Ofcom seeks to regulate body-shaming and depression content

The UK's Office of Communications (Ofcom) recommended on 22 October 2026 that platforms be required to protect children from body-shaming content and content that promotes depression, as part of its first statutory report on content harmful to children published under the Online Safety Act. The report found no significant change in children's exposure to harmful content in the nine months after regulatory rules took effect in July 2025, and noted that the two new proposed categories depend heavily on context, which automated systems struggle to interpret.

Detecting sustained targeting, escalation in coercion, or the introduction of age-inappropriate contact demands analysis of conversational patterns over time rather than attempting to label individual posts as harmful or benign out of context. Anti-grooming and anti-sextortion modules track the cumulative shape of direct-message exchanges across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, flagging contact that progresses from compliments to isolation to demands for imagery, surfacing the child to a safeguarding professional before compliance with a request or before distress becomes intent. This approach addresses the structural challenge Ofcom identified, that context-dependent harm cannot reliably be caught by conventional content filters, without requiring platforms to make binary moderation decisions on ambiguous single messages.