Meta, TikTok and X are fighting Ofcom, Britain's communications regulator, over demands for detailed data on how they police their own platforms. The dispute concerns information notices Ofcom issued in February under the Online Safety Act, and the three companies took their objections to court this week. The hearing concludes on Wednesday, with a separate Meta challenge listed for the following week.
What the regulator asked for is specific. It wants to know how many posts each platform removed or made less visible, and how many users were exposed to harmful content. The notice covers seven separate Meta services.
Each company objects on different grounds. X described the demand as the most burdensome information request it has received from any regulator in any jurisdiction. Meta argued that Ofcom sought wide-ranging and granular material without a clearly defined regulatory purpose, while TikTok said the regulator went around an existing monitoring arrangement that carried its own safeguards.
Ofcom's answer went to its mandate rather than to the detail. "Parliament has charged us with the job of regulating an industry that has been unregulated and unaccountable for more than 20 years," a spokesperson said. The regulator added that it needs the information to judge whether the new regime is working, and that it had already narrowed the scope before issuing the notices.
The Power To Ask Is In Dispute
An information notice is the most basic instrument the Act gives Ofcom, and that is what makes this case larger than its subject matter. The Online Safety Act passed in 2023 and its duties came into force in stages, with obligations on illegal content enforceable from March 2025 and child safety duties following later that year. Serious breaches carry fines of up to 10% of a company's global turnover.
Underneath that sits a separate and smaller power. Ofcom can demand information, and failing to answer is its own offence with its own penalty. The regulator pursues that before it reaches any question about whether a platform's safety measures are adequate.
So this hearing is not about whether Meta, TikTok or X are meeting their duties. It is about whether the regulator can compel the data it would use to find out.
The Formal Regime Is Not Running Yet
There is a second route to this information, and it has not opened. The Act creates a category of the largest services, and those placed in it carry a duty to publish transparency reports to a format Ofcom sets.
That machinery has slipped, and the register naming which services fall into the top category moved to July 2026 after a legal challenge by the Wikimedia Foundation led Ofcom to reconsider how categorisation should apply. The first transparency reports are now due in summer 2027.
The gap explains a good deal of the argument, because Ofcom is using a general power to ask for data now, roughly 18 months before the purpose-built regime would deliver it. TikTok's complaint that the regulator bypassed an existing arrangement points directly at that. Whether the general power can stand in for the specific one is the question underneath the dispute, and the part with consequences for every service the Act touches.
Every Fine Has Hit A Small Operator
The enforcement record to date gives the dispute its context, and the pattern in it is striking. In its first twelve months of enforcement Ofcom opened investigations into 30 companies covering 96 sites and apps, and issued 16 fines against six providers totalling roughly £4M.
The names on those penalties are not the ones in court. The largest went to 8579 LLC at £1.4M in February, AVS Group at £1.05M last December, Kick.com at £830,000 and the imageboard 4chan at £520,000, with daily penalties of between £100 and £500 accruing on top.
Collection has been another matter. Of around £3M imposed by March this year, approximately £55,000 had actually been paid. That says something about enforcing penalties against operators outside the United Kingdom with few assets inside it.
The contrast is the point. The regulator has fined small sites that ignored it, and is now in court with the large platforms over whether it can require them to produce numbers.
Comparable Numbers Are The Prize
The data in question is not information the platforms lack. It is information they have generally published on their own terms. Every major platform releases transparency figures, in its own format, using its own definitions of what counts as harmful, over periods it chooses. Those reports are genuinely informative and almost impossible to compare with one another.
A regulator asking the same questions of seven services in one shape is asking for something different. Comparability exposes which platform removes more, which leaves more visible, and how many people saw the material before anything happened. That is the evidence any later enforcement decision would rest on.
That explains both the regulator's insistence and the companies' resistance, without either side needing to be acting in bad faith. Europe went the same way for connected products, writing obligations into law rather than guidance and accepting the compliance cost that follows.
What The Ruling Settles
The outcome shapes the regime rather than any individual company's safety record. A ruling for the platforms would force Ofcom to narrow what it asks for, which in practice means a smaller evidence base for every judgement it makes afterwards. A ruling for the regulator leaves the notices standing and the data flowing, and establishes early that the information power works as written.
Neither answers the question the Act exists to address, since nothing decided this week establishes whether these platforms are meeting their duties on illegal content or child safety. It establishes only whether the regulator can gather the material to assess them. The hearing ends on Wednesday and Meta's separate case follows next week, which puts a first reading of how far Britain's online safety powers reach within a fortnight.
