Ofcom raises concerns about age verification for social media limits but will work on solutions

The UK Government announced widely expected bans for young children using social media, and limitations on uses by 16 and 17-year olds. These are due to come in next spring and will affect platform such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and X but will exclude messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal.

There’s much left to come our about how these restrictions will work but to re-cap, we listed the changes as: –

• Ban on social media for under-16s
• Blocks on live-streaming and stranger communication for under-16s
• Restrictions will apply to a wider range of online services beyond the big headline ones, so gaming sites are included.
• Restrictions on by default for under 16s and under 17s – we suspect this means 17-year-olds will have the option to change the setting if they wish.
• Overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18s may emerge in the detailed July announcements
• AI romantic companions will have to enforce a minimum age of 18
• Intimate functionality of other AI chatbots to be restricted for under-18s
• Tech companies have a 3-month deadline to stop children from taking, sharing or viewing nude images.

The topic of how to determine age (is someone under or over 16) was passed over to Ofcom to look into and Ofcom yesterday responded, raising some interesting points: –

Clarify of Law — Ofcom stated “A clear lesson from the first year of implementing the Online Safety Act has been that clarity in the law facilitates successful compliance and enforcement. We would encourage the Government’s regulations to be as clear and specific as possible, including about the services these restrictions will and will not apply to. This would allow Ofcom to move rapidly to detailed implementation and then driving real improvements for children online as soon as possible.”

Age Assurance at 16 is more complex than 18 — Ofcom points out that whilst this should be ‘technically feasible’, there are fewer available methods than at age 18, citing e-mail based age estimation and credit card checks which are not available for 16-year olds. Additional work is needed to understand ‘availability of identity and age attributes’ and privacy considerations of various methods. Evidence from Australia on ‘age inference’ models isn’t yet available.

Boundary Ages & Growing up — Ofcom highlighted the complexity around how to deal with accuracy (e.g. 15 vs 16-year-olds) as well as how to deal with a child growing older and stepping into a different category.

Most positively we see Ofcom acknowledging the importance of user privacy.

We do think that client-side age attestation by a phone (and other devices) could have a role to play as you could tie it to purchases and activations for new devices. It’s by no means foolproof and clever kids could set up an open source operating system, but equally those individuals will also probably know how to set up an SSH tunnel, proxy server, VPN or any other range of possible options to work around the bans. Equally it’s entirely possible than a 13-year old could buy a ‘blackmarket’ phone which has been ‘unlocked’ for adult content from the dark web with cryptocurrency; this could actually expose children to new risks.

On a wider topic, is social media all it’s cracked up to be? Many of the generations now becoming parents who have grown with social media are increasingly moving away from it, not liking the profiling these platform have undertaken.

The new bans won’t stop kids accessing content they shouldn’t. We know that. The question is will it have an impact in reducing it, and what will the unintended consequences be.