Governments around the world have been struggling with designing policies to protect minors from online harms for some time. We have seen a general shift now from protection of children in online spaces (with a focus on age-appropriate design and safety requirements focusing on assessments and governance and certain high risk elements) to prevention of children from accessing some of them. Australia garnered a lot of attention in this respect over a year ago with its “under 16 social media ban” and developments have recently picked up pace in Europe. Last week, after much speculation, the UK government confirmed plans for an “Australia plus” package - an under-16 social media ban, plus feature-level restrictions for a wider set of online services.

What is the UK proposing?

The proposals are expected to amend the Online Safety Act 2023 in three ways:

• “Social media” services will be required to block under 16s using highly effective age assurance. Ofcom is expected to provide recommendations to Government on age assurance technologies by October.
• Online services with livestreaming functionality, or which allow children to be contacted by strangers, will be required to restrict access to those features from under 16s, although messaging services like WhatsApp are not expected to be in scope.
• Romantic AI chatbots will be required to block under 18s.

We still await the definitions (coming in July, apparently) to determine exactly how these obligations will be scoped and which services and features will be caught. More is expected on this front over summer, with the changes planned to come into force in spring 2027.

You can track all of the developments on the Online Safety Act through our tracker here.