Online safety & content laws in Jersey (2026)

Jersey's States Assembly declined to request extension of the UK Online Safety Act 2023 via its permissive extent clause; UK Parliament Acts do not ordinarily apply to Crown Dependencies without their express consent, leaving Jersey outside the UK regime.

The Children, Education and Home Affairs Scrutiny Panel published a November 2025 review making 63 findings and 38 recommendations, concluding Jersey lags behind comparable jurisdictions in age verification, platform accountability and cross-border enforcement, and that there is 'no accountability in Jersey at all' for child online protection.

Ministers accepted 12 of the 38 recommendations, partially accepted 23 and rejected 3. Interim steps include a new cross-ministerial group, school mobile-phone restrictions, enhanced digital literacy programmes, and the launch of digisafejersey.gov.je.

Jersey's government launched a public consultation in January 2026 on draft Online Harms legislation focused on content removal and online privacy rights (deadline 6 March 2026). The proposed law would give islanders stronger rights to have illegal or harmful content removed from social media, websites and search engines.

As of early 2026 Jersey has no statutory age-verification requirement for adult content sites; access is controlled only by self-declaration tick-boxes, which the scrutiny panel identified as wholly inadequate for child protection.

Separately, the States Assembly unanimously approved a Cyber Security (Jersey) Law in January 2026 (expected in force summer 2026 after Privy Council approval), imposing incident-reporting within 24 hours and security obligations on operators of essential services; this does not address content moderation or platform liability.