Online Safety Act comes into effect 

Yesterday (March 16 2025), the Online Safety Act came into effect, meaning that providers of services in scope of the Act must now “start implementing appropriate measures to remove illegal material quickly when they become aware of it, and to reduce the risk of ‘priority’ criminal content from appearing in the first place”.

At the end of last year, Ofcom released a set of codes of practice and guidance for in-scope firms - including social media firms, search engines, messaging, gaming and dating apps, and pornography and file-sharing sites - aimed at tackling illegal harms. This covered 40 safety measures that needed to be introduced by March 2025 to address issues such as protecting children online, protecting women and girls, removing terrorist accounts and identifying fraud.

Now that the deadline for these steps to be implemented has passed, Ofcom will be enforcing the rules and has stated that a key priority of its early enforcement is to tackle the spread of online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online. As part of this, it has launched an enforcement programme to assess the safety measures being taken, or that will soon be taken, by file-sharing and file-storage providers to prevent the dissemination of CSAM on their services. 

You can read the latest update from Ofcom here.