UK Online Safety Act enforcement begins with first notices issued to tech platforms

The UK communications regulator Ofcom has issued its first formal notices to social media platforms under the Online Safety Act, requiring them to demonstrate how they will assess and mitigate risks of child sexual abuse and exploitation on their services. The notices mark the beginning of active enforcement of the landmark legislation, which came into force earlier this year and imposes duties on platforms to protect children from illegal content including grooming, abuse imagery, and harassment.

Platforms now face a choice between scaled content moderation, which raises privacy concerns when applied indiscriminately to all users, and precision interception at the point of harm. Guardii's anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection modules identify escalating threat patterns in direct messages in real time, flagging coercion or predatory targeting before a child is exploited, without requiring blanket surveillance of every conversation. As a Meta Business Partner with detection capability across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, the platform enables services to meet their duty-of-care obligations by surfacing children at immediate risk to the appropriate safeguarding authority while preserving privacy for the majority of users engaged in ordinary social interaction.