Summary

  • Ofcom recommends moving body-stigma and depression content into the Online Safety Act’s priority-content category. Only the Secretary of State can make that change to the statutory list.
  • The report found no significant change in the overall share of children encountering harmful content during the first nine months of the child-safety duties. It measured a trend, not whether the duties caused it.

A regulator has delivered the report Parliament asked for. It has named two kinds of content, assembled evidence about cumulative exposure and put a recommendation in front of the minister who can change the law. The awkward part sits in the same report: the overall share of children encountering harmful content did not significantly change across the first nine months after the Online Safety Act’s child-safety duties took effect in July 2025.

Those statements pull in different directions only if we expect one document to do every job. Ofcom’s first report under section 63, published on 22 October 2026, had two tasks: review the incidence and severity of harmful content and advise whether the statutory categories in sections 61 and 62 should change. It recommends adding body-stigma content and depression content to section 62’s “priority content” list. It does not recommend other additions to the existing categories.

That is a meaningful recommendation awaiting the ministerial decision set out in section 219: the Secretary of State can amend the lists by regulations after consulting Ofcom. Ofcom has made its case; ministers hold the switch.

The distinction between “non-designated” and “priority” content is the operational hinge. The Act already places duties on regulated user-to-user and search services in relation to non-designated content, but those duties reach kinds of harm identified in a service’s most recent children’s risk assessment. Ofcom says explicit designation under section 62 would put body-stigma and depression content on the same statutory footing as the kinds already listed there. That changes the default scope of the system: a provider’s assessment no longer supplies the same gate for whether those named kinds enter the relevant protections.

Ofcom defines body-stigma content as material that shames or stigmatises body types or physical features. Depression content includes material that promotes depression, hopelessness or despair, including presenting those states as positive. The regulator’s case is built around accumulation. Repeated exposure can matter even when a single item looks ordinary enough to pass unnoticed. That is an uncomfortable fit for a compliance system designed to count discrete posts, isolated reports and completed reviews.

The exposure figures are not subtle. In March and April 2026, 42% of 11-to-17-year-olds reported seeing body-stigma content in the previous four weeks; 23% reported seeing depression content. Ofcom says reported exposure to each did not change significantly between December 2025 and April 2026. Personalised feeds were the most commonly reported route, followed by comments. These are Ofcom estimates for defined age groups, content categories, services and recall periods.

The wider result is just as clear and more difficult to interpret: Ofcom found no significant change in the overall proportion of children encountering harmful content during the first nine months after the duties began. That is the report’s most politically combustible line. The report does not test individual providers’ compliance or evaluate the Protection of Children Codes, and it does not connect service-level changes to children’s exposure over time. The missing fact that would change the performance judgment is a service-level evaluation linking specific safety changes to exposure outcomes.

If adopted, the categories would determine what providers must build systems around, what risk assessments must name, what regulators can ask about and what an eventual enforcement record can examine. For providers, a change from “identify this risk in your own assessment” to “this category is named in the Act” would narrow the room for treating the issue as optional housekeeping. For children and families, it could change the formal floor beneath protections. For Ofcom, it would make the category explicit while leaving the hard question—what works in each service—where it belongs: in evidence about actual systems and outcomes.

The report has gone to the Secretary of State. If the minister changes the categories, Ofcom says it will update its regulatory documents and guidance. Ofcom also plans a revised Children’s Register by January 2027. Until then, the recommendation is the live decision point. The evidence has arrived; the law is waiting for its next signature.

Sources