UK: Labour Party calls for implementing online safety legislation for children

The British opposition Labour Party has called for better online safety for children through online safety legislation. The call follows a report that found only a small number of underage users were removed from the Snapchat platform by its developing company.

The Labour Party called on the government to implement the Online Safety Bill after a report by Reuters found that only a small number of underage users were removed by Snap Inc. from the Snapchat app. This comes at a time when the United Kingdom, much like the European Union and other countries, is looking into how to better protect users on social media from potentially harmful content without infringing on free speech.

The report by Reuters Friday last week found that Snapchat was removing only dozens of children from the UK from the app every month, compared to the thousands of users that were blocked by the video-sharing platform TikTok.

“Parents are crying out for better protections for children online and especially on social media,” said the Shadow Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, Lucy Powell, in a statement responding to the report.

“The Government has delayed and now watered down the online safety bill, relying almost entirely on age verification technologies which aren’t fool-proof, when we know that many children pass themselves off as older online,” said Powell.

Powell also said that the British government needs to strengthen the legislation in order “to take on the algorithms and business models of platforms which promote harm and fail to protect children.”

In the data shared with media regulator Ofcom and seen by Reuters, from April 2021 to April 2022, TikTok blocked around 180,000 suspected underage accounts in the UK every month or around two million in a span of 12 months. Snapchat, however, told the watchdog that it removed around 60 accounts a month or more than 700 overall within the time period.

With the party expected to take power following the 2024 elections based on public polls, Labour said on Monday that it would launch a review into business taxes in an effort to create a stable environment for investments. The opposition party has since criticized the governing Conservative government for its “chaotic” approach to business taxation, paired with the changes to corporate tax rates and incentives in recent years.