Ofcom Urges New Child-Harm Content Categories

Ofcom has recommended that content promoting body stigma and content about depression be added to the kinds of material treated as harmful to children under the Online Safety Act, in the regulator’s first statutory report on the subject, published on 22 October. The recommendation is advice to the Secretary of State, not a change in the law: only if the government takes it forward would the two categories, currently treated by Ofcom as “non-designated content”, be written into the Act’s list of priority content harmful to children.

The review is the first Ofcom has produced under section 63 of the Online Safety Act 2023, which requires the regulator to publish such a report at least every three years and to advise whether the categories of harmful content should change. Beyond body stigma and depression content, Ofcom did not recommend any other additions, saying the available evidence either supported the current categories or that concerns were likely to be addressed by proposed legislation.

In brief

In its first statutory report under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom recommends adding body stigma and depression content to priority content harmful to children.
The change is a recommendation to the Secretary of State, not law, and no other category changes were proposed.
Ofcom found no significant change in children’s exposure to harmful content in the first nine months of the children’s safety duties, calling the finding “concerning”.

What Ofcom found, in its own words

The headline the report is at pains to make is not the new categories but how little has shifted. “Most children in the UK say they have encountered at least one piece of harmful content online in a four-week period,” Ofcom writes. On the trend, its wording is blunt: “at a total level there was no significant change in the proportion of children encountering harmful content over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties came into force in July 2025,” a finding it calls “concerning” and says “shows that further progress is needed to protect children online”. The regulator adds that there is no new evidence of a change in the severity of harm children experience, and that children continue to report that encountering harmful content damages their wellbeing. Those are the figures as Ofcom frames them; the regulator published a 1.64 MB main report and a separate annex, “Analysis of Content Harmful to Children in Generative AI and Traditional Search API Responses”, examining whether generative AI and search tools surface harmful material to children. That AI annex is the thread worth following, because age-assurance and content-classification systems are increasingly the machinery through which these duties are enforced.

A recommendation that lands in a crowded policy moment

The timing is pointed. The UK Government has said it intends to introduce a social media ban for under 16s and extra protections for under 18s, and Ofcom says it will “shortly” publish a rapid assessment of what “highly effective age assurance” could look like for deciding whether someone is 16 or over. That puts the regulator in the middle of an argument happening across Europe, where Greece has passed an under-15 social media ban with age checks due from 2027. The harder question is enforcement rather than ambition. Ofcom’s own powers have looked uneven in practice: as TSN has reported, nine of eleven Online Safety Act fines remained unpaid when the regulator’s chief gave evidence to MPs, and Ofcom has weighed and backed away from a court order over AI deepfakes when it judged the legal bar too high. Adding two categories to a list means little if exposure is not falling and penalties are not being collected, which is why the “no significant change” line matters more than the recommendation it sits beside.

The list is easy to change; the outcome is not

Designating new categories of harmful content is the part of this system that moves quickly, assuming the Secretary of State agrees. The slower, harder part is whether any of it reaches children’s feeds: Ofcom’s own data says exposure has not measurably fallen in the first nine months of the children’s duties, and its enforcement record is still thin. The next markers to watch are specific — whether the government adopts the body-stigma and depression recommendation, when Ofcom’s age-assurance assessment lands, and whether its next evidence round shows the exposure figure finally moving.