Ofcom targets suicide forum under Online Safety Act

Ofcom has provisionally found that a suicide forum linked to multiple deaths in Britain is in breach of the UK’s Online Safety Act after failing to effectively block access for UK users, the Guardian reports. The regulator said it could ask courts to order internet service providers to block the site, and it is also considering fines, depending on the forum’s response within 10 working days.

The forum had implemented a geoblock, but Ofcom concluded it was not consistently maintained. The Guardian reports that the site initially posted guidance on how to circumvent the block, later removed, and that Samaritans found UK users could still reach the service via a “mirror site” using a different domain name. Encouraging or assisting suicide is a criminal offence in the UK, and Ofcom began investigating the forum in April last year.

The case shows how the Online Safety Act pushes enforcement away from individual criminal liability and toward infrastructure controls. A forum can be pursued not just for what it hosts, but for whether its risk assessments exist, whether its takedown processes are “swift” enough, and whether its technical barriers meet a regulator’s standard. When those measures fail, the next step is not necessarily arrests; it is network-level blocking through ISPs.

That is a different kind of power. ISP blocking turns a legal dispute into a routing decision, and it creates a template that can be reused for other categories once the mechanism is normalised. The same compliance logic—risk assessments, monitoring, identity checks, geofencing—also tends to reward large platforms that can staff policy teams and build audit trails, while smaller operators face a binary choice: invest in paperwork and tooling, or disappear from the market.

Campaign groups argue the regulator has moved too slowly. The Molly Rose Foundation, set up after the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, said it had identified at least 135 UK deaths linked to the forum and called for decisive action. The group’s analysis, cited by the Guardian, found coroners had raised concerns about various substance or suicide forums with government departments at least 65 times since 2019.

Ofcom’s provisional ruling now turns on a practical question: whether the forum can be forced into compliance, or whether the UK will test how quickly it can make access to a website vanish at the ISP layer.

The regulator is not naming the forum. It is, however, describing the playbook for removing it from the UK internet.