This week, I lost all faith in the promise of the Online Safety Act to make the UK the safest place to be online. Why? Because the regulator responsible for enforcing the law announced they can take no more action against the nihilistic pro-suicide website responsible for 164 UK deaths, including that of my 21 year-old sister Aimee.
It has taken 468 days for Ofcom to investigate this site, and receiving this news over a Zoom call from Ofcom’s chief executive Melanie Dawes – on the same day we got a new Prime Minister and the news agenda was swamped – felt like a slap in the face to bereaved families like mine across the country.
David Parfett, who was also in the Zoom meeting, the father of Tom Parfett who died in 2022 told me: “It’s difficult to find words to adequately describe the missed opportunity to stop preventable deaths.”
A mother in our group wrote to me afterwards saying “Listening to Melanie Dawes deliver that news yesterday to a group of bereaved families with what felt like, at worst, a complete lack of concern, and at best an absolute failure of bravery and imagination was enraging.”
This is yet another hard blow to these families, who since 2019 have fought to get this website blocked, in the hope of preventing future loss of life. Since I lost my sister in 2022, I’ve joined other grieving families and met new ones who have lost their loved ones to this website (which we are not naming). It’s a site that is run by two men who run the world’s largest incel forum, and of the four sites they run, the only one that admits women is the pro-suicide forum. The people who run this site profit and take pleasure from encouraging suicide of vulnerable young people, directing them towards poison suppliers and enabling groomers to assist in suicide. This is criminal, and it is staggering that neither Ofcom nor the Government are willing to take real action to stop it.
If this were a shop on the high street, it would have been shut in hours
In its announcement, Ofcom stated that “all possible legal routes under the Act have now been exhausted." Instead of applying to the courts to get Internet Service Providers to block the website, they’re trusting the founders of this site with a voluntary geoblock to UK users. This is a measure that bereaved parents got around using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to disguise their location in a matter of seconds during our meeting with Ofcom this week. One of the ethical dilemmas that stands in the way of ISPs taking action are UK net neutrality rules, which mean that internet providers do not block or favour certain types of content. Given that Ofcom is responsible for ensuring net neutrality compliance, this duty puts it in direct conflict with the need to block certain types of content to prevent harm, like this website. In 2023, some ISPs offered to block the site, but on most it remains easily accessible with a VPN.
If this was a shop on the high street we would have seen action in a matter of hours, but instead they've been allowed to continue for almost a decade. As the regulator responsible for enforcing the Online Safety Act, Ofcom said, "While, in a narrow set of circumstances, failure to comply with obligations in the Act can give rise to criminal liability, this is not one of them." Assisting suicide is against the law in the UK under The Suicide Act but because its happening online, loopholes in The Online Safety Act and legislative gaps around enforcement of fines overseas and the use of VPNs are enabling the death toll to rise. If Ofcom cannot act against a website so sinister, what faith can we have in its powers to regulate Big Tech, the most powerful industry on the planet?
This announcement comes a couple months after Ofcom announced a £950,000 fine for the site for not complying with the Act, of which they have not paid a penny, because recovering money from an organisation that does not have UK assets would require engaging enforcement agencies in other countries and it’s unlikely that a US court will recognise a UK judgement. To families like mine the fine feels purely symbolic – the site owners are probably taking great pleasure in the lack of power Ofcom has.
The past six months have been a relentless series of instances of being let down by institutions responsible for keeping UK citizens safe from harm. A couple of weeks ago, our campaign group, Families and Survivors to Prevent Online Suicide Harms, met with then Science, Innovation and Technology minister Liz Kendall, junior health minister Baroness Merron and then junior security minister Angela Eagle, where we yet again shared our stories, highlighting the systematic failings that have cost so many lives. The Secretary of State decided to focus on the social media ban for under 16s as evidence of her taking action. Our loved ones were all 16 and above, and this website would not be subject to the ban. Angela Eagle MP decided to explain how we were only now learning about the harms of the internet – which was rubbing salt in the wounds of a room of bereaved families whose children could still be here today, if action was taken when the government was first warned of this site in 2019.
In May, the National Crime Agency and Crown Prosecution Service confirmed that Kenneth Law – the Canadian who supplied poison to people in more than 40 countries – will not face charges in the UK. Days earlier, Law had pleaded guilty in Ontario to 14 counts of aiding suicide, after prosecutors dropped 14 counts of murder as part of a plea deal; the agreed facts referred 286 packages being sent to people in the UK and 79 deaths were linked to Law. My sister Aimee was among those who bought poison from him. He will never answer for her death here.
Ofcom’s Monday announcement makes it even more evident that the gap between their enforcement powers and the harms happening online are only widening. I am no lawyer, but I can read between the lines. Despite recognising the “the predators who use it to prey on some of the most vulnerable people in our society, have devastated lives and inflicted immeasurable heartbreak.” Ofcom’s statement goes on to say “We’ve used the powers we’ve been granted to the fullest extent possible.” This is a regulator hemmed in by the law, openly admitting that it is only able to go only so far. Even now. Ofcom says only that it is reviewing whether its powers can be strengthened. That is why a public inquiry is our only option: to find out why the 65 warnings from coroners to the Government about this site, first raised in 2019, have gone unheeded.
As the mother I quoted earlier told me: “If the Online Safety Act isn't fit for purpose, then at least have the guts to challenge and change it... surely Ofcom is best-placed to advocate for a better, stronger Act? And, if the act is truly powerless even against what is functionally online murder, then the government needs to move. Now. Before more of our children, our sisters and brothers, our loved ones get caught, snared and extinguished by this terrible, terrible web.”
Bereaved families like mine have been failed by poor police investigations and unwilling coroners, ignored by complicit tech companies, and let down by the Government, who so far have rejected our calls for a public inquiry. Now Ofcom has failed us too. Only by understanding what went wrong over so many years across different departments and institutions through a thorough public inquiry, can we build laws fit to deal with this evil online. Will our new Prime Minister finally be the one to act and prevent the death toll from growing any higher?
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [email protected] or [email protected]
Adele Walton is a journalist and online safety campaigner. She is the co-founder of Logging Off Club and author of Logging Off: the Human Cost of our Digital World (click here to buy the book at a discount)