LONDON — When U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that his government would ban social media for under-16s on Monday morning, the Downing Street press room erupted into a round of applause.
“I think most parents will welcome this action,” Starmer said. “They will welcome a government that stands by them, that supports them to do the best for their children, and that fights for their happiness and safety against the most powerful companies in the world.”
Among those whooping and cheering were ex-Love Island personality Georgia Harrison — who described the plans as “absolutely amazing” — and more than a dozen parents from Smartphone Free Childhood.
Ian Russell, a tireless online safety campaigner and key architect of the Online Safety Act, was nowhere to be seen — because he wasn’t invited.
His Molly Rose Foundation, along with 5Rights, youth-led digital wellbeing charity FlippGen, and other civil society voices who’ve warned blanket bans are a blunt instrument that risk doing more harm than good, were kept away from the fanfare, and only invited to a later technical briefing run by officials from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
So for all the warm reception Starmer’s carefully choreographed set piece garnered today, some people are happier than others. Many of the details of the policy are yet to be decided, but the headlines — which POLITICO scooped last week — tell us the direction of travel, and who will be claiming a win, quietly or otherwise.
The winners
Smartphone Free Childhood
Smartphone Free Childhood, which describes itself as a movement of families “standing together to delay [access to] smartphones and social media,” has long been agitating for precisely the kind of action outlined Monday.
As POLITICO previously reported, back in January the charity used its 100,000 person-strong network of WhatsApp groups to organize a grassroots lobbying blitz that saw MPs flooded with messages from concerned parents urging them to back a ban.
“This moment belongs to the hundreds of thousands of parents who refused to stay quiet over the past two years,” Smartphone Free Childhood’s co-founder Joe Ryrie said. “Together they’ve proved that ordinary people really can reshape public policy — and that childhood doesn’t have to be defined by the commercial interests of a few technology companies in Silicon Valley.”
Age verification providers
The U.K.’s online safety regime has already been a boon for the industry, thanks to provisions under the Online Safety Act that require services to introduce age checks to prevent children from encountering pornography and other types of “primary priority” content.
Now more age-gates are coming — across social media, but also a wide range of services that allow livestreaming and communication with strangers, plus AI chatbots specifically designed for sexually-explicit interactions.
Two caveats.
One, providers will need to demonstrate the efficacy of their tools — like facial age estimation — when distinguishing between 15- and 16-year-olds, or 17- and 18-year-olds. At these age thresholds, things get murky, though Yoti’s CEO Robin Toombs told POLITICO that “safety buffers” — margins added to thresholds to account for the possibility of errors — can “strike the right balance between reducing the risk of underage users slipping through while still allowing the vast majority of users to access age-restricted products, services, and platforms.”
Two, since Ofcom is now carrying out a rapid study on what effective age assurance looks like for the purpose of verifying whether someone is over 16, there could be tighter regulation coming down the track, which is good for companies worried about cheaper but less accurate or privacy-preserving offerings, and bad for those that have so far largely escaped scrutiny.
Tech lawyers
The Online Safety Act is a mammoth, and some say confusingly drafted, piece of legislation, and that’s before we get to Ofcom’s codes of practice — so tech lawyers tasked with interpreting the law on behalf of clients have already had their work cut out.
More regulation already means more hours to bill for, but ministers have moved so quickly in response to the consultation — which closed less than three weeks ago — that companies could have grounds to argue the whole process had a foregone conclusion, Guilia Carloni, senior associate at Winston Taylor noted.
Secondary legislation — increasingly the government’s preferred tool — is particularly vulnerable to judicial review, and concerns have already been raised about the human rights impacts of blanket bans.
In other words, there could be a lot more casework coming.
The losers
Digital rights activists
Digital rights activists fear the rapid expansion of poorly regulated age checks will create a backdoor for more intensive surveillance and increase the risk of mass data breaches — and don’t trust the U.K.’s data protection watchdog to take action.
They aren’t fans of Big Tech, of course, but argue the government has failed to take a rights-respecting approach to regulation.
Watch this space. On Friday evening, a group of content creators and activists from the U.K., U.S., EU, Canada, and India met virtually to discuss the launch of a new global movement called “Stop Killing the Internet” in response to jurisdictions the world over converging around the ban playbook, a person on the call told POLITICO.
“The talk is that a Rubicon has been crossed and a line in the sand has to be drawn,” they said. The website went live shortly after Starmer’s announcement, and the campaign will launch in less then two weeks’ time.
Ofcom
Ofcom already has its hands full regulating the more than 100,000 services in scope of the Online Safety Act, parts of which aren’t even in force yet.
Now there’s even more to do, as its group director for online safety Oliver Griffiths acknowledged would be the case last month. Many of the proposals outlined by the government in its kids’ online safety consultation “create new duties and require comprehensive policy work to implement,” he said.
“The Government has entrusted us to build on this progress with new measures to protect children, and we’re ready to work closely with them as the detailed regulations take shape,” a spokesperson said in a statement Monday.
‘Safety by design’
OK, so this is a concept rather than a stakeholder, but many online safety campaigners want safety features embedded into digital products and services from the outset.
The government’s decision to kick kids off social media suggests it buys the argument — at least in the short term — that platforms can’t be made age-appropriate through regulation.
“We remain of the view that banning children from social media platforms without addressing the underlying, unsafe and addictive design choices made by tech companies that place profit before safety and well-being will not make them safer,” the Online Safety Act Network’s director Maeve Walsh said.