R (Meta, X and TikTok) v Ofcom

A Divisional Court (Singh LJ and Collins Rice J) has on 30 October 2026 handed down judgment dismissing challenges brought by Meta, X and TikTok to information requests issued by Ofcom pursuant to its powers under the Online Safety Act 2023. As noted in the Court’s press summary, these were the first judicial review proceedings to test Ofcom’s information powers under the Act.

The proceedings concerned information notices issued by Ofcom to Meta, WhatsApp, X and TikTok pursuant to section 100 of the Online Safety Act, which permits Ofcom to require regulated service-providers to provide Ofcom with “any information that they require for the purpose of exercising, or deciding whether to exercise, any of their online safety functions”. The notices formed part of Ofcom’s implementation of the new regulatory regime brought about by the Act. The information requested was intended to “enable Ofcom to understand the nature and scale of the online safety problem it needed to address, make choices about strategies for responding to it, and understand and adjust the effects of those choices over time” (§25).

The claimants’ challenges were made on the following grounds (“Grounds").

1. First, that the information requests were ultra vires by virtue of circumventing provisions within the Act establishing a regime for the supply to Ofcom and publication of information from certain large, ‘categorised’ service providers (the “Transparency Regime”).

2. Secondly, that the information sought by Ofcom was not “required” within the meaning of section 100(1) of the Act.

3. Thirdly, that Ofcom had unlawfully failed to consider whether to undertake or unlawfully failed to undertake an impact assessment pursuant to its statutory duty under section 7 of the Communications Act 2003.

4. Fourthly, TikTok (alone) alleged that the information request issued to it was vitiated by apparent predetermination on the part of the decision-maker.

5. Fifthly, that the information requests were disproportionate, contrary to the proportionality requirement in section 100(4) of the Act and/or the ECHR.

Hearing the Grounds on a rolled-up basis, the Court dismissed Grounds 1 to 4 as unarguable and refused permission in respect of them. It granted permission for Ground 5, but rejected it.

In respect of Ground 1, the Court found that the Transparency Regime “served a different purpose from the information notices issued by Ofcom”, being about publication of information rather than information sought “for Ofcom’s own purposes” which may well not be capable of lawfully being published (at §43).

The Court accepted in respect of Ground 2 that Ofcom did not need to have “a specific task” in mind when issuing an information request (at §71): the statutory language was “very broad” (§72) and Ofcom had identified statutory purposes for its requests to the extent necessary under the Act.

In relation to section 7 of the Communications Act 2003, the Court explained the circumstances in which Ofcom’s duty to conduct impact assessments arises (at §95) and found that Ofcom had not acted irrationally in not undertaking, or considering whether to undertake, an impact assessment in these cases (§97). The Court also gave obiter guidance as to the proper approach to section 31 of the Senior Courts Act 1981, in circumstances where Ofcom argued, and the Court accepted, that the outcome for the claimants would not have been any different even if an impact assessment had been conducted, due to the extensive engagement which Ofcom had undertaken with the claimants prior to issuing the information requests (at §99).

The Court dismissed TikTok’s predetermination challenge, confirming in that regard the need “to avoid the pitfalls of decontextualization and of undue suspicion” when considering such challenges (at §117).

The judgment is perhaps of most interest for the analysis of proportionality at §§131-162. It was accepted by all parties in light of Shvidler v SSFCDA [2026] AC 607 that proportionality was an issue for the Court to assess on evidence before it, and not merely by considering the evidence that had been before Ofcom when it issued the requests (§§132, 137). The evidence before the Court stated that the information requests imposed an “extraordinary” burden on the claimants (§143), though such evidence had not been before Ofcom. The Court ultimately held that there was a “lack of pertinent substance in the Claimants’ evidence”, which did not “sufficiently get to grips with the demands of a proportionality exercise” (§161). As such, the proportionality challenge was rejected: the evidence adduced by the claimants was not “capable of bringing the overall balance down on the side of the disproportionality of any of the notices” (§161).

Javan Herberg KC, Tristan Jones KC, George Molyneaux, Aislinn Kelly-Lyth and Rowan Stennett acted for Ofcom.

The full judgment can be found here.