UK Online Safety Act: Ofcom Publishes Illegal Content Enforcement Guidance for Platforms

UK communications regulator Ofcom has released its final illegal content codes of practice under the Online Safety Act, requiring platforms to take proactive measures against child sexual abuse material and to assess risks of children encountering grooming, with penalties for non-compliance reaching up to ten percent of global annual revenue. The guidance specifies that services must use content moderation technology and human review to detect and remove CSAM, and sets out requirements for age assurance and reporting mechanisms.

Mandating that platforms deploy detection technology addresses a critical gap, but the effectiveness of that technology determines whether children are protected or simply monitored. Systems that identify harmful conversational patterns in real time, such as the escalation signatures characteristic of grooming or the coercive language of sextortion, can intervene at the moment of greatest danger: Guardii's detection modules operate across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other services, flagging threat behaviour as it unfolds in direct messages and enabling rapid escalation to the appropriate authority, without requiring platforms or parents to review the content of every exchange.