It announced plans this week to amend the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to include powers ‘to act at speed to introduce targeted actions’. It intends to amend the Online Safety Act to make AI chatbot providers abide by illegal content duties—closing a legal loophole that allows chatbots to encourage children into harmful behaviour.
A public consultation due to launch in March will explore limiting children’s use of virtual private networks (VPNs). These ‘not only allow children to bypass age-verification safeguards and access pornography and other harmful material undetected, but they can also obscure where online content originates from too,’ according to Jamie Hurworth, senior associate at Payne Hicks Beach. He urged the government to tackle VPNs ‘head-on’.
The consultation will also consider a minimum age limit for social media, restrictions on features such as infinite scrolling and a requirement on tech companies to preserve the data on a child’s phone if they die.
Simmons & Simmons tech partner Alex Brown said there appears to be cross-party support for an under-16s social media ban, following the ban in Australia and proposed bans in France, Spain and Norway.
Brown said the government seems to be moving from regulating use to regulating the tech itself due to ‘growing concern that chatbots and AI‑driven systems can create risks for children that are not easily captured by existing service definitions.
‘The Online Safety Act was deliberately framed around regulating services rather than technologies, but rapid developments in generative AI and conversational chatbots are exposing the limits of that model.’
However, Matthew Holman, tech partner at Cripps, said: ‘Accelerating a ban of social media platforms in the UK is a bad idea for several reasons.
‘The main one is that hurried legislation often contains numerous gaps and inaccuracies which make it susceptible to legal challenge—which will surely come. An outright ban risks removing under-16s from the world of current affairs and potentially impacts their right to free speech and freedom of expression.’
