The UK Government has announced major plans to ensure the online safety of children with “no free passes.”
In an announcement on its official website, the UK Government announced that it would “act at pace to keep kids safe online” amidst “addictive design and fast-moving technologies”.
New measures will soon be announced to crack down on explicit content created by AI following earlier pressure on Grok. The generative AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI had attracted widespread censure for the way it was being used to easily create and spread fake nude images.
The UK Government’s threat of action against xAI led to the company restricting the image-generating abilities of its AI chatbot.
Now, promising to “act fast on its findings within months”, the UK Government is to consult on setting a minimum age limit for social media, as well as restricting their use of AI chatbots and even VPNs. The latter can be used to bypass the region-based blocking of harmful content.
Pexels: Dan Nelson
The government also plans to look into restricting infinite scrolling on social media apps, and other such potentially addictive mechanisms.
While the creation and dissemination of explicit underage content is already illegal in the UK, the government plans to consult on how to make tech companies responsible for preventing children from sharing and receiving such content.
As part of its plans, the UK Government also wants to make it a requirement for tech companies to preserve online data in instances where there are clear links to a child’s death.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said that “No platform gets a free pass” in these deliberations.
This digital wellbeing consultation will apparently launch next month and will seemingly be conducted as a matter of urgency.
While no exact time scale is provided here, the release claims that the government “will be guided by what parents and children say they need now, not in several years’ time”, while the first of these new powers is expected to be enacted “within months”.