The UK's online safety crackdown is creating a liability problem that many technology insurance policies were never designed to address.
As regulators expand their focus from social media platforms to broader questions of platform design and child safety, insurers are confronting a more fundamental question: what happens when claims focus not on harmful content, but on the design of the technology itself?
According to legal and insurance specialists, that shift could expose gaps in policy wordings built around media, privacy and cyber risks rather than product liability.
The scale of the underlying exposure is significant. Ofcom found that 81% of 10 to 12-year-olds use at least one social media app or site, while 86% have their own account on a social media, messaging or video-sharing platform. For insurers, that means the debate is no longer confined to a handful of major platforms, but to products used by millions of children.
Rosehana Amin, partner at Clyde & Co in London, believes the shift could fundamentally alter the types of claims insurers face.
"This will reframe claims from third-party content risk to first-party product risk," she said. "Insurers will see fewer disputes about 'publisher' versus 'host' functions, and more about defective design, failure to warn, fraudulent misrepresentation, and negligent architecture."
The consequence is that policies built around defamation, privacy or user-generated content may not respond at all. Coverage disputes, Amin argues, will instead move toward product liability triggers, aggregation questions, and whether harm is occurrence-based or the result of systemic design choices.
The shift comes as UK regulation continues to tighten. Ofcom can levy fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global revenue for breaches of the Online Safety Act, while new legislation is expanding age-related restrictions for under-16s.
Ed Ventham, co-founder of Assured Cyber, a specialist cyber and technology insurance broker in London, sees the same trend emerging.
If product design becomes the liability trigger, features such as doom scrolling, age assurance and parental controls, the exposure moves beyond individual users and towards risks that could affect millions simultaneously.
"It's not just cyber, not just media, it's tech, product liability, potentially casualty as well," he said.
The sharpest coverage question concerns intentional conduct exclusions.
The March 2026 verdict of K.G.M. v. Meta et al. in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, which awarded $6 million in damages against Meta, for Instagram, and Google, for YouTube, crystallised an argument that campaigners and plaintiff lawyers have advanced for years: that addictive platform features were designed rather than accidental.
"Insurers will argue intentional conduct or 'expected/intended injury' exclusions where pleadings allege deliberate engagement engineering with known harms," Amin said. "The counterargument will be that the intent was to increase usage, not to cause injury. Reports from former employees or whistleblowers regarding what the platform knew or concealed will be relevant for insurers to assess whether there was deliberate or intentional conduct."
While that argument has yet to be tested in a UK appellate court, Amin believes it is moving closer as claims increasingly focus on conscious design decisions supported by internal documents.
The latest twist came this week when Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave Apple and Google three months to block explicit images on children's devices or face further legislation. For Amin, that moves the debate into legally distinct territory.
"Device-level liability shifts the duty from hosting or recommending content to supplying hardware or software that is safe and compliant at point of use," she said. "Legally, that looks more like product safety and regulatory compliance than intermediary liability. For insurers, it broadens exposure into product liability, recall risk, and regulatory fines."
Ventham believes the development could also complicate future causation disputes.
“It does change the causation debate - where did the harm originate? Platform content, app design, device settings? The device-level piece is something we're not quite ready for as an industry.”
For brokers, the bigger concern may not be Big Tech. It may be the much larger population of smaller businesses whose products include social, messaging or community features.
"The big platforms will just change their stance - they've got the capital to change their model," Ventham said. "It's actually the smaller businesses that will be affected most."
Those firms are less likely to have the legal resources to challenge claims, less likely to have broad coverage programmes in place, and less likely to have reviewed how their policies respond to emerging regulatory exposures.
Amin identifies one of the market's biggest unanswered questions.
"Insurers will need to examine whether claims that social media addiction is a public nuisance will be covered under traditional liability cover, or are they fundamentally uninsurable, because such losses, for example abatement costs, are not 'because of' or 'on account of' bodily injury."
The government's consultation response is expected later this summer and should provide the clearest indication yet of how far the regulatory net will extend.
For years, technology liability policies have largely been written around what users do on platforms. The next wave of litigation may focus on how those platforms and devices were designed in the first place.
If that shift takes hold, some of the market's most familiar cyber and technology wordings could find themselves being tested in ways they were never built to handle.
