Ofcom Chief Executive Melanie Dawes has inflamed the rhetorical (and legal) war against social media firms. Asked on the Today programme about ongoing legal action from US platform 4Chan – the first firm fined by Ofcom under the OSA – Dawes said legal action against the regulator is a good thing:
“We’ve seen quite a lot of pushback, but we expected that and we will use all the tools at our disposal to keep forcing through that change. I mean, it’s very difficult for me to talk about individual investigations. That one remains live… we’ve got significant legal pushback in the US, but I see that as a sign that we’re having the impact we want.”
In November Ofcom declared ‘sovereign immunity‘ in proceedings from 4Chan and has moved to dismiss the case. Dawes is clearly gearing up for legal clashes with more firms…
Ofcom wrote a threatening letter overnight to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Roblox, and X, telling them that they aren’t doing enough to protect children online with checks. Dawes boasted about that too:
“I think they’re quite uncomfortable about this. We’ve given them a deadline of the end of April to come back to us. We’re strongly encouraging them to publish those letters when they come back to us. And whether they do or not, we will publish the responses in May. It’ll be a report card on the industry, on those six companies, and we will then follow up with enforcement action where we need to.”
The platforms themselves are bemused that Ofcom is going after them instead of so-called ‘higher risk’ platforms which veer much closer to illegal activity in the corners of the internet. Dawes is ploughing ahead anyway – it’s all-out war…
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