Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on March 3, 2025
1 min readLast updated: January 25, 2026
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The UK has set a March 31 deadline for social media platforms to assess risks of illegal content under new safety laws, enforced by Ofcom.
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's media regulator Ofcom on Monday set social media and other online platforms a March 31 deadline to submit a risk assessment around how likely users are to encounter illegal content on their sites.
New laws passed last year require companies like Meta's Facebook and Instagram and ByteDance's TikTok to take action against criminal activity on their platforms and make them safer.
Under the Online Safety Act, firms have to assess and mitigate the risks of a wide range of offences occurring on their platform, including terrorism, hate crime, child sexual exploitation and financial fraud.
"Specifically, they must determine how likely it is that users could encounter illegal content on their service, or, in the case of user-to-user services, how they could be used to commit or facilitate certain criminal offences," Ofcom said in a statement.
Failure to meet the assessment deadline could result in enforcement action, Ofcom said.
(Reporting by Aby Jose Koilparambil in Bengaluru and William James in London; Editing by Vijay Kishore and Sachin Ravikumar)
Ofcom has set a deadline of March 31 for social media and online platforms to submit their risk assessments.
The Online Safety Act requires companies to assess and mitigate the risks of various offences, including terrorism, hate crime, and child sexual exploitation on their platforms.
Failure to meet the assessment deadline could result in enforcement action from Ofcom.
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