UK promises age assurance for social media, device-level child safety controls

How many times can a head of government pledge to do something about harmful social media platforms before they’re obligated to pass a law? In the case of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, it remains an open question. 

The PM continues to prepare to announce legislation that would set a minimum age to have an account on large social media platforms, which has major implications for the biometric age assurance market. The expectation is that the UK will follow Australia’s lead in setting the age at 16 and older. Reuters reports that Starmer “is said to have decided to proceed with restrictions after speaking to bereaved parents and considering evidence from Australia.” 

The agency quotes a government source who says “the prime minister is not afraid about taking on the tech companies and their bosses to protect young people.” But another source says a formal ban is unlikely to come this week. 

Tech executives face possible criminal liability over child safety

While a hard date for a social media minimum age law is elusive, Starmer has gotten more concrete when it comes to stopping kids from sharing explicit images on social media. The proliferation of AI deepfake technology has led to the emergence of “nudify” sites, which allow users to upload a photo and use AI to remove a subject’s clothes or place them in sexually explicit scenes. The UK government says 91 percent of online child sexual abuse reports recorded in 2024 contained self-generated content from children themselves. 

In a speech delivered at London Tech Week, Starmer rejects the idea that such exposure is just the price of modern tech. “I am calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce device controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images,” Starmer says. This, in theory, would involve settings that block nudity across a whole device by default. 

A follow-up report from the BBC says the government has set a timer for three months. If big tech companies don’t act to limit the sharing of explicit images by then, “the government will bring forward legislation to force them to activate blocking technology.” The piece mentions fines – which have proven to be largely inconsequential for multi-billion dollar tech companies and their tycoon owners – but also notes that the government has promised “nothing is off the table,” and says the government is exploring criminal liability for tech execs who fail to comply “as a last resort.” 

Is it time to take a second look at the smartphone?

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall says that “no parent should have to worry that giving their child a smartphone opens the door to abuse and exploitation.” Like Starmer, she has more pledges, insisting the government is holding social media platforms to account and “will soon announce our next steps to keep children safe online.” 

Yet what feels like foot-dragging may be rooted in a crucial observation that has largely been left out of the discussion about online harms: the devices themselves, Kerndall says, “are part of the problem.” 

While Kendall insists they can also be part of the solution, that admission opens the door to a flood of questions about the design of smart devices, society’s addiction to them at large, and their effect on children in particular. Plenty of commentators have described disappearing into a device. Legal attention has thus far focused on the addictive design of platforms and content. But the endless scroll, the slot-machine swipe refresh and the constant notifications model are as much a part and product of smartphones as they are of social media. 

The observation highlights a tension in the government’s policy, which is not exclusive to Britain. In Starmer’s speech, the announcement on explicit images comes after a segment in which Starmer hails AI as “an emerging revolution in technology,” and celebrates the rebirth of a shuttered Warrington soap factory as an AI data center. Globally, AI infrastructure is exploding, and leaders at both public and private levels are pushing agentic tech as an inevitability: get on board, the thinking goes, or get left behind. 

With the other hand, it castigates social media companies for creating a digital infrastructure of harm. Yet most of these companies come from the same place, and are rooted in the same ideologies, as the leading AI firms. 

As such, it is somewhat disheartening to see the UK falling into a cyclical pattern, wherein it happily integrates tech that masquerades as a public good before discovering villainous intentions underneath. Once this kind of tech takes hold, it becomes extremely difficult to reverse; most every government on Earth still maintains an account on X, whose edgelord chatbot Grok famously spat out thousands of images of nude children last winter. 

Adopting the language of tech evangelism and insisting that AI is absolutely, without any doubt a world-changing technology that will improve the world is repeating the mistakes made with social media – itself once heralded as a game-changing tool for connection, now recognized as a major risk to kids’ safety. The UK would be wise to remember that what has been called “AI” as a useful abstraction is not, in fact, a mandate from heaven, but a collection of products controlled by individuals who have accrued grotesque wealth pretending they are the angels we’ve all been waiting for. 

Canada to social media: just be nice, eh?

Canada appears to be moving ahead with legislation placing age restrictions on large social media platforms. A report from CTV News says an announcement is expected this week, although in comments to the media Prime Minister Mark Carney was cagey, saying only that his government “will be taking steps to protect people’s data, their privacy and their children.” 

The government is framing their policy around “digital safety” rather than “online harms.” It also (rather characteristically) appears to be the first country to frame age restrictions for social media as a potentially temporary measure. Scott Reid, a former director of government communications, tells CTV that “there is a suggestion once those social media platforms have demonstrated their compliance, then perhaps a new digital safety regulator will let young people back on.” 

Article Topics

biometrics  |  device-based age verification  |  legislation  |  OS-level age verification  |  social media  |  UK age verification  |  UK digital ID