But 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 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.