Governments are working on more stringent rules to ensure age verification and legal accountability on social media platforms…
At long last, governments are finally waking up to the perils of unsupervised exposure to social media among children. It’s not about warnings or guidelines anymore. The plan is to implement more stringent rules to ensure age verification and legal accountability on social media platforms.
The United Kingdom has emerged as a frontrunner in a bid to fast-tracking legislature to restrict social media access to children under 16 and also to include AI chatbots in the online safety rules. As of right now, the digital ecosystem is growing faster than the safeguards designed to protect young users and that is what these rules are aimed at.
The UK’s Fast-Track Social Media Law
British Prime Minister is very serious about bringing in new social media laws that are centred around child safety. He wants age verification systems to be mandatory and has also proposed strict penalties for tech companies that fail to protect young users.
Once the laws are enforced, there will be major financial penalties in case of a failure to prevent harmful or illegal content from reaching children. The Online Safety Act that is being proposed reflects the growing concerns over mental health, cyberbullying and exposure to harmful content.
Talking to The Guardian, Starmer spoke at length about the issue: “I think this is such an important issue that we need to go into it with a ban as a possibility. I don’t think there’s a parent in the country who isn’t worried about this, by the way, I really don’t. The status quo, things as they are now, is not good enough”.
The plan is to bring these laws into action as quickly as possible. “We’ve taken the powers to make sure we can act within months, not years,” he added.
AI Chatbots and the Grok Controversy
Along with social media platforms, the push to regulate AI chatbots has gathered pace after the Grok controversy. For context, the Elon Musk-owned social media platform X has a chatbot called Grok which was recently in the news for a tool that would generate sexualised deepfake images, including of minors.
After several of these images went viral, several governments have slammed the tool and are exploring how they can take retrospective action on Musk’s company.
The controversy has highlighted a major loophole in the current laws. Existing safety laws apply to user generated content and not AI generated content. Governments are now working overtime to close that gap.
India’s Different Approach: Consent Over Bans
India is also considering safety laws of its own but they are slightly different from the ones proposed by the UK. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) framework proposes that children under 18 will need verifiable parental consent to create social media accounts.
The goal is to make sure that parental approval is in place before children’s data is processed and also to strengthen privacy and protection for kids.
The Karnataka government is also exploring laws to restrict social media use among children. Global developments as well as the impact of social media on mental health have been cited as the reasons behind the need for such laws.
The Negative Impact of such Laws
While restricting social media usage would be for the greater good of children, a complete ban may have a detrimental effect.
If children are not able to access social media, they are very likely to turn to unregulated websites or find workarounds to access banned webpages. Kids these days depend on social media to stay updated on the news as well as to keep in touch with their friends.
Taking that away from them completely might be counterproductive.
The Last Word
These proposed laws are long overdue. For almost two decades now, youngsters have had unregulated access to social media which has been very damaging, even fatal in some cases. With AI chatbots entering the picture and kids seeking advice and answers from artificial intelligence, it is great that governments have stepped up in the bid to bring in a framework as well as penalties for not following it.
There is still a long way to go. Even once laws come into the fold, it remains to be seen how they are enforced and whether they are effective. As technology continues to evolve, the laws will need to get updated too.
But the good news is that these long overdue laws seem to be around the corner.
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