Introducing the Systems Approach and the Statutory Duty of Care

Early policy in relation to the internet framed questions from the perspective of liability for individual items of content. With the growth of social media, the approach struggles to deal with the scale of material as well as the contextual subjectivity of the acceptability of some types of content. This chapter explains a different approach, based on the work of Carnegie UK Trust, that moves away from direct content regulation to look at the services on which that content is created and disseminated. It argues that those services are not neutral as to that content, and that design choices can operate to create or exacerbate problems. The proposal is that of a risk managed approach to service development, aiming to achieve ‘safety by design’. Although the orginal Carnegie proposal was based in English law, it is argued that the esssential elements of this approach could be deployed in other legal systems.