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A possible social media ban for children in the UK could be expanded to games, the government's online safety minister has suggested.
Speaking to The Sunday Times (via Game Developer) Kanishka Narayan said that a ban on social media for teenagers—which is being considered by the UK following a social media ban being implemented in Australia—could include restrictions for online video game platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, an area that Australia's social media ban does not extend to.
Narayan didn't cite any specific games in his conversation with The Sunday Times, but he said that, following a recent visit to Australia, his primary concern regarding children's use of the Internet was over "stranger pairing", between children and adults they don't know.
Apparently, this issue was discussed, "mostly in the context of gaming platforms" rather than conventional social media like Tiktok, Instagram etc. "That will weigh quite significantly in my mind as we think about how we stop some of the most egregious harms for young people," Narayan added.
Narayan's statements were recently echoed on Sky News by Rachel De Souza, the Children's Commissioner for England. Speaking on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, De Souza said that young boys in particular are vulnerable to being exploited on gaming platforms.
"Boys often aren't on social media," De Souza said. "They're often spending three or four hours a day gaming. And these games often have features that allow a 55-year-old in Arizona to come in and speak to a nine-year-old."
Roblox in particular has been repeatedly called out for its failures to adequately protect its player-base—which is largely composed of children. The platform has been subject to numerous lawsuits over child safety concerns, while there have been "at least two dozen" people arrested in the US and accused of "abducting or abusing victims" they'd met on Roblox.
Roblox's responses to these lawsuits and allegations have varied in quality, but this month, the company will introduce new age-based account categories as it strives to "more closely align content access, communication settings and parental controls with a user's age." These are much-needed and long overdue features, though it's worth noting that this is only one reason why Roblox has been accused of putting its audience at risk of exploitation.
But is a wider social media ban that incorporates games the answer? Well, in March, the BBC reported that the effectiveness of Australia's social media ban had been questioned, with the country's Internet regulator saying that social media companies were not doing enough to comply with it. In response, a spokesperson for Meta said that the company was "committed to complying" with the ban, while claiming that accurate age determination was "a challenge for the whole industry."
Personally, I think a social media ban wrongly implies that children accessing social media is the problem, rather than vastly profitable tech giants failing to dedicate adequate resources to get their houses in order—an issue that affects adults as much as it does children in various ways. Whether or not a UK social media ban will actually come into force, and what form it will ultimately take, remains to be seen.
