What's the issue?
Under the UK's Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA), Ofcom is required to publish guidance to help Part 3 (regulated user-to-user and search) service providers comply with Part 3 and Part 4 safety duties, focusing on content which disproportionately affects women and girls, including online misogyny, harassment, domestic and intimate image abuse.
What's the development?
On 22 February 2025, Ofcom published: A safer life online for women and girls: practical guidance for tech companies in draft for consultation. The draft guidance identifies nine areas where technology businesses should do more to improve women and girls' online safety by taking responsibility and using a safety-by-design approach to prevent harm and support users. While the draft guidance focuses on harms which disproportionately impact women and girls, Ofcom recognises that many of the outlined steps will be relevant more widely. Its focus though is on those services with the highest reach or highest risk for online gender-based harms.
Nine steps
Ofcom's nine proposed actions are (in summary):
Taking responsibility
- ensure governance and accountability processes address online gender-based harm
- conduct risk assessments focusing on harms to women and girls
- be transparent about women and girls' online safety.
Preventing harm
- conduct abusability evaluations and product testing
- set safer defaults
- reduce the circulation of online gender-based harm.
Supporting women and girls
- give users better control over their experiences
- enable users who experience online gender-based harm to make reports
- take appropriate action when online gender-based harm occurs.
Each action is associated with foundational steps and good practice steps. Ofcom provides a summary document setting out the Guidance at a Glance in table format. Table 1 sets out foundational steps and table 2 sets out good practice steps. Each table sets out the nine actions and each row in the table represents a different step providers can take to meet that action. The foundational steps are those included in the relevant Code measures and risk assessment guidance Ofcom has already set out in final or draft form. To help providers implement the steps, additional columns cover:
- the reference to the part of the draft guidance which details the foundational step
- an explanation of the foundational step
- here the foundational step appears in other Ofcom documents
- who should implement the step
- references to the legal duties in the OSA to which each foundational step applies
- the status of the relevant foundational step – ie whether it is final or in consultation.
Table two covers the specific paragraph in the draft guidance where the relevant good practice step is discussed in more detail as well as a brief description of the step.
Ofcom's approach
Ofcom aims to set a foundation of safety by bringing together relevant Code measures and guidance from across illegal Harms, protection of children and (as applicable to a defined set of providers), transparency.
Ofcom wants this guidance to give service providers a holistic framework for understanding harms to women and girls online and has three main objectives:
- for the guidance to be a resource which summarises the ways different types of content and activity affect women and girls online
- to set out practical and achievable recommendations for improving their safety beyond the measures set out in the Codes and risk assessment guidance
- to demonstrate to industry the pressing need to improve women and girls' online safety and provide them with the support and encouragement they need to enable them to take action.
Next steps
Stakeholders are invited to respond to the consultation by 5pm on 23 May 2025. Once Ofcom has considered responses, it will publish a statement outlining its final decisions alongside the final version of the guidance. This is expected by the end of 2025.
