A fresh assessment reveals additional flaws in the U.K.’s Online Safety Act.
A fresh assessment reveals additional flaws in the U.K.’s Online Safety Act.
Who would have imagined that locking down large portions of the internet behind age checks—purportedly to shield young users from vaguely defined “harmful content”—would backfire so decisively and fail to protect children in practice? Apparently, Britain’s online regulator, Ofcom, was not immune to this miscalculation.
Last Thursday, Ofcom published a report examining whether the government should revise the content categories laid out in the 2023 Online Safety Act, a framework that obliges firms operating in Britain to prevent children from “accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content” and to furnish parents and youths with clear, accessible channels to report problems when they arise. The act’s so-called “child safety regime” (as Ofcom describes it) became fully operative in 2025, when adult sites in the country began enforcing ID checks. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason has observed, the age-verification rule has touched far more than adult websites. It has already age-gated a broad spectrum of material—ranging from war news to the NoFap subreddit to a historic work of art—producing a widespread chilling effect online.
However, Ofcom’s report largely sidesteps these adult-age gating concerns, and its findings emphasize disappointing outcomes for the act. The document notes that “Most children in the UK say they have encountered at least one piece of harmful content online in a four-week period.” It also states that “at a total level there was no significant change in the proportion of children encountering harmful content over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties came into force in July 2025.” In other words, the regime appears to compel adults to disclose their identities for access to a broad swath of content, much of which is harmless, while pursuing a perpetual, ineffective whack-a-mole effort to remove “harmful” material from kids’ feeds.
Rather than advocating repealing the Online Safety Act on grounds of ineffectiveness or perceived threats to online liberty, Ofcom’s analysis proposes broadening the law’s reach. The regulator suggests adding “body stigma content” and “depression content”—currently categorized by Ofcom as non-designated content—to the roster of “priority content” that is considered harmful to children. Priority content is defined as material that services must protect or minimize the risk for children in age groups deemed to be at risk of harm from exposure. In practical terms, this could give platforms more justification to age-gate, block, or refrain from publishing content for fear of breaching the statute.
The report does not tackle the government’s plans to ban children under 16 from using social media, and Ofcom says it will soon publish an evaluation of what constitutes highly effective age assurance to determine whether someone is 16 or older. Yet if the social-media ban proceeds in a fashion similar to Australia’s experience, where youngsters reliably circumvent the rules, it is likely to fail—perhaps just as the Online Safety Act has so far.
