Children up and down the country will have received a new mobile phone or tablet this Christmas, and will be busy downloading apps, setting up accounts and chatting on messaging services. Children are more “online” than ever before in 2024 – nearly all teenagers have a social media account, and over 60% of 8-11 year-olds use social media despite age restrictions.
Have your say! Should children be banned from social media? Would it be fair to take it away from them, or would it be “for their own good”? Comment below, and join in on the conversation.
Social media apps set an age restriction on accounts, but these have been easy to fool in the past. Ofcom, the online regulator, will be setting out plans next year aimed at ensuring that social media giants know who their users are, and bar underage people from using them.
Speaking to the Telegraph, Jon Higham, Ofcom’s head of online safety policy, said kids were creating adult profiles to get onto apps. He said: “It doesn’t take a genius to work out that children are going to lie about their age. So we think there’s a big issue there.”
“The sort of thing that we might look to in that space is some of this facial age estimation technology that we see companies bringing in now, which we think is really pretty good at determining who is a child and who is an adult. So we’re going to be looking to drive out the use of that sort of content, so platforms can determine who’s a child and who isn’t, and then put in place extra protections for kids to stop them seeing toxic content.”
The Online Safety Bill was finally introduced in 2023 after years of political wrangling, but Ofcom can’t yet use powers to punish companies who fall foul of the new rules. Tech firms could be fined up to 10% of their global turnover or have their services blocked in the UK if they fail to protect kids online.
In 2025, Ofcom will set out how it will update its rules so it can begin to enforce the law – but this will take more time, and be subject to more scrutiny in Parliament. A Government spokeswoman said: “Under the Online Safety Act, services which are likely to be accessed by children must have highly effective age assurance. It is for the independent regulator to decide how to implement the Act, but the government is clear that services should be taking proactive action to keep children safe including when it comes to age verification, not waiting for measures to come into force.”
Have your say! Should children be banned from social media? Would it be fair to take it away from them, or would it be “for their own good”? Comment below, and join in on the conversation.