Digital Futures for Children (DFC) Lecture – Does online regulation work for children?
On 14th May, CMF Executive Group members Sally Latham and Olivia Dickinson attended the Digital Futures for Children’s (DFC – the joint research centre between LSE and the 5Rights Foundation) public lecture examining how the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) and the EU’s Digital Services Act are reshaping platform design, governance and accountability in practice.
Baroness Beeban Kidron: “when did childhood become an absence of harm rather a chance or opportunity to grow and flourish?”
Steve Wood, Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE/DFC and Director, PrivacyX Consulting, launching his report reviewing 70 platforms, across social media, gaming, AI, video streaming and messaging, looked at evidence of change to child safety and privacy since 2024. This report is Phase II of an original report – Phase I covered 2017-2024.
It’s worth noting that Steve Wood had to end the review in March 2026, having already expanded the number of platforms from 50 to 70, adding AI chatbots in later stages, and in the week he spoke, Instagram had just launched ‘Instagram Instants’. ‘Instants’ allow users (of any age) to send disappearing photos to close friends, but obviously have online safety concerns: keeping up with every new feature on every platform is like whack-a-mole.
However, there were some positive findings: platforms *other* than Meta, Google, TikTok and Snapchat are now better at design by default – so in theory following the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) – but the big four are now more reliant on tools that have to be set by parents. Investment in ‘by default’ protection has slowed in the last couple of years, so there is now possibly too much onus on parents to understand the end user tools and always be one step ahead of their kids.
Sonia Livingstone, Professor at the Department of Media and Communications, LSE and Director of the Digital Futures for Children centre then chaired a discussion with Steve, Professor Lorna Woods, Emeritus Professor of Internet Law at the University of Essex, Professor Orla Lynskey, Chair of Law and Technology at UCL and Baroness Beeban Kidron, Crossbench Peer, House of Lords, UK Parliament and Chair of the Management Committee at the DFC centre, and the primary architect of the Age Appropriate Design Code. Steve Wood was formerly Deputy at the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) so also knows his Age Appropriate Design Code very well.
The discussion focused on what Ofcom could be doing, going forward, to keep children safe and asked if the AADC is enough. With the debate at the moment about ‘banning’ under 16s from social media (or rather, regulating the platforms), Professor Lorna Woods pointed out that if platforms use age verification which excludes children then there is no incentive for platforms to do better and design age appropriately or safely: “is age verification a means to be safe by design or a way to not need it?”. All on the panel agreed that compliance with the EU’s DSA or the UK’s Online Safety Act does not mean protection for children. As Baroness Kidron closed the discussion, she said that the question is not, “does regulation work?” “But rather do we have the right regulation?”
Read more in the report
https://www.digital-futures-for-children.net/our-work/regulation-impact including recommendations for governments, policymakers, regulators, platforms, NGOs and the research community and the case for building on the strong potential current regulations have.
CMF Submission to the DSIT Consultation: Growing up in the Online World. Children’s Public Service Media Needs a Home