Carnegie UK

Carnegie UK is a charitable trust that provided an institutional base for online-safety policy work. Its programme developed and promoted a systems-based approach to platform responsibility: attention moves toward how a service's design and operation create risks, rather than treating every harmful item as an isolated event. The programme undertook legislative drafting, evidence submissions and international advice.

Its accounts distinguish restricted project resources from the trust's permanent endowment. Trustees set strategy and annual budgets, while management executes the work. That structure matters because a policy model requires sustained time and expertise to develop. An established institution can support specialist work through repeated consultations, amendments and changes in the political timetable, keeping an argument available when a government decides to act.

The Australian record provides a concrete route for the ideas to travel. Carnegie submitted to the House Select Committee on Social Media and Online Safety in January 2022. The later statutory review cited its 2019 model and subsequent criticism of content-specific duties. These references place the Australian debate in a longer history of policy development, with identifiable authors and an institutional programme behind it.

In October 2023 Carnegie announced the end of its online-safety programme and said Lorna Woods and Maeve Walsh would continue through a new network supported by Reset. Its accounts also recorded support for developing that network. The important continuity is expertise and policy work that survived a change of organizational home. Carnegie is therefore a significant origin point in the duty-of-care branch of the map, even though its own programme had ended before the current Australian proposal.

Assessment updated 2026-09-12