The UK Government is showing no signs of giving up on its pursuit of turning the country into a nanny state with recent governmental proposals revealing plans to ban under 18s from being able to "like" posts on Facebook and Instagram.
According to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), children are being encouraged to attract as many likes as possible on their posts with the overexposure potentially leading to too much personal information being provided by children. It is also leading to children spending more time on apps than the government wishes them to. All of this, they say, is putting children at risk and therefore the only way to combat it is to remove the feature altogether.
If the new proposals come into force, it would give require all social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram to disable the feature for anyone who is under 18 in the UK.
To ensure that companies comply, the ICO has also suggested that any social media platform found not to be complying with the law will face a fine of up to £17.2m, or 4% of their global turnover.
These recent proposals are just another example of the UK government feeling the need to interfere with its citizen's online life. Last week, the UK government also put forward another proposal which would require by law for all social media platforms to remove any content the UK government deemed to be hateful or harmful, or face being banned in the country or hit with massive fines.
The proposals will continue to be consulted on until May 31 with the aim being for them to come into law sometime in 2020.
Very very interesting! Facebook is becoming dominated by absurd policies, which ruin the ability to share
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This is an interesting article, I cant however decide how I feel about it. On the one hand I also do feel like children are overexposed, but I actually dont think this will help
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In the one hand, we do need to protect children more and I think everyone would agree that's a good thing, however, it's a fine line between making the internet safer and heavily regulating it. Hopefully, some more reasonable protections get thought of instead of just outright telling people what they can and can't do.
For me, the most dangerous part is the government getting to determine what exactly is harmful or hateful as that's widely open to interpretation and abuse to silence critics as we've already seen.
Thanks for checking out the article! :)
100% agreed!
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