On 30 October 2026, London's High Court rejected a challenge by Meta, TikTok and X to the information notices Ofcom issued in February 2026 under the Online Safety Act 2023. According to The420.in's report of the ruling, the court found the companies had not shown why the notices were 'unreasonably onerous'. The notices ask for counts of posts removed or restricted, and for data on how many users encounter harmful content.
The strongest case for Ofcom
Ofcom's argument is simple and, taken on its own terms, persuasive. The Act asks it to judge whether platforms' safety systems work. Without platform-held numbers, the regulator would be assessing those systems from the outside. Ofcom told Reuters, as reported on 5 October, that it needs the information to evaluate whether the regime is working. It also said it narrowed the scope of the requests before implementation. A regulator that cannot measure outcomes can only police paperwork, and that serves neither users nor companies.
The power is also statutory, not improvised. Section 100 of the Online Safety Act 2023 lets Ofcom require information it needs to exercise, or decide whether to exercise, its online safety functions. That includes obtaining or generating information. Parliament chose to give Ofcom a broad power.
What the platforms argued
The companies did not argue that Ofcom may never ask for data. Their arguments were about scale and process:
- X's witness statement called the request 'the most burdensome information request X has received from any regulator in any jurisdiction', according to Reuters via The Star.
- Meta said Ofcom wanted 'wide-ranging and granular information' about seven services 'for no clearly defined regulatory purpose'.
- TikTok argued Ofcom was circumventing an alternative monitoring regime that carries specific safeguards.
According to The420.in, X said collecting the data could cost millions of pounds. The court did not accept that general claims about the scale of the work were enough to invalidate the notices. That detail matters more than the headline outcome. The ruling is a finding that these companies did not prove their case on this record. It is not a finding that no volume of data demand could ever be disproportionate.
Why the limit still matters
The Act itself builds in a constraint. Section 100 says the power must be exercised in a way that is proportionate to the use to which the information will be put. Ofcom's own Online Safety Information Powers Guidance, published on 15 December 2025, sets out how it intends to use these powers. That limit is the only thing between a legitimate transparency regime and open-ended compliance demands.
This matters for innovation as well as for the largest firms. Meta, TikTok and X can fund legal teams and data engineering to answer a granular notice. A smaller platform, a new entrant or a non-profit forum cannot. If the template set by the largest firms' notices becomes the baseline expectation, compliance costs will work as a moat for incumbents. The same logic applies to speech. Counts of removed or restricted posts are useful for accountability, but a regime that rewards low removal numbers or high removal numbers will push platforms to optimise for the metric. The result could be either over-removal of lawful speech or under-enforcement dressed up as good statistics.
What a proportionate regime would look like
There is no reason to oppose measurement. There is good reason to ask for measurement that is useful and cheap to produce. Four design principles follow:
- Publish the purpose. Each notice should state what regulatory question the data answers, which is the gap Meta alleged in court.
- Standardise definitions. A shared definition of 'removed', 'restricted' and 'exposed' lets Ofcom compare platforms and spares each company from building bespoke pipelines.
- Scale to size and risk. Notices to the largest services should not set the template for small ones.
- Publish the results. Public aggregate data lets researchers, journalists and civil society test claims about platform harm, instead of relying on a regulator's private reading.
The penalties give the stakes. Reuters notes fines of up to 10% of global turnover for the most serious breaches. When the sanction is that large, the regulator's evidence base needs to be sound, and the process of gathering it needs to be disciplined.
What remains open
This judgment does not end the friction. According to The420.in, Meta is pursuing a separate case on how Ofcom calculates fees and potential penalties, and is also challenging how WhatsApp is categorised under the framework. Meta said it was disappointed with the judgment, TikTok said it was considering the decision, and X did not immediately comment. Whether any of them appeals is unknown.
Ofcom has won the principle that it may demand extensive moderation data. The more consequential question is what it does next. If it uses the data to publish clear, comparable findings and to calibrate its enforcement, the ruling will look like a sensible step toward evidence-based regulation. If it uses the data to build a growing set of bespoke demands, the next court challenge will be better evidenced than this one.