Ofcom protective social media defaults trial
The United Kingdom (UK) communications regulator Ofcom published this randomized online experiment in July 2026. It tested whether adults and young people retained protective defaults for network expansion, location sharing, and direct messages on a simulated social-media service.
The sample comprised 3,201 adults and 5,717 participants under 18, including groups aged 13 to 15 and 16 to 17. Across the groups, 94% finished with all three protective settings enabled. No individual protective default was overridden by more than 5%. Adding explanatory messages did not significantly improve retention, probably because the defaults were already highly persistent.
The experiment supports a narrow conclusion: well-chosen privacy and contact defaults can remain in place without requiring users to configure them actively. It did not show that the settings reduce harassment, grooming, location abuse, or other real-world harms. Participants did not interact with one another, and the chosen settings did not change the feed they experienced. External validity on established services therefore remains uncertain.
Earlier Ofcom experiments reported that safer content defaults and automatic skipping reduced exposure to harmful material, although a substantial minority later changed the safer setting. Together the trials make defaults a credible design lever, not a substitute for measuring actual outcomes.
The official technical report remained readable through research retrieval but rejected the repository’s archival requests with HTTP 403. This source note therefore cites the official remote report provisionally instead of linking a local artifact.
Less harmful social media uses the trial as evidence about usability and persistence, not as proof of reduced harm.