Former Education Minister Lord John Nash is the founder and chair of the board of trustees of Future Academies, a family of schools across London and Hertfordshire that was created with the mission of broadening young people’s horizons and improving their life chances, enabling them to pursue their chosen course in life. This article will look at measures being implemented by the UK Government to keep children safe online, including a tightening of legislation around chatbots.
The Government recently won its battle with X, threatening the social media platform with legal action over the AI assistant Grok generating non-consensual sexual deepfakes. Taking this a step further, it recently unveiled plans to do likewise with ‘all AI bots’.
In addition to closing loopholes in legislation surrounding chatbots, the Government proposals also include measures requiring tech companies to preserve all data on a child’s phone if they die. The prime minister warned that no platform will get a ‘free pass’ when it comes to children’s online safety, promising to crack down on the ‘addictive elements’ of social media.
The main proposals include:
- The inclusion of AI chatbots in the Online Safety Act
- New tech legislation being passed quicker
- A duty on coroners to notify Ofcom of the death of all 5-to-18-year-olds to ensure tech companies cannot delete their data in case it is relevant to their death
The UK Government also reiterated its commitment to launching a public consultation on the use of social media by children, seeking expert opinions on the restriction of young people’s access to AI chatbots as well as limiting infinite scrolling. The Government announced plans to create new legal powers, enabling it to take ‘immediate action’ following the consultation.
In an interview featured by the BBC’s Today programme, Liz Kendall, the UK technology secretary, explained that a proper consultation was essential, highlighting the need for the Government to act swiftly once the consultation had arrived at a decision. First discussed in a green paper in 2017, Liz Kendall suggests that implementation of the Online Safety Act took too long against the backdrop of rapidly changing technology. The Online Safety Act, which became law in 2023, was drafted before AI chatbots such as ChatGPT entered the mainstream. In light of this, the Government aims to close loopholes in legislation so that new technology is also included.
Ellen Roome is a mother who lobbied tirelessly for social media data reform following the death of her son, Jools Sweeney, who died in 2022 after an online challenge went wrong. Roome contends that her son’s social media accounts could have provided vital evidence pertaining to his death, but she was unable to access them. Since the death of her son, Ellen Roome has been campaigning for social media platforms to preserve children’s data. Now, an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill has ensured that will happen; all children’s social media data will automatically be preserved within five days of their death, ensuring its availability should a coroner or Ofcom request that information later on. As Ellen Roome suggested, once it is possible to prove what has been shown on social media platforms, the Government can start to hold companies accountable, forcing them to make badly needed changes.
The Online Safety Act 2023 incorporated a new set of laws to protect both children and adults online, placing a range of new duties on social media companies and search services to make them more responsible for the safety of users on their platforms. The Act gave providers new duties to implement processes and systems to reduce online risks, as well as making them responsible for taking down illegal content where it appears.
The strongest protections afforded by the Online Safety Act 2023 were designed to protect children, preventing them from accessing harmful, age-inappropriate material and providing children and their parents with clear and accessible ways to report online issues when they arise. The Act also protects adult users, ensuring enhanced transparency of major platforms in terms of the harmful content they allow, giving users more control over the types of content they see.
The UK Government has announced plans to amend the law to place a duty on chatbots to protect people from illegal content. In an article published on Substack, the British prime minister explained that over the past 20 years social media has evolved, becoming something completely different from the simple pages it was at its conception. He suggests that this evolution has culminated in the creation of something that is quietly harmful to children.
The Government has pledged to crack down on the more addictive elements of social media such as doomscrolling and autoplay, which keep young people hooked on their screens for hours. They are also implementing measures to prevent young people getting around age limits, including banning them from using VPNs.
