Online suicide forum fined £950,000 under new law

Provider of forum said to be linked to more than 130 deaths in the UK found in breach of duties under Online Safety Act. 

Communications regulator Ofcom has today fined the provider of an online suicide forum £950,000, for failing to comply with its legal obligations to protect people in the UK from illegal content. 

Photo by Ryan Snaadt / Unsplash

Given the nature of the forum, Ofcom will not name it or the provider – and we won’t, either. The forum is said to have been linked to more than 130 deaths in the UK. It was the first online service to investigated by the regulator under the provisions of the Online Safety Act 

The Act, which came into law in October 2023, sets duties on all providers of so-called ‘user-to-user’ online services. In Section 10(2), that includes a duty to take proportionate measures to prevent users from encountering illegal content by means of the service, to mitigate the risks of the service being uses to facilitate such material, and to manage the risks of harm to users.  

Under Section 10(3), there is a duty to minimise the length of time for which any priority illegal content is present on the service once the provider is aware of it. 

Ofcom says it ‘assessed extensive evidence and considered representations by the forum’s provider, as well as assessing the impact of multiple changes they have made to the service in response to our investigation.’ These changes have, says the forum provider, restricted access to people in the UK. 

Yet Ofcom concluded that the forum’s provided had failed, and continued to fail, to comply with its statutory duties to assess and mitigate the risk of people in the UK encountering illegal content on its service. 

Given the seriousness of the failure, what Ofcom calls the ‘deliberate nature of the contraventions’ and the serious risk of harm, the regulator has imposed a fine of £950,000. The forum’s provide has 10 working days to take specific steps to come into compliance with the law. Ofcom is already preparing an application for a court order to require internet service providers to block UK access to the site, should there continue to be an ongoing breach of the law. 

Further updates and a full version of the judgment will be published in due course on the Ofcom website.