Online safety laws have failed to protect children in UK, Ofcom admits
(www.theguardian.com)
Armand1
United KingdomBut Ofcom found 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”.
Examples of harms included children being shown the murder of Charlie Kirk, graphic pornography and weapon-related content making them feel unsafe in their schools and neighbourhoods. Personalised recommendation feeds powered by “for you” algorithms were repeatedly found by Ofcom to be at the root of the continuing tide of harmful material.
“Tech companies have had months to act, yet too many platforms are still built to keep children hooked with their algorithms continuing to push harmful content to their young users,” she said. “We urgently need stronger action from tech companies to rein in features that drive harm to children and stop putting business interests over their safety obligations.”
If you don't start fining them, they won't improve. £1000 / day per person.
The regulator is already facing a wave of legal actions from tech companies challenging its powers including the Instagram operator Meta, as well as TikTok and X, owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX group. It has warned it risks being “absolutely clobbered legally by deep-pocketed individuals and firms”.
If you're going to enact a law that makes everybody's lives worse and destroys privacy, you might as well do a decent job at what the law is intended for.
It was to create a shopping database. The UK government has same issue as the US.
Ofcom: "Am I so out of touch? No! It's the children that a wrong!"
It was never about protecting your children, it's always about turning you into a child of the state. Beaten repressed, neglected, and locked in a broom cupboard so as not to disturb the neighbors with your loud crying.
Let me guess, the only solution is more surveillance/police state?
If you don't start fining them, they won't improve. £1000 / day per person.
They've issued 11 fines since March last year. 2 have been paid. Because none of the big offenders are UK-based, so they don't give a shit. 🤷♂️
If they don't pay the fines, then you block them from operating in the country until they have...
Although it's not that simple as some of these services are so ingrained in our daily lives that it would cause significant disruption if we did.
Yeah, and then the internet gets even more censored and controlled, and it still won't make a lick of difference to protecting children.
Because control has been the entire point of this from the very beginning.
My point wasn't "it's bad that companies aren't paying the fines", it was "this entire thing is obviously dumb and unworkable and nothing at all to do with protecting children." 💀
but don't let that keep you from squelching everyone's rights and freedoms to "protect the children"
So if these laws provided no benefit, we're going to roll them back, right? Right?
I've been having a look at the report, the conclusion is, bizarrely but predictably, that the legislation being completely ineffective means that they need to restrict things even more:
"We will shortly be publishing our rapid assessment of what highly effective age assurance could look like for determining whether someone is 16 or over and are working closely with the government on the implementation of the expected new restrictions. We will continue to drive compliance with the Online Safety Act for services that fall outside the social media ban and to improve the experience of 16–17-year-olds."
Yay...
And even that won't work.
Why oh why can't we have a sane government for fucks sake
Sorry Ofcom, but they had nothing to do with protecting children.
The best way to protect children would have been to require ISPs to make an easily accessible parental control tool which was on by default on every device and had to be individually turned off with a disclaimer imho. Probably also have schools being at the forefront of social media bans, punishing children via school who are found to have had social media.
I grew up in a house that had parental filters turned on at the ISP level. They already exist for both ISPs and mobile carriers. They block VPN websites, but not their endpoints.
Turning them on by default might be a good idea, as most parents don't have a clue how to access their router's menu, but determined children will find their way around them, as I did.
To the surprise of nobody who's actually paying attention, including most of the people who wrote the laws and voted for them in Parliament.
It's always about control and surveillance, and never about protecting kids.
This is unsurprising unfortunately. It was never going to "work" in terms of their stated aims. What it has done is start getting people used to the idea of needing ID to use the internet. All to "protect the children" despite the fact it clearly achieves nothing in that regard.
The plan seemed to have been to scan everything on everyone's devices next: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-plans-to-stop-children-taking-sharing-or-viewing-nude-images
Although this was a Starmer plan so I don't know if it is still going ahead.
It was first proposed by tories when they were in power.
I cant tell who is actually behind it, but youd expect some mix of the civil service, paid advisors/consultants and the big tech lobby groups.
Interesting, I didn't know that. I must have missed it at the time. It is certainly disturbing how it seems that increasingly authoritarian control of technology and the internet seems to be favoured by almost every political party.
In many countries too
Agreed - very disturbing how common it has become. That's actually why I joined Lemmy and I'm getting more and more into open source and distributed systems. I'm not going to be giving my ID to random tech companies just to use the internet. If there is nobody to threaten, there's not a lot they can do to restrict these services, short of outright banning them. But I don't think that would be possible to enforce.
Even then, if you set up your own private instance which is just you and probably some verified friends that you know, you wouldn't even be falling foul of the law as there's no way for children to access harmful content. Do suppose your IP address being traceable easier though would be an issue in that circumstance.
It's not a core issue to most of them, so they probably listen to advisors, and the loudest ones are probably paid by Trump or Putin interests, so heavily authoritarian.
It absolutely should be a core issue as it's scary how many eyes are glued to tiktube reelz and similar, but it looks like the non-authoritarians may well lose before they even realise what the problem is, let alone the scale or how to tackle it better.
Yeah, most people don't even seem to realise this is happening. I sometimes think people treat me like I'm wearing a tin foil hat for even talking about this kind of stuff. I've written to my MP and she basically just gave me the party line and didn't reply to my arguments against it.
It makes sense though. People who spend their entire lives chasing ever more power and control don't tend to give up power and control.
It's not a huge problem when relatively benign people are in charge. However sometimes Hitler.
Very true and that's a thought I have had with some governments. With the current government I am not entirely sure whether they are actually as malicious with this legislation as they appear or whether they are just stupid enough to think that they're actually doing something good here. It's hard to tell sometimes, either is possible. But it doesn't matter really because like you say, they could start doing this kind of thing and before you know it, Nazis are in charge and start using this legislation maliciously or just extend it once people are used to it.
Laws that address a social problem with technology don't often work.
You can witness the same thing first-hand at work.
“People never fill out this very important field when they submit a request!”
Makes it a required field
“Now people always put - or N/A in this very important field when they submit a request!”
Everyone has had this kind of experience. But for some reason we’re always ready to believe that “this time it’s different”.
