Protecting Women and Girls’ Online - the Final Guidance from Ofcom - Our Response
Today Ofcom have released their finalised guidance, as per the Online Safety Act, towards keeping women and girls’ safe online. The guidance is the conclusion of the years-long campaign we and others undertook to ensure women and girls were considered in legislation for the online environment.
Our Executive Director, tèmítópé lasade-anderson said:
Glitch’s position is still that ‘guidance’ does not go far enough to mitigate the online violence against women and girls (VAWG) that companies host, facilitate and profit from. We would prefer the guidance to be upgraded to at least a statutory code of practice. Nevertheless, we are pleased that Ofcom’s guidance applies a safety-by-design approach, recommending that tech firms subject new services or features to ‘abusability’ testing, and ensuring moderation teams receive specialised training on tech-facilitated gender-based harms. This signals a shift to expecting platforms to embed prevention in the design and build phase, rather than relying on mitigation and remediation attempts solely after abuse occurs.
As a charity working at the intersection of race and gender injustice, there is still a lack of focus overall on the ways that racialisation and gender reshape how Black women and girls experience online abuse. The intersectionality framework in the guidance should be a foundational framing of all online gender-based violence, shaping risk assessment, decision-making, and automated detection. Black women continue to face disproportionate levels of online abuse— including AI-facilitated intimate image abuse. Online gender-based violence is nuanced, multifaceted and contextual, so categorising abuse is always a challenge. Good practice means accurately identifying misogynistic and misogynoiristic content using nuanced, multifaceted and contextual approaches.
Lastly, although a more robust approach to prevention via abusability is recommended by Ofcom, the regulator does not have the power to support individuals with holistic approaches to redress, as Ofcom themselves have noted. In our position paper, Beyond the Content Takedown we outline how the Digital Services Tax could fund a non-criminal, civil redress access scheme, a recommendation supported by the Women and Equalities Committee’s Fourth Report, published in March.
We’ll keep working with Ofcom to ensure tech-facilitated gender-based violence is taken seriously by companies, and achieves the ambition of the Online Safety Act.