Terms and conditions and content controls
Ofcom has commissioned a survey with 2,149 UK social media and video-sharing platform users aged 16+ to understand their experiences of using terms and conditions and content controls. We carried out this quantitative research in October 2023 in collaboration with YouGov.
Previous Ofcom research found that many users of online platforms do not engage with terms and conditions (PDF, 7.2 MB), so we wanted to better understand the reasons behind this lack of engagement. We explored users' awareness of terms and conditions, the attitudes towards using it to comply with platform rules, as well as the drivers and barriers in reading terms and conditions.
In this research, we considered content controls to be personalised settings provided by social media and video-sharing platforms that enable users to manage the content they see online and avoid encountering harmful or upsetting content. We tested users' awareness of content controls, their experience in using it, and the reasons for not using it.