Protecting children

Under the Online Safety Act, services that are likely to be accessed by children have new duties to comply with to protect children online. One way they can do that is to adopt the safety measures in Ofcom’s codes of practices.

Today we are publishing a major policy Statement for the protection of children online.

Children in the UK will gain increased protection from online pornography next month, Ofcom has announced, as major providers agree to bring in robust methods to check users’ age for the first time.

As of 25 July 2025, all sites and apps that allow pornography will need to have strong age checks in place, to make sure children can’t access that or other harmful content.

We are investigating whether Score Internet Group LLC has failed/is failing to comply with its duties under the Online Safety Act 2023 to protect children from encountering pornographic content through the use of highly effective age assurance.

With growing concern over the potential for online communities to promote misogyny, new research, commissioned by Ofcom, explores how men come to engage with the manosphere, the role it plays in their lives, and how it shapes their views and behaviour.

This page provides the report and accompanying annex from our qualitative research exploring experiences of engaging with the manosphere, carried out in October and November 2024 by Revealing Reality.

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.

We are investigating whether First Time Videos LLC has failed/is failing to comply with its duties under the Online Safety Act 2023 to protect children from encountering pornographic content through the use of highly effective age assurance.

Ofcom has today launched investigations into whether seven file-sharing services, 4chan and porn provider First Time Videos have failed to comply with their duties under the UK’s Online Safety Act.