Online Safety
Our viewing habits are changing and with this where and when our children watch TV. Ensuring children are protected from harmful content is as important outside the home as it is within the home.
Drawing on our expertise as the UK’s statutory film and video regulator, we operate a number of best-practice initiatives to support online safety and help protect children from harm.
Age ratings on streaming services
The BBFC has worked with streaming services since 2008, on a voluntary, best-practice basis, to help ensure their content is age-rated in line with our Classification Guidelines. Our age ratings and content advice are well established in the online space and valued by users, appearing on dozens of streaming services including Netflix, Prime Video and Apple TV+. These partnerships support our core mission to help families choose content well wherever they watch it. We are actively developing new services – including our groundbreaking work with AI – to make it easier and more cost-effective for streaming services to adopt trusted BBFC age ratings on their UK platforms.
Mobile content
Since 2013, the BBFC has worked with the UK’s major mobile network operators (EE, O2, Three and Vodafone) to help them protect children from unsuitable content, including pornography, discriminatory material, and content promoting self-harm or suicide. Through this partnership, hundreds of millions of websites are filtered according to the BBFC’s trusted standards based on regular and extensive research (most recently involving 12,000 people) with audiences across the UK. You can read more about our work with the mobile networks here.
Educational resources
The BBFC offers a wealth of free classroom resources to support teachers in promoting online safety. These range from resources on digital resilience and staying safe online aimed at primary-age learners, to an age-appropriate resource on the subject for online pornography designed to help older teens critically engage with issues surrounding this material. You can find out more about the BBFC’s education work here.
