Ofcom’s Register of Categorised Services — the official list of which online platforms carry the heaviest duties under the UK’s Online Safety Act — now names ten “Category 1” services: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and YouTube. The register was last updated on 28 September 2026, and a batch of public consultations on what those platforms must actually do closed on 2 October. The first hard deadline lands this month: Category 1 and 2A services must hand Ofcom copies of their illegal-content and children’s risk assessments, with public summaries due in their terms of service by November.
Why it matters to creators
Every platform you rely on to find fans and drive traffic to OnlyFans, Fansly or Fanvue is now formally on Ofcom’s radar as a top-tier risk service. That matters because Category 1 status brings specific new duties — including options for users to verify their identity and filter out non-verified accounts, and protections for how platforms treat “journalistic” and “democratically important” content. Those are exactly the mechanisms that shape whether your marketing account gets seen, filtered or quietly throttled. At the same time, Ofcom’s own officials told Parliament they’re “underwhelmed” by progress so far — so don’t expect these duties to fix shadowbans or wrongful bans overnight.
What “Category 1” actually means
Under the Online Safety Act, a platform becomes Category 1 if it has a content recommender system and either more than 34 million UK monthly users, or more than 7 million users plus the ability to reshare content. Ofcom’s published register currently lists ten services at that tier, four “emerging” Category 1 services tracked but not yet subject to the extra duties (iMessage, Messenger, Threads and Wikipedia), four Category 2A search services (Google Search, Bing, ChatGPT Search and Facebook’s Feed Deep Dive), and 25 Category 2B messaging services including Discord, Etsy and Airbnb. The list isn’t static — Quora was moved out of Category 1 and into 2B in the same 28 September update, a reminder that where a platform sits can change as its user numbers do.
The consultations that closed on 2 October covered the detail of what Category 1 duties look like in practice: guidance on “giving users more choice, control and trust,” on protecting content of democratic importance and journalistic content, and on record-keeping and review. None of this is finalised yet — Ofcom still has to publish final codes.
Ofcom admits it’s “underwhelmed”
Giving evidence to the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee on 15 September, Ofcom’s group director for online safety, Oliver Griffiths, was unusually blunt about the pace of change: “when you look at our tracking of the stats on this, the overall effect, we’re underwhelmed… so far.” Full Category 1 codes of practice aren’t expected to be in force until roughly the middle of 2027 — more than three years after the Act became law. Ofcom has opened 40 formal investigations and imposed around £7 million in penalties to date, but told the committee that sum remains “largely unpaid.”
It isn’t all stalled. The same evidence session pointed to real movement on age checks specifically: all ten of the largest pornography services now have age gates in place, and sampled data across 32 companies showed a 23-fold increase in age verification checks since mid-2025 — the trend this site covered when Ofcom’s age-verification rules first landed for OnlyFans creators and again when it fined two porn sites over £1.3 million for getting it wrong. Progress on the platforms you actually use to build an audience is the slower, newer part of the story.
What this means for your traffic and your appeals
If you’ve been caught in a ban sweep like the one that hit Instagram, X and Reddit accounts within the same fortnight, Category 1 status is the regulatory lever that’s supposed to force more transparent moderation and better complaints handling on exactly those platforms. User-empowerment duties should eventually mean clearer tools to understand why content or accounts were actioned, plus identity-verification options that could, over time, make it easier for genuine creator accounts to be distinguished from bot and scam accounts pretending to be you. None of that is live yet. The practical reality for the next several months is that Ofcom is still consulting, drafting and negotiating funding with government — Griffiths told the committee that without “extra staff and extra funding, then something will have to give” once the under-16 social media duties are added to the workload.
This is UK regulation, but it bites on global platforms creators everywhere use for discovery — a US-based creator posting to Instagram or Reddit to drive traffic to a UK-hosted audience is still affected by how those platforms respond to Ofcom. Watch whether Meta, Reddit and the others start rolling out identity-verification or content-filtering options globally rather than UK-only, since that’s the cheaper engineering choice for them.
What to do now
- Don’t wait on regulation to fix a ban or shadowban — keep your traffic sources diversified across at least two or three Category 1 platforms rather than depending on one.
- From November, check whether the platform you rely on most has published its risk-assessment summary in its terms of service, and read what it actually commits to on account moderation.
- If you’re building a following via Reddit or X specifically, note both are now formally Category 1 — keep screenshots and records of any account action so you have a paper trail if a formal complaints mechanism becomes available.
- Keep an eye on “identity verification” features as they roll out; opting in early could help separate your real account from impersonators, a problem creators building serious income from these platforms increasingly have to manage themselves.
This is general information, not legal advice — speak to a qualified professional about how platform regulation affects your specific business.
