Ofcom has published its first report on content harmful to children online under the Online Safety Act (OSA), which the UK regulator says includes its advice on “whether it is appropriate to make changes to the kinds of content harmful to children set out in the Act,” and specifies recommended changes.

The headlining recommendation in the report is the addition of body stigma content and depression content to the list of priority content that is harmful to children. As research has shown the potentially negative effects social media can have on kids, these concerns – mental health and body image – have risen to the top of regulators’ warning lists.

The recommendation would require government action before body stigma and depression content become statutory priority harms under the Online Safety Act.

Indeed, for now, Ofcom seems content to add those two classes of content, and no more. “At this time, we do not recommend any other changes to the categories of primary priority or priority content that is harmful to children in the Act,” it says. “We are not recommending changes where we found that the available evidence supports the current categorization or where proposed legislation is likely to address concerns.”

Yet the effects of the existing protections remain difficult to discern. Ofcom’s research shows that, in a four week period, most kids in the UK say they have encountered at least one piece of harmful content online. The regulator says its evidence shows that, overall, “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.”

“This finding is concerning and shows that further progress is needed to protect children online.”

Reclassification would strengthen duties to protect children

Reclassifying body stigma and depression content as priority harms would give them explicit statutory protection, strengthening the duties on regulated services to protect children from encountering them.

The OSA places harmful content into three buckets: primary priority content (PPC), priority content (PC) and non-designated content (NDC). For the first, sites must prevent children of any age from encountering it, and search engines must minimize the risk. For priority content, services must take proportionate measures to protect children in age groups considered at risk, including minimizing their exposure.

NDC “comprises other kinds of content which are not listed in the Act but which present a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of children in the UK.” This is where body stigma and depression content currently sit.

Ofcom believes that, based on evidence, they should be bumped up to the PC category, beside content that is abusive and hateful, violent content, bullying content, and content promoting dangerous stunts and challenges or harmful substances.

Targets getting tougher to hit as online safety laws expand

This already covers a substantial range of content, and further expansion is likely to involve more difficult judgments. The easy targets have been addressed: pornography, with its big-secret social taboo, calls itself “adult content” for a reason. Biometric age assurance tech makes sense for this use case, at least in terms of how society has thus far restricted pornographic material; it rightly gets classed as PPC. So too does content promoting suicide or eating disorders, which are direct threats to kids’ health and safety.

However, in tandem, lawmakers have begun to understand that social media platforms have been designed and engineered to create patterns of behavior that have proven to be harmful to kids and teens. Besides which, society is realizing that it accidentally made tech CEOs the would-be kings of Earth, and is trying to reverse that.

Hence the wave of legislation putting age minimums on social media platforms, and seeking to establish legal accountability for the companies that operate them.

Separately, Ofcom is preparing an assessment of highly effective age assurance methods for determining whether users are at least 16, as the UK government advances plans for an under-16 social media ban.

But the two categories of content proposed for the PC bin begin to poke at the edges of proportionality, given how their definitions under the law might be interpreted.

Ofcom wades into dark night of the soul

Body stigma content is defined as content that shames or otherwise stigmatizes body types or

physical features. Depression content is content that promotes depression, hopelessness and despair. Drilling down, Ofcom specifies that “promotes,” in this context, “means content which encourages or portrays depression, hopelessness or despair as positive. This includes content which glamorizes, glorifies or romanticises depression, hopelessness or despair.”

It is philosophically easy to look at an image and say, “those people are engaged in coitus; furthermore, the makeup and beach house setting signal to me that this is not educational content. As such I label it pornographic.” Likewise, social media platforms have defining features: their size and reach, their design elements, and their business model.

It is a much chewier problem to identify what elicits shame, or instills hopelessness. Will Sartre be flushed from the internet? Where to put Sara Teasdale’s poem-as-suicide note, “I Shall Not Care”? What of the fitness teachers that push their devotees to burn that fat? And what can one say to a story about the world’s climate that paints a hopeless picture of the future – and which critics might say glorifies that feeling?

Online safety regulations have thus far steered fairly clear of the muddy waters of semantics, emotional states and spiritual salvation. Perhaps, before the next review, Ofcom should revisit Existentialism 101 to meditate on this nugget from Albert Camus: “There is no love of life without despair of life.”

Article Topics

children  |  Ofcom  |  Online Safety Act  |  regulation  |  UK age verification

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