SUMMARY
- Britain’s High Court upheld Ofcom’s demands for three years of moderation data from Meta, WhatsApp, TikTok, and X.
- Ofcom can cite broad purposes such as online safety research or keeping its codes under review without having a specific project, rule change, or investigation in mind.
- The companies asked the court to require Ofcom to show what it needed each piece of data for. The judges rejected that argument and upheld the notices.
Britain’s online censorship regulator can order platforms to hand over years of internal data without giving a specific reason for demanding it. In an October 30 ruling against Meta, WhatsApp, TikTok, and X, the High Court said Ofcom can invoke a broad purpose such as researching online safety without having a particular research project in mind. It can demand information for a possible revision of its rulebook before it has decided to revise anything. It was the first judicial review to test Ofcom’s information powers under the Act.
The notices show what that means in practice. On February 10, Ofcom ordered the companies to supply data stretching back to January 2024, before key duties under the Online Safety Act took effect. It wanted to know how much content the platforms acted on, how fast they acted, and how many British users, including children, had seen that content. It asked for figures on accounts subjected to moderation, the outcomes of reports filed by British users, and what happened when users appealed.
What Ofcom Has to Explain
The Act requires Ofcom to explain why it wants the information. Under Section 102(3)(b), the notice itself must give that explanation. The February notices were precise about what the companies had to produce. Their stated purposes were much broader. Ofcom cited reviewing its codes of practice, conducting research and preparing reports, assessing compliance, and protecting the public from harm.
Ofcom said it wanted to track changes in moderation, using the period before the rules took effect as a baseline. It told recipients to expect repeat demands and asked them to factor that into their data retention policies. Meta and WhatsApp argued that Ofcom should have to show which pieces of information it needed for which regulatory functions. They pointed out that some of the data predated the duties Ofcom said it wanted to assess compliance with. Ofcom had also dropped one of its stated justifications by the time it defended the notices in court.
The judges approached the case through Section 100, which lets Ofcom require information both to exercise its powers and to decide whether to use them. The court accepted that the information must be necessary for a lawful purpose, but treated that assessment as Ofcom’s to make in the first instance, subject to review. The judges expressly rejected the idea that “there has to be a specific task that OFCOM has in mind.” Research and work on codes of practice were sufficient lawful purposes for these notices.
The court distinguished the power to send the notices from the separate duty to give reasons in them. Even if Ofcom had breached that duty, the judges said, reissuing the notices with the defective or unnecessary purposes removed would make no substantial difference. They pointed to a witness statement that Ofcom filed in the litigation, which explained in detail why it wanted each answer and what function it served. The notices stood.
The companies also argued that the notices bypassed the Act’s annual transparency reporting system. The court said that system was designed to make information public. Ofcom sought the February data primarily for its own use, and the judges said some of it might be information the regulator could not lawfully publish.
UK Forces X to Work With ‘Anti-Hate’ Nonprofit That Vowed to ‘Kill’ It
Ofcom already scrutinizes how quickly platforms act on speech. In a separate enforcement case covered by the Foundation for Freedom Online, X committed to reviewing UK reports of suspected illegal hate and terrorist content within an average of 24 hours and to consulting outside organizations about its reporting systems. In October, Ofcom confirmed it had received X’s first quarterly report on how it handled those complaints.
The Cost of Answering
X told the court that responding could cost millions of pounds and take specialist staff three or four months. It said the first stage had already consumed hundreds of hours across ten people. Meta said up to 20 teams had worked on its partial response. TikTok described the notice as one of the largest regulatory information requests it had faced in Britain or the European Union.
The judges assessed proportionality themselves. They found that the companies had given too little evidence separating the cost of complying with each notice from work they already had to do under the Act.
The companies can face penalties for failing to comply with a valid notice. Section 109 makes failure to comply a criminal offense, subject to statutory defenses. Ofcom has already used its civil enforcement powers against the American message board 4chan, imposing a £20,000 penalty in October 2025 after the site failed to answer two notices seeking its illegal content risk assessment and information about its worldwide revenue.
As the Foundation for Freedom Online has reported, Ofcom later widened its 4chan investigation to cover the site’s duties to protect children. In October, Ofcom chief executive Melanie Dawes acknowledged to Parliament that foreign court rulings could leave the regulator unable to collect some fines.
