Failure standards

This week, Ofcom published the first of doubtless many reports on the impact of the Online Safety Act, which came into force in 2025. In the report, Ofcom acknowledges that there has been little change in the amount of “harmful material” children encounter online. The one bit of success appears to be that children are less able to access mainstream pornography sites because of age verification – but children still see pornography via social media, messaging, and gaming services. Ofcom wants to add body stigma and depression content to the list of types of “priority content” deemed harmful to children. This is all without the proposed social media ban, which, separately, Ofcom warns may bar 100,000 16-to-17-year-olds because they have neither a passport nor a driver’s license to act as backup when other methods of age verification fail. As Mike Masnick puts it at Techdirt, the OSA is ineffective, so Ofcom concludes we need more of it. So very Yes, Minister – specifically the episode…