Delivering improved online safety for candidates during elections: a proposal for a code of practice

Online protections for participants in the democratic process are long overdue, with numerous studies over the last decade indicating problems from abuse, particularly directed at women and others with protected characteristics. The previous Government had an opportunity to include measures in the Online Safety Act, but failed to do so. The Speaker’s Conference is currently undertaking a deep dive into the security of candidates, MPs and elections and will be publishing a second report shortly on the impact of social media. As part of its work, the Conference has flagged the need to tackle disinformation as a driver of abuse, and recommended a code of conduct for campaigning. The Government's planned code of conduct is intended to address misleading campaigns.

Our proposal would sit alongside that code, for consideration in the context of the Government’s recently published Election Strategy, ahead of an Elections Bill anticipated in the next session. It also aligns with the existing codes of practice which are enforced by Ofcom under the Online Safety Act.

As the Online Safety Act has demonstrated, it takes time to legislate and even longer to get the subsequent regulatory frameworks in place and enforceable. There is no time to lose if the Government is serious about developing concrete proposals which can be implemented swiftly and embedded before the run-in to the 2029 General Election is upon us.

The policy brief - attached as a PDF at the bottom of this page - sets out such a proposal: for the introduction of a duty on Ofcom to produce a code of practice, in consultation with the Electoral Commission and National Police Chiefs’ Council and others, to address the potential harms arising during the electoral process.

An amendment to the Online Safety Act to deliver this duty should be added to the forthcoming Elections Bill and we provide the suggested wording for that in the brief. In the annex, we set out a potential structure for the code of practice to demonstrate how it would work, drawing on models used in our earlier work to develop codes of practice to reduce specific online harms.

We will work with civil society and academic experts in the coming months to develop a full draft of the code on electoral harms and will publish that in due course. Do please get in touch with us if you would like to talk to us about this work, or contribute to its development: hello@onlinesafetyact.net