Since we opened our investigation into 4chan Community Support LLC ('4chan') and its compliance with its duties to protect users from illegal content, new duties to protect children under the Online Safety
Act 2023 ('the Act') 203 the Protection of Children duties - have come into effect.
Such duties require providers of regulated user-to-user services, which are likely to accessed by children, to use proportionate systems and
processes which are designed to effectively reduce the risk of harm to children from content available on their site and to prevent children from encountering certain types of harmful content 203 known as Primary Priority Content - altogether. In
particular, section 12 of the Act requires providers of services that fall under Part 3 of the Act, and allow one or more kinds of Primary Priority Content (including pornographic content), to use highly effective age verification or age estimation (or
both) to prevent children from encountering that kind of content where identified on the service.
Ofcom is therefore expanding this investigation to include consideration of whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that
4chan has failed, or is failing, to comply with its duties under section 12 of the Act.
