Britain’s High Court has rejected legal challenges by Meta, TikTok and X seeking to block detailed information requests from the country’s online safety regulator, a ruling that reinforces Ofcom’s ability to demand data about platforms’ content-moderation practices, Courthouse News reported from Manchester.
The judgment, handed down in London, dismissed the tech companies’ arguments that the notices — issued by Ofcom on Feb. 10 — imposed disproportionate burdens and exceeded the regulator’s statutory powers under the Online Safety Act 2023. The court said the companies had not provided the detailed evidence needed to show how much extra work complying would require beyond ordinary costs of obeying the law.
Ofcom asked the platforms to produce six categories of information, including how much content and how many accounts were subject to moderation, how quickly platforms acted, how many British users saw material later moderated and the number and outcomes of user reports and appeals. The requests cover data dating back to Jan. 1, 2024, enabling the regulator to compare platform activity before and after the law’s main duties took effect, Courthouse News said.
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The regulator told the court the information would help it judge whether harmful content was becoming less common and whether interventions were working. Ofcom welcomed the High Court’s decision, saying, “Gathering information from companies is fundamental to our ability to do our job.”
The companies said compliance would be expensive and time-consuming. X told the court that fulfilling the requests would cost millions of pounds and require three to four months of specialist work and that it had already spent hundreds of staff hours on early stages of the process. But the judges said such generalized complaints lacked the specific figures needed to persuade the court to override Ofcom’s demands. The ruling also noted that Ofcom consulted the platforms while drafting the notices and made changes intended to reduce the burden, including extending X’s deadline.
Transatlantic dispute over free speech
The court battle comes amid heightened tensions between London and Washington over how far governments should regulate online speech. U.S. officials and leaders of U.S.-based platforms have criticized Britain’s Online Safety Act and the European Union’s Digital Services Act as posing risks to freedom of expression and imposing heavy demands on technology firms.
President Donald Trump raised concerns about the British law during a meeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer on July 28, 2025; Starmer responded that the legislation aims to protect children from harmful material rather than to curtail lawful expression. Elon Musk, owner of X, has been an outspoken critic: shortly after the law took effect in July 2025, he wrote on his platform, “Its purpose is suppression of the people.” X also warned that the legislation risked “seriously infringing on the public’s right to free expression,” Courthouse News reported.
Britain’s government and Ofcom have repeatedly rejected claims that the law is intended to censor lawful speech. Ofcom has said platforms are not required to restrict legal content for adult users and that companies must consider freedom of expression alongside safety obligations imposed by the law.
Meta said it was “disappointed with the court’s decision, but we and others across industry pursued this challenge because information-gathering of this scale goes beyond what is necessary or proportionate.” TikTok said it was considering the judgment, and X did not immediately respond to the ruling, according to the report.
The High Court’s decision does not resolve other outstanding legal challenges brought by Meta, including a separate dispute over how Ofcom calculates regulatory fees and potential penalties and a contest over whether WhatsApp is correctly categorized under the regime.
Courthouse News reporter James Francis Whitehead is based in England.
