The Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) is a wide-ranging law aimed primarily at addressing illegal content online. To achieve this goal, the OSA imposes “duties” on providers of in-scope services to, among other things, address illegal content on their services and to take steps to protect children from content that is harmful to them.

These duties apply to providers of various online services, including so-called “user-to-user” (U2U) services. This term is defined to cover services through which users may “encounter” content created by other users, e.g. social media and file-sharing services (s. 3(1)). The OSA notably excludes email, SMS and MMS content from its scope, but does not exempt various types of “over-the-top” (OTT) communications, e.g., chat features in online gaming tools, or app-based messaging services.