Ofcom report is another example of bias, incompetence and propaganda
Ofcom published its first report on the Online Safety Act in December 2025, claiming great wins from rules that came into force last year but the whole organisation is utterly laughable
Working in the tech sector, I have a bit of a different viewpoint of areas like Digital ID and the Online Safety Bill. Therefore, upon reading the Ofcom report I really can conclude with confidence this is a stunning piece of work, not in its achievement or technical content but in utterly laughable claims.
The key claims of 2025 include;
UK visits to pornography sites fell by one third since 25 July 2025.
The top ten adult sites, handling a quarter of traffic, rolled out age checks.
Over half the top 100 adult services now verify age, covering three-quarters of daily visitors.
Ofcom has enforcement actions against more than 80 non-compliant porn sites, imposed fines up to £1 million, and forced some high-risk file-sharing platforms hosting child sexual abuse material to block UK IPs entirely.
Duties now apply to roughly 100,000 services including social media, search, dating, gaming and porn platforms.
Services such as X, Telegram, Reddit, TikTok and others introduced age gates.
The regulator admits terrorist content and illegal hate speech remain on major platforms, some of which have lowered moderation standards.
Thirty per cent of children aged 11-17 still saw suicide, self-harm or porn content in the past month. Ofcom calls for more enforcement in 2026.
Can you spot the glaring errors?
The report notes visits to pornography sites fell by one third since 25 July 2025 but we all know VPN usage has doubled to 1.5 million daily active users right after the rules hit, before easing to under one million. Anyone with basic tech knowledge knows even slightly knowledgeable users, adults and teenagers alike, simply route around the blocks via VPNs, proxies or the dark web.
What is being labelled as success tackling mainstream porn sites for Government endorsement of its policies is purely cosmetic, the worst material migrates elsewhere. the report also suggests viewing of porn websites has increased elsehere in the world, like its some win, but this is because users here in the UK and using VPNs, which trying to find workarounds actually expose users to sometimes greater risks.
There is also the effect on police investigations. The massive increase in the use of VPNs can hide data that the police services relied on to find perpetrators/consumers of hardcore child pornography. Honestly, this is so disjointed, it’s bordering on sheer incompetency. Ofcom’s own data even shows harms to children have not vanished and in some cases persists at scale but because some of it has gone ‘underground’ they cant trace it.
These fines running into millions push platforms into over moderation which is exactly what the government wants. Vague categories such as ‘hate speech’ which have no precise legal definition in this context only invites subjective crackdowns. The result is pre-emptive censorship of legal speech to avoid penalties. This is not protection, it’s control dressed as safety.
Pattern of bias and mission creep
This fits Ofcom’s established record. In June 2025 the regulator criticised GB News for using the Supreme Court’s biological definition of sex and demanded the channel give airtime to the claim that trans women are women, utter insanity. Even competitors in the media space like the Telegraph called it contempt for women, the truth and the law. Ofcom had earlier been found by the High Court to have broken its own rules, its response was to rewrite the rules for greater power, a move the Telegraph labelled a censorship agenda.
Google and other tech firms have publicly attacked the UK framework as a threat to free speech. Ofcom now requires security protection for its own staff amid backlash to its crackdowns. The regulator is not a neutral, consistently aligns with government priorities and narratives on free speech, gender ideology and online control.
Ofcom’s embarrassment trying to be the worlds internet police
Ofcom’s reach does not stop at the UK border. In October 2025 the regulator slapped a £20,000 fine plus £100 daily penalties on 4chan, the US-based image board with zero offices, zero staff and zero operations in Britain. The charge was failing to hand over risk assessment data on illegal content. It’s laughable that Ofcom consider they can just email a company on the other side of the planet and dictate what they will do because they say so.
4chan’s American lawyers came back very robustly. Preston Byrne of Byrne & Storm told the BBC: “My client has broken no law in the only jurisdiction that matters here, the United States.” He advised Ofcom to “go to court in the US to explain how enforcement of Ofcom’s orders in our country wouldn’t violate the First Amendment.” The notices, he added, “create no legal obligations in the United States” and amount to an illegal campaign of harassment against American tech firms.
In August 2025, 4chan and fellow US forum Kiwi Farms took Ofcom to federal court in Washington DC. They are seeking a permanent injunction declaring the Online Safety Act unenforceable against them on US soil, citing improper service (email instead of the US-UK legal treaty) and a direct collision with First Amendment rights. 4chan has made clear it will not pay a penny.
This is regulatory humiliation in real time. Ofcom insists the Act applies to any service with UK users, presence or not. American companies with no footprint here simply reply: we do not answer to London. The fines become worthless pieces of paper, the threats empty gestures, and the regulator is left looking like a paper tiger barking at sovereign US entities.
The message from US lawyers is unmistakable: Britain does not get to dictate speech rules to American platforms on American soil. Ofcom’s clumsy attempt to play global sheriff has been met with the blunt response it deserved, err…no.
Selective Enforcement: X Targeted, Compliant Platforms Spared
Ofcom further shows its bias, when it moved with remarkable speed against X. On 12 January 2026 it opened a formal investigation into whether the platform failed to assess and mitigate the risk of Grok generated sexual deepfakes, including images of children. The ICO joined with its own data protection probe. X promptly restricted the feature and introduced safeguards. The investigations continue.
The report tells a different story about the wider internet. Terrorist content and illegal hate speech remain on major platforms. Grooming persists at scale. Child sexual abuse material is evolving rapidly with GenAI. Yet no comparable formal, high-profile investigations have been launched into platforms like TikTok, horrendously notorious for grooming minors and addictive harm to children. Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, Reddit, Discord or Telegram. These services, all named in Ofcom’s compliance updates as having introduced age checks, receive general “challenges” to improve risk assessments while X faces the regulator’s spotlight.
The pattern is clear. X, the platform that restored free speech under Elon Musk and resists government directed censorship, draws immediate enforcement. Platforms that quietly suppress inconvenient speech, align with official narratives and cooperate more readily face softer scrutiny or vague warnings. Ofcom’s report admits “lowered moderation standards on major sites” and persistent harms, yet the only named major-platform investigation is into the free speech outlier.
This is not neutral regulation. It is selective pressure designed to punish platforms that refuse to act as extensions of government policy. Compliant censors get latitude; free-speech platforms get the full weight of the regulator. The Online Safety Act was sold as child protection. In practice, it is being used to police speech and the bias is impossible to ignore.
Government failure on display if you open your eyes
The Online Safety Act is another example of ministers reaching for heavy regulation without grasping how the internet actually works. Labour (and the preceding administration that passed the Act) promised safer streets and protected children. Instead they delivered ID requirements for adults, surveillance of 100,000 services, and a regime that drives content underground while leaving core problems - grooming, fraud and terrorist propaganda unresolved.
Ofcom’s report is not evidence of success. It is evidence that the quango will always declare victory to justify its budget and expand its reach. Right leaning outlets including the Telegraph have repeatedly documented this, rule breaking followed by rule changing, free speech rulings that favour one side of the culture war, and enforcement that hits dissenting voices harder than actual criminals.
The Act and its enforcer are not fixing the internet. They are breaking trust, chilling speech, and proving once again that centralised technocratic control fails where targeted criminal law and parental responsibility would succeed. Time to repeal the worst parts and rein in Ofcom before the next report claims even greater “progress”.
Ofcom is a joke.