Illegal harms further consultation: Torture and animal cruelty

Ofcom is consulting on strengthening our draft illegal harms codes of practice and guidance under the Online Safety Act by specifying animal cruelty and human torture as types of content that platforms must tackle.  

In our November 2023 Illegal Harms Consultation, we consulted on a number of regulatory documents which will form the first key steps in our role as online safety regulator.

In that consultation, we noted that the animal cruelty offence was added at a fairly late stage to the Online Safety Bill, which meant that we were unable to address this offence in November.

Animal cruelty content can pose a significant risk to users of online services. Therefore, we are consulting on regulatory documents, that will help to capture the harm this content causes, with the aim of publishing them alongside our Illegal Harms Statement in December 2024. 

We also note that a lot of animal cruelty online content may also fall outside of this offence under the Act and that the other priority offences in the Act do not fully capture obscene content depicting human torture.

To address this, we are proposing to add illegal animal cruelty and human torture content to our codes and guidance. If our proposals, in this and our November 2023 Illegal Harms Consultation, were to be adopted, the relevant guidance and proposed measures would apply to tackling animal cruelty and human torture content online. We think this is an important first step in better protecting users from this content.

Responding to this consultation

Please submit further consultation responses using the response form.