Technology companies are doing just enough to show a degree of compliance with the UK’s Online Safety Act, but are failing to meet the needs of the individuals and young victims the legislation exists to protect, experts say. A panel of online safety pros assembled before Parliament’s Communications and Digital Committee on Tuesday, taking aim at the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta, and ByteDance for failing to act on important matters. Clare McGlynn, professor of law at Durham University and expert on violence against women and girls (VAWG), was especially critical of major search engine providers for their inconsistent downranking of harmful content search terms. "Rape porn," for example, is correctly downranked and no user sees any relevant links until the tenth page of results, although adjacent terms such as "unwilling porn" can be found as early as the third page, McGlynn said. "I just think if someone spent a little more time thinking ‘I really want to minimize the risk of this material appearing,’ I would take a systematic approach," she told the committee. "I would downrank ‘unwilling’ and ‘unwanted,’ and I would downrank ‘asleep porn’ as well… because it just means that it’s easily findable. "So, they don’t rank some of them, but just not systematically or wholly consistently." McGlynn went on to say that during her own research, "force porn" was rightly downranked heavily, although terms as similar as "forced porn" were not. "If you were trying to think of the words that would be similar to say rape, and rape porn is extreme porn and it’s not supposed to be on those platforms anymore, you would think of words like unwilling and unwanted," she added. "And we know your algorithm would." Google inevitably took much of McGlynn’s flak due to its dominance of the search engine market, although the professor said the same issues can be observed on Bing, too. Alexandra Whiston-Dew, partner at law firm Miscon de Raya, argued that search engines have such an important role in regulating the OSA, noting the limited resources at Ofcom’s disposal. She said that more needs to be done from the tech side to ensure different parties in the chain of publication are detected early and downranked or blocked accordingly. There are publications, for example, that actively advertise themselves as websites that host illegal content, and these appear to be missing from the search engines’ crosshairs. "So, they are spotlighting the fact that they are publishing illegal content, and this is going under the radar not only from the search engines but also the other platforms and the businesses in the chain of publication," said Whiston-Dew. "Also Ofcom needs to really pull all of their resources together and attack that receptacle of illegal content." Similarly, McGlynn raised the issue of porn sites continuing to host extreme porn, as they are legally allowed to do, to make it available to less regulated territories. With the harmful content still on the site, all it takes is a VPN connection to access it, and bypass the age assurance mechanisms in the process…