Drawing on our expertise as the UK’s statutory film and video regulator, the BBFC operates a number of best-practice initiatives to support online safety and help protect children and vulnerable adults from harm.

Age ratings on VoD and 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.

Online pornography

The BBFC is the UK’s foremost authority in the regulation of pornography. We have statutory responsibility for classifying pornographic video works under the Video Recordings Act 1984 and we classify some online content on a voluntary, non-statutory basis for a small number of adult services.

The BBFC will not classify any content that is in breach of the criminal law, nor any material that might cause harm – for example by encouraging dangerous emulation or by encouraging unhealthy fantasies relating to violence, sadism, abuse and non-consensual behaviour. The standards we apply when classifying pornography are set out on page 26 of the BBFC’s Classification Guidelines. 

In recent years we have conducted in-depth research into young people’s experiences of online pornography and have been commissioned to carry out research into the functionality of online pornography services for both the DCMS and Ofcom, to inform the development and implementation of the Online Safety Act. We have also observed an increased level of concern amongst stakeholders about the gap that exists between content classified by the BBFC and unregulated online pornography, which can be violent and abusive in nature. There is also a growing body of evidence which demonstrates the impact of pornography on society, particularly in relation to violence against women and girls.

The BBFC has long maintained that in order to address the fundamental challenge of harmful content and activity, we as a society must ensure that content that is unacceptable offline is also unacceptable online. We therefore welcome the fact that the Government is currently looking at this following the recommendations set out in the Independent Pornography Review led by Baroness Bertin.

Baroness Bertin’s report recommends that ‘violent, harmful and misogynistic pornographic content, that is illegal to distribute in physical formats, should also be treated as illegal content on online platforms’. This includes strangulation content, but also other violent and abusive material that the BBFC would refuse to classify – including depictions of non-consensual activity and scenes in which adults role-play as children.

The BBFC welcomes this recommendation and we believe that parity between the online and offline regulation of pornography is an achievable objective. Our latest research, published in June 2025, demonstrates overwhelming levels of support for regulation amongst UK pornography users, with 80% backing new laws to prevent the publication of violent or abusive pornography online, in line with existing offline regulation.

Baroness Bertin further recommends that the Government ‘appoint a body, such as the BBFC, [...] to audit content from platforms that host pornography to ensure they are tackling prohibited and illegal content’. The BBFC stands ready to take on such a role, which we would regard as a natural extension of our longstanding role in relation to pornography distributed offline.

Education 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.