Ofcom has published its final guidance on protecting children under the Online Safety Act 2023. This follows consultation, including with children.
The guidance includes more than 40 measures for tech firms to meet their duties under the Online Safety Act. These will apply to sites and apps used by UK children in areas such as social media, search and gaming. The steps include preventing minors from encountering the most harmful content relating to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography. Online services must also act to protect children from misogynistic, violent, hateful or abusive material, online bullying and dangerous challenges.
Ofcom’s Codes demand a ‘safety-first’ approach in how tech firms design and operate their services in the UK. The measures include:
- Safer feeds. Personalised recommendations are children’s main pathway to encountering harmful content online. Any provider that operates a recommender system and poses a medium or high risk of harmful content must configure their algorithms to filter out harmful content from children’s feeds.
- Effective age checks. The riskiest services must use highly effective age assurance to identify which users are children. This aims to ensure that they can protect them from harmful material, while preserving adults’ rights to access legal content. That may involve preventing children from accessing the entire site or app, or only some parts or kinds of content. If services have minimum age requirements but are not using strong age checks, they must assume younger children are on their service and ensure they have an age-appropriate experience.
- Fast action. All sites and apps must have processes in place to review, assess and quickly tackle harmful content when they become aware of it.
- More choice and support for children. Sites and apps are required to give children more control over their online experience. This includes allowing them to indicate what content they don’t like, to accept or decline group chat invitations, to block and mute accounts and to disable comments on their own posts. There must be supportive information for children who may have encountered, or have searched for harmful content.
- Easier reporting and complaints. Children must have straightforward ways to report content or complain, and providers should respond with appropriate action. Terms of service must be clear so children can understand them.
- Strong governance. All services must have a named person accountable for children’s safety, and a senior body should annually review the management of risk to children.
Providers of services likely to be accessed by UK children now have until 24 July to finalise and record their assessment of the risk their service poses to children, which Ofcom may request. They should then implement safety measures to mitigate those risks, From 25 July 2025, they should apply the safety measures set out in our Codes to mitigate those risks.
If companies fail to comply with their new duties, Ofcom has the power to impose fines and – in very serious cases – apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK.
In recent weeks, it has been suggested that the UK government is coming under pressure from the US government to reduce the protections in the Online Safety Act as part of a UK-US trade deal. In addition, the government has been keen that regulators prioritise growth. However, the Times reported on 24 April that Peter Kyle, the technology secretary, said that he was not afraid to encourage Ofcom to use their powers to fine technology companies over breaches.
Ofcom has also announced that it is consulting on proposals that seek to expand blocking and muting user accounts and disabling comments measures in the Illegal Content Codes to a wider range of services. This is because it now considers that it would be proportionate for these measures to apply to certain smaller services that are likely to be accessed by children. The consultation ends on 22 July.
