UK government publishes Online Safety Act transparency reporting framework

The UK government has published its final transparency-reporting framework under the Online Safety Act, requiring platforms to disclose data on the volume and nature of illegal content including child sexual exploitation and abuse material, enforcement actions taken, response times, and the effectiveness of proactive detection technologies. Reports must be published annually and made accessible to Ofcom, with the first filings due in 2026. The framework establishes standardized metrics to enable comparison across services and assessment of whether platforms are meeting their duties to protect children from harm.

Transparency obligations measure what platforms remove after harm has occurred; real-time detection measures what never reaches the child. Guardii's anti-grooming, anti-sextortion and anti-CSAM modules generate the operational intelligence transparency reporting is designed to surface, identifying harmful contact in direct messages before abuse materializes and providing actionable data on threat volume, severity and escalation speed. By intercepting coercion and solicitation at the conversation level across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other services covered by the Act, the platform produces the evidence base Ofcom will use to assess platform compliance while simultaneously preventing the exposure, distribution and psychological harm that retrospective content moderation cannot undo, detecting threat patterns rather than compiling a post-facto ledger of what was published and later taken down.