In early 2014 a drinking game spread through social media faster than anyone could take it down, with young men filming themselves downing dangerous quantities of alcohol and nominating friends to go further. Several died. I was asked on air what responsibility social media websites have towards their users, and whether they should be regulated. The interview is below.
What the law says now
In 2014 the answer was that platforms had no legal duty to their users beyond their own terms of service, and that removing a viral challenge was a matter of goodwill. That is no longer so. The Online Safety Act 2023 lists, as “priority content that is harmful to children”, content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for a challenge or stunt highly likely to result in serious injury to the person who does it or to someone else (section 62(8)). A service likely to be accessed by children must assess the risk of that content, use proportionate systems to prevent children encountering it, and act on reports of it, with Ofcom’s children’s safety codes setting out what is expected and fines of up to 10 per cent of worldwide turnover for failure. The duties are owed to Ofcom, not to the individual user, so a family that loses a son to a challenge still has no direct claim against the platform under the Act, but the platform that did nothing now answers to a regulator with real powers. Where a challenge involves encouraging self-harm, the Act also created a criminal offence of doing so. Who should carry the responsibility for children’s safety online, and whether this settlement has got it right, is a question I return to in Who is responsible for protecting children’s safety online?.
First published 9 September 2014. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.