UK online safety regulator Ofcom publishes illegal harms enforcement guidance

Ofcom has released detailed guidance on how it will enforce illegal content duties under the Online Safety Act, setting out the framework by which platforms must prevent users from encountering priority illegal content including child sexual exploitation and abuse material, and how the regulator will use its powers to issue fines of up to 10 percent of global revenue or block non-compliant services from the UK. The guidance specifies that platforms will need to adopt proactive technologies such as hash-matching, classifiers and behaviour-detection systems, and that Ofcom will assess both the systems in place and their effectiveness through transparency reports, samples and, where necessary, skilled-persons assessments.

Regulatory frameworks mandate that harm be detected and disrupted, but they do not provide the detection capability itself. Guardii furnishes exactly that layer: a world-leading AI platform that identifies grooming, sextortion, CSAM including AI-generated variants, and sustained abuse as those harms occur in direct messages, enabling a service to meet its proactive monitoring obligation without requiring human moderators to read every exchange. Because Guardii reports the shape and severity of a conversation rather than its verbatim content, it delivers the enforcement outcome Ofcom expects while preserving user privacy, and because it operates in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other services, it catches harm at the point of contact and ensures that a child in acute distress or danger is surfaced immediately to the adult or authority who can intervene.