Social Media Apps Will Have To Shield Children From Dangerous Stunts

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Social media firms will be ordered to protect children from encountering dangerous stunts and challenges on their platforms under changes to the online safety bill. The legislation will explicitly refer to content that "encourages, promotes or provides instructions for a challenge or stunt highly likely to result in serious injury" as the type of material that under-18s should be protected from. The bill will also require social media companies to proactively prevent children from seeing the highest risk forms of content, such as material encouraging suicide and self-harm. Tech firms could be required to use age-checking measures to prevent under-18s from seeing such material. In another change to the legislation, which is expected to become law this year, social media platforms will have to introduce tougher age-checking measures to prevent children from accessing pornography -- bringing them in line with the bill's measures for mainstream sites such as Pornhub. Services that publish or allow pornography on their sites will be required to introduce "highly effective" age-checking measures such as age estimation tools that estimate someone's age from a selfie. Other amendments include requiring the communications watchdog Ofcom to produce guidance for tech firms on protecting women and girls online. Ofcom, which will oversee implementation of the act once it comes into force, will be required to consult with the domestic abuse commissioner and victims commissioner when producing the guidance, in order to ensure it reflects the voices of victims. The updated bill will also criminalize the sharing of deepfake intimate images in England and Wales. In a further change it will require platforms to ask adult users if they wish to avoid content that promotes self-harm or eating disorders or racist content. Once the law comes into force breaches will carry a punishment of a fine of 18m or up to 10% of global turnover. In the most extreme cases, Ofcom will be able to block platforms.

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