The Online Safety Act (“the Act”) makes online businesses legally responsible for keeping UK users safe online, even if their business is based outside of the UK.
Ofcom is the UK’s independent regulator responsible for implementing the Act and provides guidance for the online dating industry to:
- find out how the rules apply to online dating services,
- understand the risks online dating could present to users, and
- know what dating services need to do to comply.
How the Online Safety Act applies
The Online Safety Act applies to certain types of online services, including those where users can interact with each other, or create, share and upload content. You can use our tool to find out if the rules apply to your service.
This includes services that:
- have links to the UK, and
- are a ‘user-to-user’ service – an internet service that enables users to generate, share or upload content (such as messages, images, videos, comments, audio) on the service that may be encountered by other users of the service. This includes services that enable user interactions.
On online dating and social discovery services, user-to-user interaction can take a variety of forms. People often share content by creating a personal profile and sharing images, videos and messages with other users on the platform. Users may be connected with strangers through matchmaking systems, and can communicate via direct messages, comments, or voice and video messages.
The Online Safety Act introduces legal duties for providers of services in-scope of the Act to assess the risk of harm from:
- illegal content, and
- certain kinds of content harmful to children.
The online safety risks in dating and social discovery
Online dating and social discovery services allows people to connect with other users, build relationships, and express themselves. However, the features that make these platforms social and interactive can also be misused, creating risks of fraud, intimate image abuse, harassment and grooming.
Ofcom’s research indicates that online dating platforms are more likely to have an increased risk of harm related to:
- Fraud: Romance fraudsters can use the guise of genuine relationships to manipulate victims for financial gain, and they might do this through creating fake personas on dating sites. Ofcom’s online scams and fraud research found that 29% of adult internet users have experienced romance or dating scams, and 6% of users encountered fraud on a dating website or app.
- Intimate image abuse and sextortion: There is evidence to suggest that dating services may be used to perpetrate intimate image abuse offences, particularly in relation to sextortion. A survey by Thorn of young people who had been targets of threats to expose sexual images found that in 11% of cases the perpetrators first interacted with the victims and survivors through an online dating service.
- Harassment and stalking: Research shows that dating services may be used by offenders to harass or stalk victims. A common example of harassment on dating platforms is continuously contacting victims against their will, creating fake profiles to continue contact after being blocked, and monitoring victim’s online activity.
There is extensive evidence of the risks of harm on online dating platforms, as set out in our Registers of Risks for illegal content. Providers need to assess the risk of 17 kinds of illegal content in their illegal content risk assessment.
Actions you should take
It is your responsibility to comply with the law, but Ofcom has produced guidance and resources to help you. You can read these documents in full, or start with our guide for services which will help you:
- check if the Online Safety Act applies to you
- carry out your illegal content risk assessment and put in place protections under the safety and related duties
- complete your children’s access assessment and, if applicable, carry out your children’s risk assessment and put in place protections under the children’s safety and related duties, and
- comply with the record-keeping and review duties for the activities above.
Illegal content measures
There are basic measures that all in-scope services should implement to protect users from illegal content. These include:
- easy-to-find, understandable terms and conditions
- a complaints tool that allows users to report illegal or harmful material when they see it, backed up by a process to deal with those complaints, and
- the ability to review content and take it down quickly if they have reason to believe it is illegal.
Services can use our illegal content tool which provides recommended safety measures to address risks based on your answers to the questions in the tool.
Age assurance measures
Dating and social discovery services that permit the sharing of pornographic content (including user-generated pornographic content) are required to implement highly effective age assurance to stop under 18s from encountering it. This applies both to public spaces such as user profiles, and private interactions, such as direct messages.
It is for services to determine which age assurance method(s) to use, provided the process as a whole is highly effective.
Services should use our protection of children tool to understand whether they are required to implement highly effective age assurance, and read our Quick Guide for implementing highly effective age assurance for more detail on the age assurance processes.
Protections for women and girls
There is clear evidence that women and girls experience unique and serious harms online, including on dating platforms. Our guidance sets out nine practical actions that dating platforms can implement to tackle gender-based harms such as misogynistic abuse, coercive control, stalking, and intimate image abuse.
These actions include:
- setting safer default settings
- reducing the circulation of content depicting, promoting or encouraging online gender-based harms
- improving user reporting e.g. through a trusted flagger programme and off service -incident reporting processes.
Other resources
Our research on romance fraud explores how serious games can empower people to recognise and resist romance scam attempts through repeated feedback and experiential learning.
Collaborators
Ofcom works closely with industry representatives to raise awareness of how to comply with the Online Safety Act. Online Dating and Discovery Association (ODDA) and Global Dating Insights (GDI) are part of our network of intermediaries for the dating and social discovery sector.
