Putting Some Meat On The Bans

We've teed up the kind of emerging regulatory ecosystem, what's happening.

You can't have escaped the news recently about various social media bans happening across the world, most notably, as we've talked about, in the UK and increasingly in the EU.

And we've had a couple of announcements this week that I would say add a bit of meat to the very bare bones that was the initial announcements from Keir Starmer earlier this year.

And actually some teeing up that Ursula von der Leyen did a couple of weeks ago.

So we've started in the course of this last week, started to see more information about what these bans will look like.

So in the UK, we'll start there.

The UK, there was some very wishy-washy statements about what a ban could look like.

And there was a plan in July to expand a bit more as to what that actually would look like and how the ban would work.

And we've actually started to get a bit more of that.

So this week it was shared that 16 and 17-year-olds will be unable to access social media platforms that fall under the ban after midnight.

and before 6am.

But, crucially, this is a setting that would be able to be turned off, presumably within the platform settings themselves, which we'll come on to, was not very well received by a bunch of people.

The government have also expressed a desire to disable certain features that kind of exacerbate time spent on the platform, such as autoplay, such as infinite scroll.

Those are two features that we will talk a lot about in the second half of today's podcast as well.

Those are things that are going to happen.

What the governor said won't happen is that there won't be a VPN ban.

This is something that had been muted because of concerns about teams circumnavigating, circumventing the kind of measures to ban them from platforms.

There's been a small but very vocal group of people off the back of the Australia social media ban who've called for VPN bans.

And it's something in kind of political sphere that has a lot of traction behind it, I'd say.

But the government has said they're not going down that route.

And they also haven't said which platforms are in and out of scope.

So...

Despite saying that there would be kind of more detail shared in July, we're still yet to hear which platforms will definitely be in and out.

We know that the big ones, Meta, TikTok, YouTube will be in there.

We don't know beyond that whether other gaming sites or other kind of large forums will be in there as well.