UK social media ban: Ofcom identifies four age-check methods. New Delhi, 30 Oct 2026, By IBW Team British communications regulator Ofcom yesterday published a rapid assessment of how social media firms could reliably determine whether someone is aged 16 or over, ahead of the British government and Parliament deciding how the UK's social media ban will work in practice. In June, the United Kingdom government announced a social media ban for under-16s and said the use of highly effective age assurance by tech firms - a stronger test than the "reasonable steps" criteria applied in Australia - will be critical for the ban's successful implementation in the UK, Ofcom said in a statement. To help inform Parliament's consideration of the government's forthcoming detailed rules for the ban, the Secretary of State had asked Ofcom to carry out a rapid assessment of what highly effective age assurance could look like for determining whether someone is 16 or over. "We have identified four age assurance methods that are currently capable of being highly effective at determining whether a user is 16 or over: photo ID matching, digital ID services, banking-based checks and facial age estimation," the regulator said in the statement. The UK government has said it intends to publish its first set of regulations for the ban before the end of 2026. Ofcom said it is already developing draft guidance for platforms, and will consult on this as soon as the government's regulations are laid in parliament. While it will, unequivocally, be the responsibility of regulated services themselves to meet their current and future online safety duties, including by using highly effective age checks, a separate Ofcom report, published yesterday, identifies that app stores could also have an important role to play.

Meta challenges Ofcom in court for 'acting irrationally' in fine and fee pricing. News Reporter Meta has challenged the UK regulator in court over how it calculates fees and fines under the UK's online safety law, as it argued the methods are disproportionate and unlawful. The tech giant has questioned the media regulator, Ofcom, over its definition of 'qualifying worldwide revenue', which it uses to calculate financial penalties and fees for tech companies which earn over £250m a year. The parties are at a judicial review hearing in the English High Court on Tuesday and Wednesday. The regulator created and drafted the Qualifying Worldwide Revenue (QWR) provisions in September last year under the Online Safety Act, which introduced new protections against harmful online content. Under the rules, firms found to have breached safety rules can face fines of up to 10 per cent of qualifying worldwide revenue or £18m, whichever is the higher amount. Under the new rules, if Ofcom enforces against a single entity owned by a tech firm, such as a social media platform, it will calculate financial penalties based only on that entity's revenue. News updates. Stay ahead with our three daily briefings delivering all the key market moves, top business and political stories, and incisive analysis straight to your inbox. However, if the regulator enforces against multiple entities, including a firm's parent company and subsidiaries, it can instead calculate the amount based on the group's total revenue generated from everything, including non-regulated activities such as enterprise software. According to court filings seen by City AM, Meta has alleged the Online Safety Act does not give the regulator powers to include revenue for non-regulated services when pursuing multiple entities, and so Ofcom is breaching its own statutory powers and "acting irrationally" by creating a "double counting" approach to calculating fines and fees. The US tech firm is claiming Ofcom deliberately adopted the "broadest possible approach" of those rules to grant itself power to impose financial penalties on providers "at an unprecedented level of magnitude." Ofcom, however, argued that Meta "is incorrect" and that it "struck a careful balance" in adopting its approach to calculating financial penalties. "A fundamental flaw with this argument is that it was no part of the purpose of the QWR Regulations to set the 'level' of any penalty. The QWR Regulations determine the methodology for calculating the maximum penalty in a particular case, but Ofcom will determine the appropriate and proportionate level of penalty on the facts of the case at hand," Ofcom said in court filings seen by City AM. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the tech giant is "committed to cooperating constructively with Ofcom as it enforces the Online Safety Act." "However, we and others in the tech industry believe its decisions on the methodology to calculate fees and potential fines are disproportionate. We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries where they're being regulated. This would still allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in UK corporate history," the spokesperson said. An Ofcom spokesperson said in a statement: "Parliament has charged us with the job of regulating an industry that has been unregulated and unaccountable for more than 20 years." "Effective regulation relies on our ability to gather information, levy appropriate fees, issue fines and apply the law as intended. While legal challenges are an important part of any regulatory regime, we will defend them robustly as part of our mission of making life safer online for people in the UK." Regulator 'operating in a highly litigious environment' During a meeting for the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee on 15 September, Ofcom's group director for online safety, Oliver Griffiths, said the regulator is "operating in a highly litigious environment" as it is facing two lots of legal proceedings brought by Meta over its fee calculation, amongst other online service providers bringing similar claims. Griffiths added the regulator has "a raft of services that are bringing judicial reviews against us for trying to collect data so that we can monitor and evaluate what is happening" with the online safety regime.

Meta, TikTok and X challenge Ofcom over data demands. Meta, TikTok and X told a London court that February's information notices were disproportionate, with X calling them the most burdensome request it has received from any regulator anywhere. Meta, TikTok and X are fighting Ofcom, Britain's communications regulator, over demands for detailed data on how they police their own platforms. The dispute concerns information notices Ofcom issued in February under the Online Safety Act, and the three companies took their objections to court this week. The hearing concludes on Wednesday, with a separate Meta challenge listed for the following week. What the regulator asked for is specific. It wants to know how many posts each platform removed or made less visible, and how many users were exposed to harmful content. The notice covers seven separate Meta services. Each company objects on different grounds. X described the demand as the most burdensome information request it has received from any regulator in any jurisdiction. Meta argued that Ofcom sought wide-ranging and granular material without a clearly defined regulatory purpose, while TikTok said the regulator went around an existing monitoring arrangement that carried its own safeguards. Ofcom's answer went to its mandate rather than to the detail. "Parliament has charged us with the job of regulating an industry that has been unregulated and unaccountable for more than 20 years," a spokesperson said. The regulator added that it needs the information to judge whether the new regime is working, and that it had already narrowed the scope before issuing the notices. The power to ask is in dispute. An information notice is the most basic instrument the Act gives Ofcom, and that is what makes this case larger than its subject matter. The Online Safety Act passed in 2023 and its duties came into force in stages, with obligations on illegal content enforceable from March 2025 and child safety duties following later that year. Serious breaches carry fines of up to 10% of a company's global turnover. Underneath that sits a separate and smaller power. Ofcom can demand information, and failing to answer is its own offence with its own penalty. The regulator pursues that before it reaches any question about whether a platform's safety measures are adequate. So this hearing is not about whether Meta, TikTok or X are meeting their duties. It is about whether the regulator can compel the data it would use to find out. The formal regime is not running yet. There is a second route to this information, and it has not opened. The Act creates a category of the largest services, and those placed in it carry a duty to publish transparency reports to a format Ofcom sets. That machinery has slipped, and the register naming which services fall into the top category moved to July 2026 after a legal challenge by the Wikimedia Foundation led Ofcom to reconsider how categorisation should apply. The first transparency reports are now due in summer 2027. The gap explains a good deal of the argument, because Ofcom is using a general power to ask for data now, roughly 18 months before the purpose-built regime would deliver it. TikTok's complaint that the regulator bypassed an existing arrangement points directly at that. Whether the general power can stand in for the specific one is the question underneath the dispute, and the part with consequences for every service the Act touches. Every fine has hit A small operator. The enforcement record to date gives the dispute its context, and the pattern in it is striking. In its first twelve months of enforcement Ofcom opened investigations into 30 companies covering 96 sites and apps, and issued 16 fines against six providers totalling roughly £4M. The names on those penalties are not the ones in court. The largest went to 8579 LLC at £1.4M in February, AVS Group at £1.05M last December, Kick.com at £830,000 and the imageboard 4chan at £520,000, with daily penalties of between £100 and £500 accruing on top. Collection has been another matter. Of around £3M imposed by March this year, approximately £55,000 had actually been paid. That says something about enforcing penalties against operators outside the United Kingdom with few assets inside it. The contrast is the point. The regulator has fined small sites that ignored it, and is now in court with the large platforms over whether it can require them to produce numbers. Comparable numbers are the prize. The data in question is not information the platforms lack. It is information they have generally published on their own terms. Every major platform releases transparency figures, in its own format, using its own definitions of what counts as harmful, over periods it chooses. Those reports are genuinely informative and almost impossible to compare with one another. A regulator asking the same questions of seven services in one shape is asking for something different. Comparability exposes which platform removes more, which leaves more visible, and how many people saw the material before anything happened. That is the evidence any later enforcement decision would rest on. That explains both the regulator's insistence and the companies' resistance, without either side needing to be acting in bad faith. Europe went the same way for connected products, writing obligations into law rather than guidance and accepting the compliance cost that follows. What the ruling settles. The outcome shapes the regime rather than any individual company's safety record. A ruling for the platforms would force Ofcom to narrow what it asks for, which in practice means a smaller evidence base for every judgement it makes afterwards. A ruling for the regulator leaves the notices standing and the data flowing, and establishes early that the information power works as written. Neither answers the question the Act exists to address, since nothing decided this week establishes whether these platforms are meeting their duties on illegal content or child safety. It establishes only whether the regulator can gather the material to assess them. The hearing ends on Wednesday and Meta's separate case follows next week, which puts a first reading of how far Britain's online safety powers reach within a fortnight.