Ofcom has published its final guidance on age assurance under the Online Safety Act 2023. It says that robust age checks are a cornerstone of the OSA. It requires services which allow pornography or certain other types of harmful content to introduce “age assurance” to ensure that children are not normally able to encounter it….

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The Competition and Markets Authority has set out its initial plans for the new digital markets competition regime. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act received Royal Assent in May 2024 and the new digital markets competition regime came into force on 1 January 2025. The CMA issued guidance about its substantive and procedural approach…

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The UK government has announced that it intends to crack down on explicit deepfakes.  It will introduce new offences covering both creating and sharing deepfake images. This reflects the government’s manifesto commitment to ban the creation of sexually explicit deepfakes as well as recommendations from the Law Commission relating to intimate images. The government will…

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Ofcom has published its review of public service broadcasting and says that broadcasters are delivering well for UK audiences, in challenging times. As part of its role to support and strengthen the quality of public service broadcasting (PSB), Ofcom has a duty to periodically review how television services provided by the BBC, ITV, STV, Channel…

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Ofcom has published its first-edition codes of practice and guidance on tackling illegal harms, such as terror, hate, fraud, child sexual abuse and assisting or encouraging suicide, under the UK’s Online Safety Act. The Act places new safety duties on social media firms, search engines, messaging, gaming and dating apps, and pornography and file-sharing sites….

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The European Commission has opened formal proceedings against TikTok for a suspected breach of the Digital Services Act in relation to TikTok’s obligation to properly assess and mitigate systemic risks linked to election integrity, notably in the context of the recent Romanian presidential elections. The investigation will focus on management of risks to elections or…

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The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced its final decisions following two inquiries into Meta Platforms Ireland Limited. The DPC launched own-volition inquiries following a personal data breach, which was reported by MPIL in September 2018. The data breach affected approximately 29 million Facebook accounts globally, of which approximately 3 million were based in…

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