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The Guardian view on online harms: Ofcom is failing at its job | Editorial

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The Guardian view on online harms: Ofcom is failing at its job | Editorial

Expressions of disappointment are not an adequate response to the concerning lack of safety improvements for children on social media

One thing is clear following last week’s report from the media regulator, Ofcom: the mammoth task of protecting children from online harms has barely begun. Campaigners said that they were dismayed but not surprised that the proportion of children viewing harmful content has stayed the same despite a raft of measures in the Online Safety Act designed to protect them. Research showed that high-priority material including pornography and self-harm, as well as a broader category covering bullying, abuse and the promotion of violence, continued to be encountered regularly in the nine months after new safety duties came into force.

The regulator found that personalised feeds were the main way that such content was presented, and noted that such feeds show different material to boys and girls. Suicide and self-harm content were more commonly seen by girls and children with special educational needs or disabilities. In a grim irony, Ofcom’s report appeared one day after a coroner in Norfolk ruled that suicide imagery viewed on TikTok “may have played a significant part” in the decision by a 14-year-old girl to take her own life in May.



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