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Duties under the Online Safety Act 2023 to protect children from encountering pornographic content through the use of highly effective age assurance.
16 January 2025
From time to time Ofcom may open a programme of work, or “enforcement programme”, to examine a problem or concern that relates to a particular group of stakeholders, or to a whole sector.
One of our priorities for the new Online Safety regime is to promote the implementation of robust age assurance by adult services, so that children are protected from pornographic content.
Relevant Legal Provision: Section 81 of the Online Safety Act 2023
On 17 January 2025, we wrote to hundreds of providers, collectively covering thousands of sites that publish or display pornographic content, to inform them of their obligations under Part 5 of the Online Safety Act to implement Highly Effective Age Assurance (HEAA) to prevent children from accessing pornographic content.
We asked them to respond with details of their plans to meet their obligations to impose HEAA on their sites and anticipated timescales.
The deadline for responses was between 3 and 6 March 2025. So far, we have had positive engagement from across the sector and a number of providers have implemented HEAA in response to our programme. We are reviewing compliance plans and implementation timescales for other services in scope of these duties.
We are also assessing the HEAA measures of services who have not responded and a number of services have been referred to our enforcement team for further review. We will assess such sites and consider in the coming weeks whether formal enforcement action is appropriate. Details of any new investigations will be published on our website.
Part 5 of the Online Safety Act 2025 imposes duties (Part 5 duties) on regulated providers of pornographic content to ensure, through the use of age verification or age estimation (or both), that children (under 18) are not normally able to encounter pornographic content. Such age verification measures must be highly effective at correctly determining whether a particular user is a child. This duty will come into force on 17 January 2025.
Ofcom has opened an enforcement programme into age assurance measures across the adult sector, which will initially focus on regulated providers’ compliance with the Part 5 duties.
Action we are taking:
From the 17 January, we will be writing to all service providers that display or publish pornographic content (Part 5 Service Providers) to inform them of their obligations under the OSA and to request confirmation of the age assurance provisions they are implementing to achieve compliance with their duties under Part 5 of the OSA. A copy of the letter can be foundon our public correspondence page.
Our Supervision team, which leads engagement with regulated services, will also be engaging directly with the adult industry to support compliance. This will include both one to one regular engagement with the largest or riskiest services, as well as hosting and attending adult industry conferences to raise awareness of Ofcom and the new regulations and developing creative communications that will effectively inform pornography services about their obligations.