Ofcom Information Notices Upheld by High Court

The High Court has upheld Ofcom information notices sent to Meta and WhatsApp, X and TikTok under the Online Safety Act, rejecting every challenge the companies brought. In a judgment handed down on 30 October, Lord Justice Singh and Mrs Justice Collins Rice found that the firms had not shown the demands for data were disproportionate, and that their evidence of the burden lacked substance.

It is the first time a court has tested the power. The court’s press summary describes the case as “the first judicial review proceedings to test OFCOM’s powers to issue information notices under the Online Safety Act 2023”, brought by the providers of “some of the most-used social media platforms in the UK (TikTok, X, and WhatsApp)”.

In brief

Ofcom sent the notices in February 2026, asking for data on moderation, user reports, appeals and UK users’ exposure to harmful content, broken down by age.
The court refused permission on seven of nine issues as unarguable, and dismissed the proportionality and human rights grounds on their merits.
X said compliance would cost “millions of pounds”, but the judges said none of the companies’ figures was properly explained.

What the Ofcom information notices ask for

Section 100 of the Act lets Ofcom require any information it needs for its online safety functions, but the power “must be exercised in a way that is proportionate to the use to which the information is to be put”. Ofcom used it in February, “after several months of dialogue” with the companies, the press summary says. Failing to comply with a notice is a criminal offence, though the Act allows a defence where compliance was not reasonably practicable.

The full judgment, [2026] EWHC 2779 (Admin), also published on the National Archives’ Find Case Law service, lists six categories of information. They are:

the definitions each provider uses;
the total volume of user activity on each service, broken down by age group;
how much content and how many accounts faced moderation action, how long it took, and how far content harmful to children was the target;
how far UK users, including children, were exposed to content that was later actioned;
the outcomes of appeals against moderation decisions and how long they took;
the volumes and outcomes of reports filed by UK users.

The data runs from 1 January 2024 and is due in three tranches, with deadlines of 15 June 2026, 22 September 2026 and 25 March 2027. Ofcom told the companies it expects to request the information “on a regular basis” as part of what it calls its monitoring and evaluation programme.

Why the judges rejected the Online Safety Act challenge

The companies argued that the notices were outside Ofcom’s powers and disproportionate, that Ofcom had used them for an improper purpose, skipped required impact assessments, closed its mind in advance, and ignored its own published guidance. The court found all of that unarguable except proportionality and human rights, which it allowed to proceed and then dismissed.

A central argument was that the Act already has a separate transparency regime, with yearly reports, and that Ofcom should not use section 100 to get round its limits. The judges disagreed. “The transparency regime serves a different purpose from the information notices issued by OFCOM,” they wrote, because it is about publishing information, while the notices gather data for Ofcom’s own use. They added that the transparency regime “is not yet available to OFCOM”.

On proportionality, the judgment records the companies’ evidence of the burden. X put the cost at “millions of pounds” and three or four months of work by specialist staff. Meta said its partial response had involved up to 20 teams. TikTok UK said it already had more than a thousand employees in 80 teams working on UK compliance, and called the notice one of the largest single regulatory requests it had faced in the UK or EU.

The court was not persuaded that the Ofcom information notices were too heavy. “None of these figures is, however, materially further quantified, explained or contextualised,” it said of X’s evidence. Its conclusion on all three: “It does not sufficiently identify the necessary baselines or differential resource impact. We do not assess it as capable of bringing the overall balance down on the side of the disproportionality of any of the notices.”

An Ofcom spokesperson told Reuters that “gathering information from companies is fundamental to our ability to do our job”. A Meta spokesperson told the agency that Meta was “disappointed with the court’s decision”, and that “information-gathering of this scale goes beyond what is necessary or proportionate.” TikTok said it was considering the judgment, Reuters reported.

The weak evidence, not the law, decided the burden argument

The judgment is a win for Ofcom, but the way the companies lost matters as much as the result. On the law, the court gave a broad reading to section 100, the power behind Ofcom information notices: it is not cut down by the transparency regime, and Ofcom does not have to wait for that regime to start before asking for data. That gives the regulator a working tool now, at a time when it is building its case on harms to children and preparing to police the age checks behind the under-16 social media ban.

On the burden, though, the companies lost on evidence rather than principle. The judges said the claims of cost were not tied to any baseline, and that the companies had not shown how much extra work the notices caused compared with what they already do. That leaves a clear lesson for the next challenge: a platform that wants to argue a demand is too heavy will need numbers set against its existing compliance spending, not large totals.

The court also left two questions open. It said the relevance of “future repetition of requests, and sanction for non-compliance” to proportionality is “for another day”. Ofcom told the companies it expects to repeat these requests regularly, so more Ofcom information notices of this kind look likely and that day may come. Enforcement is the other test. Ofcom’s record on collecting its online safety fines has drawn questions from MPs, and it has already found that a court order against X over Grok deepfakes set a high bar, according to MLex.

What to watch next is whether any of the companies seeks to appeal, and the ruling in Meta’s separate challenge to how Ofcom calculates fees and fines, which Reuters says is still awaited.