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Social Users Expected to Drop in the UK

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A new Online Safety Bill is about to come into play, social media owners are expecting a Drop to users in the UK.

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Whats the story?

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The long-awaited legislation, which will begin its final stages in the House of Commons next week, would not only remove underage users from the platforms but also discourage individuals without identification or with privacy concerns, people involved with policy at leading social media companies said.

Fear of falling user numbers comes as the platforms deal with declining ad revenue, their primary source of income, brought on by the global economic slowdown, and as legislation around the world is introduced that places stringent new demands on tech giants to police content on their platforms.

“More vetting of users means fewer users,” said a person familiar with advertising at Instagram. “That means fewer users to advertise to, less inventory and fewer clicks and views for business”.

In 2022, revenues at Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent, and Snap grew at their slowest pace since the companies went public in 2012 and 2017, respectively, while TikTok also slashed global revenue targets by 20 per cent.

The UK bill, aimed at protecting children from harmful content online and removing all illegal content, is considered to be leading the agenda for big tech regulation globally, along with the EU’s Digital Services Act.

TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat only allow users over the age of 13 on their platforms, but the proposed law will require businesses to enforce limits more stringently, including by explaining measures in their terms of service. UK regulator Ofcom will have the power to levy heavy fines on companies that fail to comply with the new rules.

The UK government department responsible for the bill said there was public support for keeping underage children off platforms.

“Companies can use their vast resources and ingenuity to develop their own solutions or use the range of age assurance technologies already on offer which protect people’s privacy and are used in other industries,” the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said.

Platforms’ current checks involve asking users for their date of birth and scanning text in comments, captions and bios for anything that may indicate an age.

Additional verification involves requesting ID or using age estimation through face scanning technology. Instagram users can choose to upload a photo of their identification, a video selfie to scan or ask mutual friends to verify their age.

However, Snapchat and TikTok have expressed concerns that current age estimation technology is unreliable.

Leading social networks have also warned the government that ID checks would freeze out people without identification or those who have legitimate reasons for not wanting to share it, such as survivors of domestic abuse or the transgender community.

“We are talking about really serious data collection and privacy issues, along with the potential disproportionate impact of needing to collect this data from a demographic that doesn’t [. . . ] all have ID and communities that don’t have ID,” said Nona Farahnik Yadegar, director of platform policy at Snap, the parent company of Snapchat.

Just over 70 per cent of 13-year-olds have valid UK passports, according to calculations by Yoti, a British provider of age estimation technology, based on freedom of information requests.

In comments published by Meta this week, Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, said improving verification methods was important but that it should be done in a way that does not discourage people from using the platforms.

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