Illegal and harmful content

The Online Safety Act introduces new rules for providers of online user-to-user, search and pornography services, to help keep people in the UK safe from content which is illegal in the UK, and to protect children from the most harmful content such as pornography, suicide and self-harm material.

Ofcom’s first report on video-sharing platforms (VSPs) sets out what we found in the first year of regulation.

A list of video-sharing platform (VSP) services that have notified to Ofcom.

This is the first of Ofcom’s policy Statements that Ofcom, as regulator of the Online Safety Act, will publish as part of our work to establish the new regulations.

A new report from Ofcom takes stock of how popular video-sharing platforms are protecting children from accessing potentially harmful videos.

How TikTok, Twitch and Snap try to prevent children from watching potentially harmful videos.

Ofcom has opened a programme of work, or ‘enforcement programme’, to assess the measures being taken by providers of file-sharing and file-storage services that present particular risks of harm to UK users from image-based CSAM to ensure users do not encounter, and offenders are not able to disseminate, such content on their services.

From today, online platforms must start putting in place measures to protect people in the UK from criminal activity, while Ofcom has launched its latest enforcement programme to assess industry compliance.

In the latest in a series of explainers on specific online harms, Ofcom sets out what online service providers operating in the UK need to do to protect people from suicide and self-harm content.

Risk assessments are fundamental to keeping users safer online. In order to put in place appropriate safety measures to protect people, especially children, providers must first understand how harm could take place on their platforms, and how their user-base, features and other characteristics could increase those risks of harm.