Ofcom's First Online Safety Act Enforcement Wave

Following the phased commencement of the UK's Online Safety Act 2023, the regulator Ofcom moved into active enforcement during 2025. In a 13 October 2025 update, Ofcom said that since March 2025, when the first of its online safety codes became enforceable, it had launched five enforcement programmes and opened 21 investigations into the providers of 69 sites and apps, testing compliance with illegal-content duties, child-protection rules, and age-check requirements.

The first penalties followed quickly. In October 2025 Ofcom confirmed its first financial penalty under the Act, fining the imageboard 4chan £20,000 for failing to provide its illegal-content risk assessment and its qualifying worldwide revenue, with a daily penalty of £100 for up to 60 days until the information was produced. A lawyer for 4chan had responded to the impending fine by saying, "4chan has broken no laws in the United States. My client will not pay any penalty." A second confirmed financial penalty of £50,000 followed, alongside investigations into 20 more services announced on 20 November. That month Ofcom also fined Itai Tech, operator of an AI "nudification" site, £50,000 for insufficiently rigorous age verification, and in December 2025 it fined AVS Group, a Belize-based pornography operator, £1 million for lacking effective age checks plus £50,000 for ignoring information requests. In March 2026, Ofcom fined 4chan another £520,000 for alleged non-compliance; a lawyer for the company responded with a cartoon-styled AI image of a hamster.

Enforcement also produced quieter changes. File-sharing services 1Fichier.com and Gofile.io deployed perceptual hash-matching technology to detect child sexual abuse material after Ofcom intervened, while several other services, including an online suicide forum that was the target of Ofcom's first investigation under the Act, responded by geoblocking UK users rather than complying. Suzanne Cater, Ofcom's director of enforcement, said the actions sent "a clear message that any service which flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom and their duties under the Online Safety Act can expect to face robust enforcement action."

The Act carries maximum fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher, giving Ofcom substantial leverage over global platforms. Reddit, which Ofcom ranked as the UK's 12th most visited site and fourth most visited social media platform in 2025, rolled out age verification in July 2025 and limited unverified users' access to profiles and subreddits containing adult material. No Ofcom enforcement action against Reddit was documented in this period, but in February 2026 the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data regulator, fined Reddit £14.47m over its handling of children's personal information and said it would continue to work closely with Ofcom to coordinate the protection of children online, extending the regulatory squeeze on platforms serving UK users.