UK Online Safety Act: Ofcom publishes first guidance on child safety duties

On 2 September 2026, Ofcom published its first statutory guidance under the Online Safety Act, setting out how regulated services must assess and mitigate risks to children, including grooming, sexual exploitation and harmful content. The guidance requires platforms to implement age-assurance measures, proactive content moderation and systems to detect contact risks in private messaging, with non-compliance carrying fines of up to ten percent of global turnover.

The guidance mandates detection of harm but does not prescribe the means, creating both compliance pressure and operational latitude for platforms. Guardii's real-time conversation-analysis modules for grooming, sextortion and CSAM detect threat patterns in direct messages across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, intercepting escalation and coercion before a child is harmed, and surface a child in crisis to the responsible adult or authority without exposing message content. As a Meta Business Partner and Startmate-backed platform, Guardii offers regulated services a proportionate path to meeting the duty of care Ofcom now enforces, addressing the underlying harm without requiring blanket age-verification of every user.