Action to make social media safe is taking much too long

In an era of misinformation and damaging content, cleaning up the internet must be a priority for the government, says Chris Blackhurst. So why is the regulator dragging its feet?

- Chris Blackhurst

When the last government tasked the communications watchdog Ofcom with cleaning up social media, it seemed an odd choice. Was the slow and cumbersome regulator of telecoms and broadcast, which at times appeared to struggle to adapt to the pace of change in those sectors, really going to be able to cope? If GB News could run rings around it, how on earth would it handle the likes of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk?

The counterargument was that handing the responsibility to an existing authority would speed things up. Building a new, dedicated regulator from scratch would take time, which would mean UK social media users having to wait longer to see any improvement. Ofcom would be able to hit the ground running.

Yet, despite the regulator having been given its new responsibilities because of a need for speed, progress has been pedestrian. Ofcom has settled into a familiar rhythm of year-long consultation processes, meaning a law that passed in 2023 will only begin to come into force in spring 2025.

Much of it will take even longer. Extra rules for the largest (“category one”) social media platforms (X/Twitter, Facebook, TikTok) have been delayed, with a consultation on those rules now promised by “early 2026” – meaning that, on current form, those rules won’t kick in until 2027.

This procedural time lag has real-world impacts. Last summer, as inflammatory falsehoods on social media fuelled far-right riots around the UK, Ofcom was reduced to the limp gesture of writing an “open letter” to social media platforms, pleading with them that although the Online Safety Act still wasn’t in force (because it was gummed up in Ofcom consultations), “there is no need to wait to make your sites and apps safer”.