"I just think if someone spent a little more time thinking 'I really want to minimize the risk of this material appearing,' I would take a systematic approach," said Clare McGlynn, professor of law at Durham University, to Parliament's Communications and Digital Committee on Tuesday.
Experts confront Google, Microsoft, Meta and ByteDance before Parliament
A panel of online-safety experts assembled before Parliament’s Communications and Digital Committee to criticise major technology companies for doing what the witnesses described as the bare minimum to meet duties under the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA). Witnesses named Google, Microsoft, Meta and ByteDance as platforms that have failed to act consistently or effectively on serious harms, particularly forms of sexual content that intersect with violence against women and girls (VAWG).
Search-engine downranking: inconsistent, piecemeal, and consequential
Clare McGlynn provided direct examples of inconsistent downranking by search engines. She said that searches for "rape porn" are correctly downranked to the point where relevant links appear only around the tenth page of results, while adjacent searches such as "unwilling porn" can return results as early as the third page. McGlynn told the committee that similar terms—"force porn" versus "forced porn"—are treated differently by algorithms, and she urged a systematic approach that would downrank synonymous or related phrases like "unwilling," "unwanted," and "asleep porn."
McGlynn also warned that some porn sites continue to host extreme porn and deliberately make it available to less-regulated territories; with a VPN, she said, harmful material can bypass age-assurance mechanisms and remain reachable despite restrictions on specific territories.
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End the scrambleRefuge's Trusted Flagger data: takedown success rates falling
Janaya Walker, interim director at the End Violence Against Women Coalition, cited data from domestic violence and VAWG charity Refuge showing a sharp decline in the success rate for takedown reports made via Refuge’s Trusted Flagger team. According to those figures, the success rate stood at 53.7 percent before November 2025; over the past 12 months it dropped to 18.2 percent. Refuge’s data further shows that since November 2025, zero percent of reports made to Meta have been successful.
Refuge’s Trusted Flagger team works closely with platforms to report content victims have flagged; the method is intended to accelerate action when reports come from a recognised authority. Witnesses told the committee that platforms initially showed a strong appetite for quick takedowns but that responsiveness has waned.
Ofcom, search engines and publishers: gaps in the chain of publication
Alexandra Whiston-Dew, partner at law firm Miscon de Raya, argued search engines play a central role in regulating the OSA given Ofcom’s limited resources. She warned the committee that some publications openly advertise that they host illegal content and yet "this is going under the radar not only from the search engines but also the other platforms and the businesses in the chain of publication." Whiston-Dew urged both platforms and Ofcom to detect and downrank or block those publishers earlier in the chain.
Witnesses repeatedly pressed the regulator and platforms to coordinate more closely; Whiston-Dew told the committee, "Ofcom needs to really pull all of their resources together and attack that receptacle of illegal content."
Civil redress: British Columbia held up as a model
On the subject of individual remedies, Clare McGlynn pointed to British Columbia’s civil redress system as an example of a jurisdiction that gives victims more immediate legal tools. She told the committee that in British Columbia an individual can make claims and secure "instant orders" to have material taken down and may even obtain compensation for some harms. McGlynn contrasted that with the UK, where she said an individual currently "does not have the right to demand an image be taken down" via a swift civil-route equivalent.
What this means for Google, Microsoft, Meta and ByteDance
- Google and Bing (Microsoft): face scrutiny for inconsistent keyword downranking and for allowing sites that advertise illegal content to remain indexed, a problem witnesses tied to the OSA’s real-world impact.
- Meta: cited by Refuge’s data as having a zero percent success rate for Trusted Flagger reports since November 2025; Meta's own Community Standards Enforcement Report states it removed 27.8 million posts related to adult nudity and sexual activity between April and June 2026, but that report does not separately categorise VAWG-related removals.
- ByteDance (TikTok): named by witnesses as among the platforms that have not sufficiently protected victims, and, like Google and Microsoft, did not respond to requests for comment during the inquiry period described in the hearing.
Neither Google, Microsoft nor TikTok responded to requests for comment, and Meta did not immediately respond to questions about its takedown rate, the panel noted. Dame Rachel de Souza, England's Children's Commissioner, earlier told the same committee in September that the OSA "has made absolutely no difference" to children's access to harmful content online, citing accounts from young people themselves.
The witnesses before Parliament argued that platform-level measures, regulator action and individual legal remedies must work together to meet the OSA's aims. Their examples — inconsistent algorithmic downranking, falling Trusted Flagger success, jurisdictional workarounds using VPNs, and the absence of a swift civil redress route in the UK — leave a clear set of gaps the panel urged policymakers, platforms and Ofcom to close.
