How UK watchdog plans to ‘drive out’ children from social media sites

Under the plans to be announced next month by the UK Office of Communication (OfCom), the platforms would be expected to remove millions of children from social media, the Telegraph reported.

John Higham, the online regulator’s head of online safety policy, said platforms would be expected to remove potentially millions of children from their sites by using “highly accurate and effective” age checks.

The largest tech firms will face multi-billion-pound fines under the Online Safety Act if they fail to protect children and instead allow them to access harmful content such as porn, child sex abuse images and violence.

According to estimates by Ofcom, as many as 60 percent of 8 to 11-year-olds have social media profiles – equivalent to 1.6 million children in the UK – despite major sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat having minimum age limits of 13. A third of five to seven-year-olds are said to use social media unsupervised.

Higham told the Telegraph that the watchdog’s research had exposed the “big” problem that more than one-fifth of under-age children on social media sites were claiming to be adults to access content.

The powers used by the Office of Communication

Ofcom has powers under the Online Safety Act to fine companies that fail to protect children from online harms up to 10 percent of their global turnover and to jail executives for up to two years for persistent breaches.

Taking the example of Meta, it can be fined around£10 billion as the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Tech giants have claimed to introduce more stringent age checks in recent years. These include scanning personal IDs, facial age estimation and asking a parent to confirm an age.

Checks are often triggered when a user attempts to change their birth date, or when systems automatically detect indicators that someone might be lying about their age, such as the age of their frequent contacts. But the OfCom data shows those checks rarely work.