On 13 October 2026, the Online Information Advisory Committee published its first report under section 152(5) of the Online Safety Act. The committee advises Ofcom, and it is explicit that the committee, not Ofcom, is responsible for the report's content. Its central message cuts against a common assumption in tech policy debates: that a regulator armed with the right powers could and should remove misinformation as such.
The case for a takedown power
The strongest argument for broader powers is not frivolous. The report quotes the Rycroft Review's conclusion that the UK is "already experiencing 'information warfare'", and the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee's view that foreign information manipulation should be treated as an "existential threat". If hostile states are flooding the information space, a regulator able to order content down looks like a natural response. The 2021 Draft Online Safety Bill pointed that way, pairing the advisory committee with powers over content carrying a risk of significant adverse psychological impact on an adult of ordinary sensibilities.
What Parliament actually decided
Those powers did not survive. The report records that powers to regulate "legal but harmful" content, including disinformation and misinformation short of a criminal offence, were taken out of the Bill in late 2022, while the advisory committee was kept in the 2023 Act. The consequence, in the committee's words, is that Ofcom "does not have any direct powers to require companies to act on misinformation or disinformation" as such, because it is not defined as illegal content or content harmful to children.
What remains is narrow. Ofcom can enforce duties on illegal content, including priority offences such as fraud and foreign interference. It can hold the largest services to their own terms of service once the Category 1 duties take effect, though the Act does not require any service to have a misinformation policy. And it has media literacy duties, which fall on Ofcom rather than on platforms.
Why the restraint is correct
The committee's framing is the most useful part. It says disinformation and misinformation "are features of open societies" that "cannot be eliminated because the measures needed to eliminate them would be the end of an open society." It adds that there are "perhaps even greater threats from overreacting or reacting inappropriately" to them. It also offers a deflating translation: asking what Ofcom is doing about online misinformation is "much the same as asking what Ofcom is doing about people making mistakes on the internet."
The companion note on elections shows why that matters in practice. The committee states that robust political debate "will inevitably involve inaccuracies, exaggerations, simplifications, and honest mistakes of fact", and that "there is not, and cannot be, a general prohibition on falsehood in an open society." A takedown regime would require a state-backed body to adjudicate political truth, which is precisely the role that history suggests governments perform badly and self-interestedly.
The evidence base is thinner than the rhetoric
The literature review behind the elections note finds that for many widely discussed threats "there is little or no high-quality evidence", and for almost none is there robust evidence of effects on voting behaviour. Some figures illustrate the gap between alarm and measurement:
- Ofcom's 2024 General Election tracker found 60% of respondents had encountered election information they thought might be false or misleading in the prior week. Perception of exposure is high.
- One study identified just 16 confirmed viral deepfake cases during the 2024 UK general election, and it is unclear whether deepfakes meaningfully affected results.
- One review puts exposure to falsehoods at around 1-10% of online news and civic content, concentrated among people already disposed to believe them.
The committee draws the policy conclusion plainly: confident public claims about harm "can themselves do damage", by inviting disproportionate responses and by amplifying the narratives that malicious actors want amplified. That is not complacency. The committee also says the real harms to voters and candidates, from voter-suppression content to intimidation, are cause for concern even where aggregate effects are unknown.
Where targeted action does belong
The report's constructive agenda is specific. For elections, it advises Ofcom to ensure services comply with their duties on illegal content, especially priority illegal content. It advises Ofcom to keep to its schedule for the Category 1 Codes of Practice so that platforms are held to the terms of service they voluntarily adopt, and to continue media literacy work. Existing criminal law carries much of the rest: the Representation of the People Act 1983 on false statements about candidates, the National Security Act 2023 on foreign-power interference, and the false communications offence. Those are investigated by police and prosecuted by the CPS, not by a content regulator.
This is the proportionate model: define a harm in law, attach it to an offence with a high threshold, and give platforms duties tied to that offence. It protects the fraud victim and the voter without turning a regulator into an arbiter of acceptable opinion.
The criticisms deserve a hearing
Fact-checkers have worried that the committee has been narrowed. When Ofcom renamed it the Online Information Advisory Committee in April 2025, Full Fact called the new name "bland, vague and disappointing" and noted that the word "misinformation" fell from nine appearances in the terms of reference to one. Ofcom replied that the committee's role is set out in legislation. The committee's own report also concedes that the open data available is "insufficient as a basis for effective policy making." That is a fair demand for transparency from platforms, and it is a better remedy than takedown powers.
Bottom line
Policymakers abroad weighing misinformation takedown laws should read this report. A statutory body, set up specifically to advise on the problem, has concluded that the answer lies in narrow harms, enforceable terms of service, transparency and literacy, with free expression as a constraint rather than an afterthought. Parliament's 2022 decision looks, four years on, like a sound one.