Reporting harmful content online

If you have found content online that encourages, glamorises or gives instructions for suicide or self-harm — a post, a group, a forum, a video — this is what actually exists for reporting it in the UK, and an honest account of how well it tends to work.

Nothing on this page asks you to describe what you found or where. Reporting routes need a link and a short description of the problem, not a summary of the content itself.

Report Harmful Content

Report Harmful Content is a UK service run by SWGfL, part of the UK Safer Internet Centre. It exists specifically for content that is legal but still harmful — which is exactly the category most pro-suicide and self-harm content falls into, because it rarely breaks the law outright. The service covers both adults and under-18s, it works entirely online with no phone line, and its staff can advise on wording and on which platform's own reporting route to use.

It does not handle everything. Terrorist content and child sexual abuse material go to different, specialist reporting routes, because those are criminal matters with their own reporting bodies — Report Harmful Content will tell you where to send a report if what you have found falls into one of those categories instead.

Reporting on the platform itself

Every major platform has its own reporting tool for content related to suicide and self-harm, usually reached from a menu on the post, profile or group itself. It is worth using this alongside Report Harmful Content, not instead of it — a platform report goes straight to the company that can actually remove the content, while Report Harmful Content can advise you, escalate on your behalf, and keep a record if the platform does nothing.

Most platforms also have a specific option for reporting a user who appears to be at risk themselves, separate from reporting content as harmful. If the account posting the content also looks like someone in danger, both reports are worth making — they go to different teams.

Samaritans' Online Harms Advisory Service

Samaritans runs an advisory service that works directly with platforms and online communities on this specific problem — content and communities that promote or glamorise ending your life. It is a different kind of route from the two above: less about a single report, more about an organisation with long experience in this area pushing for a policy or moderation change. It will not usually be the fastest route for one specific piece of content, but it is a route worth knowing about, particularly if what you have found is a pattern rather than a single post.

Being honest about what reporting does and doesn't do

Reporting matters, and it is worth doing. It is also frequently slow, and it can feel like shouting into a void — a form submitted, an automated acknowledgement, and then silence for days or weeks. That is a genuine limitation of the system as it currently exists, not a sign you did it wrong.

Enforcement action against an operator does not make a harmful site disappear. Enforcement and reporting both matter, and neither is a fast fix on its own. If content comes down, more can appear elsewhere; if a platform is slow to act, that is usually a resourcing and policy failure on their end, not evidence that reporting was pointless.

What reporting reliably does is create a record. A platform that has ignored five reports about the same content is in a different position — legally and reputationally — than one that has had none. Your report is one of those five, even on a day it feels like nothing happened.

If you are worried about the person who posted it, not just the content

Reporting content and being worried about a person are two different jobs, and it is easy to do only the first because it feels more concrete.

Supporting someone who is suicidal → · When your child is in a harmful online community →