EP. 180 – Vicki Nash (Oxford Internet Institute)

In this episode we continue exploring children's online safety and cross the Atlantic to unpack the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA). Vicki Nash, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, joins host Yasmin Sheikh to discuss the rationale of OSA and how it aims to protect children from illegal and harmful content online.

Vicki talks about the difficulty of producing rigorous empirical studies of online harms and benefits to inform policymaking, the debates around free speech, age verification, and privacy, and the differences in approaches to these issues between the UK, EU, and US.

Finally, they discuss whether lawyers can do their part by improving their own literacy around digital issues, and the need to continually evolve our policy approach to online governance.