Ofcom’s own figures show the Online Safety Act has made no dent in the harmful content children see online. In its first report under the Act, published yesterday, the regulator found no significant change in children’s exposure in the nine months after the relevant safety duties came into force in July 2025. Who could have guessed…
Ofcom said:
“We have not observed any significant changes in the incidence or severity of any kind of content over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties came into force.”
Most children still say they saw at least one piece of harmful content in a four-week period. By March to April this year, 14% of 11 to 17-year-olds had seen suicide or self-harm content in the past four weeks, 23% eating disorder content and 49% ‘hate content’. These are all Ofcom’s definitions of course…
Ofcom claims age checks are “helping to prevent children from accessing pornography services” but the share of children seeing porn on social media has not moved. Ofcom proposes adding ‘body stigma’ and ‘depression’ content to the list of harmful content. Meanwhile ministers now want to ban social media for under-16s altogether. Ofcom’s next report should make interesting reading…
Robert Jenrick on the Today programme:
“Can you now give a guarantee to your listeners this morning that no BBC presenter in the future will be exposed as a paedophile, as a number have been in the recent past? No, of course you can’t…”