Five regulators can fine you for a social post. Most courses mention none of them.
Almost every social media course sold in the UK is written in California. That is fine for the craft and useless for the law — and the law is the part that carries criminal liability, turnover-based fines and, since April 2025, a regulator that can fine you directly without going to court.
36 rules tracked · last verified 3 October 2026 · see changes
Advertising Standards Authority & the CAP Code
Whether a piece of marketing is obviously identifiable as marketing — and whether its claims stack up.
8 rules tracked →
CMACompetition and Markets Authority
Consumer protection law — hidden advertising, fake and incentivised reviews, and misleading pricing — with fines set as a share of global turnover.
6 rules tracked →
ICOInformation Commissioner's Office — UK GDPR and PECR
Personal data and electronic marketing — consent for tracking, the rules for marketing messages, and how customer lists may be used.
7 rules tracked →
Ofcom / OSAOfcom — the Online Safety Act
Duties on services that let users encounter each other's content: risk assessment, illegal content, children's safety.
6 rules tracked →
Sector rulesSector rules — finance, health, gambling, food and alcohol
Regime-specific restrictions that override general advertising practice, several of them carrying criminal liability.
9 rules tracked →
Rules change on a schedule, which is exactly what we are built for
The consumer protection regime changed on 6 April 2025. The CAP Code was amended two days later. The Data (Use and Access) Act raised the maximum PECR fine from £500,000 to £17.5 million on 5 February 2026. The online restriction on less healthy food advertising began on 5 January 2026. Any course recorded before those dates is teaching a regime that no longer exists — and will keep teaching it, because nobody is checking.
Every rule on these pages is stored the same way as a platform specification: a versioned fact with the date it was last checked against the regulator’s own page, and a public record when it moves. That is a promise about process, not a claim about accuracy — and it is the only kind worth making.
Legal & Ethical Social Media teaches it properly
These pages are the reference. The module is the training: what to do differently on Monday, worked through with the disclosure wording, the consent flow, the review policy and the sign-off process you actually need. It sits at Level 3, and like every module it cites these rules as live facts — so it updates when they do.
Nothing here is legal advice. It is a practitioner’s reference with the primary source linked beside every rule, so you can read the regulator’s own words before you act — and take proper advice when the stakes justify it.
