ITWeb contributor Phillip de Wet.
On Monday, I found myself looking for the enterprise-technology angle to the United Kingdom’s planned social media ban for children under 16.
There isn’t really one. Beyond better age verification (a problem the porn industry solved long ago, but not well), almost nothing will change directly in the world of grownup technology.
But the broader, eventual impact could be surprisingly large.
To understand why, you need to understand that the UK is a real place for American technologists, not a fairytale country like Australia. Australia has an actual age limit on social media, sure, but it’s just, you know, Australia. They also have koala bears and way too many venomous things that bite. That is all very far away, and of little consequence.
The UK, on the other hand, is an entry point to Europe. All the big AI players have serious operations in London, with employees who make global decisions rather than just localising what comes out of the US. American politicians have been known to look to the UK for precedent.
So, the US AI majors in particular have taken more note of Britain’s demand to age-gate social media than they did Australia’s.
It is too early to tell if that leads to real change, but the lesson is there if they want to learn it: the social media companies messed up on trust and safety, and now they have to spend a lot of time and money and effort to lock out a quite lucrative group of users, instead of grabbing those users while they’re young and impressionable.
The result may just be better guardrails on fundamentally safer AI models, which of course affects us all.
The result may just be better guardrails on fundamentally safer AI models, which of course affects us all.
Because where are all those under-16s in the UK going to spend all the hours they would have spent on social media? The AI people have some ideas about that.
The AI people – and a surprisingly large number of other services – are also giving a lot of thought to granular age-gating, something about which the porn industry teaches us nothing.
The UK government believes it can tell AI services to restrict companion-style chats with an intimate component while still pushing for its young people to be AI native. It also wants time-of-day filtering, to stop late-night doomscrolling by 16- and 17-year-olds.
One (smaller, UK-based) operator tells me that has triggered a conversation about fundamental access and identity architecture. This doesn’t make immediate sense to me as a layperson; billing and product flexibility alone would require the ability to turn individual services on and off for specific user classes, right? And anything that stands in the way of spinning up new and fancy products will always get priority, you’d think.
Apparently not. So now there’s new pressure to deal with the tech debt in legacy systems where that is not the case.
However, all of it now comes down to reading the political winds. The UK is not always a trendsetter for European regulators; sometimes it is a cautionary tale to avoid a particular approach. The UK is also subject to the vagaries of public mood, and has been known to radically change course on important policy positions when the government of the day wasn’t sure it would get elected the next time around, as is the case right now.
And then there is the standard US pressure, and the overlay of the Trump effect. America sees online services a little like a commodity export that it needs to protect against foreign protectionism, and there are already rumblings about “consequences” for coming after social media companies.
That, more than anything else, is why we can’t chart exactly where the UK’s social media moves might take the sector as a whole. You just never know, these days.
