, they know to be false with the intention to cause non-trivial emotional, psychological or physical harm. This new offence raises the current threshold of criminality.

The maximum sentences for each offence will differ. If someone is found guilty of a harm based offence, they could go to prison for up to two years, up to 51 weeks for the false communication offence and up to five years for the threatening communications offence.

Home Secretary Priti Patel said: “Companies must continue to take responsibility for stopping harmful material on their platforms. These new measures will make it easier and quicker to crack down on offenders and hold social media companies to account.

“The new communications offences will strengthen protections from harmful online behaviours such as coercive and controlling behaviour by domestic abusers; threats to rape, kill and inflict physical violence; and deliberately sharing dangerous disinformation about hoax Covid-19 treatments.”

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