These numbers should be amplified everywhere there is a flat surface. The 3,000 person sample size was statistically significant. The direction of travel is positive but runs directly contrary to the perception born in the echo-chamber of Twitter-brained media and politics. (H&CC is a client)

I've had a growing sense of FOMO in recent days, as Lusaka is the first instalment of RightsCon in a decade that I won't be attending. But this news has put it into perspective. A lot of cash-strapped digital rights organisations will have sacrificed a lot to get to Zambia. A real shame.

Convince me that EU Council presidency venue choices are not a crafty attempt by mid-level civil servants to make the case to their political masters for investment in regional public transport. EU politicos are going to spend *a lot* of time in minivans with the EU presidency comes to Ireland.

I spoke to the @thetimes.com about the UK's impending social media restrictions for teenagers. Until it is clear about what harms to children it is trying to mitigate, government is likely to make sub-optimum policy choices about the services to target and how. www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog...

New DSA enforcement action against Meta for having under-13s on its services. While the DSA doesn't set out minimum age thresholds for access to social media, I suspect DG CNECT is relying on the risk management provisions that concern how companies set and enforce their terms of service.

I spoke to TPP for this story on the Southport inquiry report. Online regulation probably wouldn't have made a difference in this case, but the report tells us something about how companies approached age assurance and children's exposure to age-inappropriate content in the pre-reg days.

I'm excited to be a keynote at next week's Westminster Forum Projects conference on children's use of social media. I'll be sharing thoughts on how experiences from Australia, the EU, and elsewhere can inform the UK debate on social media restrictions, ahead of likely govt action this summer.

The Australian government has set out its plans for a sweeping overhaul of the domestic online safety rulebook. AU was the world's first country to create comprehensive online safety rules back in 2021, but its approach looks increasingly dated (the EU DSA ushered in a regulatory paradigm shift).

Online safety enforcement klaxon: Ofcom has opened an investigation into Telegram, alleging the service has failed to adequately manage the risk of CSAM being shared among users. Note that unlike the DSA, there is no carve-out in the UK rules for messaging apps. www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safet...

The shortlist of candidates for the role of UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression has been published. I recognise several strong human rights defenders in the mix. www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies...

As an instrument for international norm-setting in the online safety regulatory space, I'm a big fan of the Council of Europe's new recommendation on online safety. I explain why in this piece for Tech Policy Press.

The recording for this webinar is now online. Come for the comprehensive overview of online child protection developments across jurisdictions. Stay for my wild hand gesticulations when describing the UK banning discourse. www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5iy...

Aditya Chakrabortty has long been one of the most insightful commentators on the left of British politics. This piece, on how Brexit has poisoned and disfigured the country's politics and body politic, is characteristically excellent.

As we say in the Old Country, 'it's a great day for the parish' to see an Irish person ascend to such a senior role in EU officialdom.

#OTD 10 April 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was signed, marking a step towards ending decades of violence in Northern Ireland. #SpéirGhorm #speirgorm #IrishHistory

Important news out of Strasbourg this morning for those of us tracking platform regulation macrotrends. The Council of Europe has officially endorsed its new recommendation on online safety and user empowerment. I have some thoughts on why it matters, here: www.linkedin.com/posts/owbenn...

An interesting reframing of the policy rationale for the AU social media ban, and one that lends itself more to the idea that the threat of bans should be negotiating leverage to extract child safety design concessions from companies. www.politico.eu/article/aust...

This is the least interesting but most compelling reason for why the DSA/DMA enforcement units of DG CNECT should be spun-out into an independent agency of the EU Commission. Too much institutional memory and regulatory expertise is put at unnecessary risk.

Ofcom has written to tech companies *reminding* them of their safety duties ahead of UK local elections But unlike the DSA, the UK framework excludes electoral integrity as a policy objective and is largely silent on platforms as a vector for election-related risks www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/r...

Job opportunity We are hiring an AI expert to join ICCL Enforce www.iccl.ie/digital-data...

Great jobs like this doesn't often come up in the tech policy space. Do apply if it fits with your professional aspirations, even if you don't meet *all* the job description criteria!

Ofcom sets July deadline for next round of companies' Online Safety Act risk assessments. Notwithstanding the country-specific assessments, for a sector that loves automation and scalability the fact that the UK and DSA risk assessment processes run on different timelines must be quite the pain.

We have tort laws here as well (extract from my book). We have wasted half a decade going down the expensive, time-consuming, diversionary and inevitably bureaucratic rabbit hole of regulation by regulator that could have been spent exploring existing private law tools. I could weep. 1/2

On the US social media addiction cases: a very interesting point from @cgoanta.bsky.social re the unique power of private litigation as a vehicle for platform accountability. Unfortunately for those of us in the UK, the Online Safety Act fails to enable a private right of action shorturl.at/kikHR

Deja vu when reading about the proliferation of social media bans across EU capitals It's precisely this kind of dynamic (pressure from below via national hate speech laws) that bounced the EU Commission down the path of overhauling the E-Commerce directive in 2019 www.linkedin.com/posts/sara-b...

It was an honour to be a guest in @hutko.bsky.social's digital platforms course at the London School of Economics yesterday. A great discussion on regulatory strategy and design, and the game theory calculus that shapes regulatory enforcement in platform markets.

Via @alecmuffett.bsky.social This development is going to get *a lot* of attention as online safety policy interest turns to AI chatbots. 'Moxie Marlinspike, of Signal fame, announces partnership with Meta to bring end-to-end encryption to Meta AI Chat' alecmuffett.com/article/149867

If you applied for 40.4 DSA access, I'd be super interested to chat (we @algorithmwatch.org did - algorithmwatch.org/en/google-ai...). And also, remember, fill in the @dsa40collaboratory.bsky.social tracker! www.soscisurvey.de/DSA40applica...

Last week saw a strategic step-change in how UK regulators approach enforcement and compliance under UK rules to protect children online. I spoke to MLex about what it means for accountability and compliance. www.linkedin.com/posts/bfigue...

Yoti - a major vendor of age assurance tech - has been fined by the Spain DPA for GDPR breaches within its identity app. Important reminder that anyone in the AA business needs to be squeaky clean when it comes to GDPR compliance, given where they're playing www.biometricupdate.com/202603/spain...

This piece underscores that a EU digital sovereignty agenda requires a massively expansionary fiscal policy approach from the national capitals. Even before the Hormuz-induced economic shock, marshalling that kind of capital looked dauting. www.ft.com/content/95fe...

Meanwhile, the police: can you please prevent remote wiping? Thanks! www.bbc.co.uk/news/technol...

A remote 'kill-switch' for a device owner whose phone has been stolen seems to me to be a reasonable idea. I wonder if industry's reticence to implement this to date is based on a reasonable technical or product policy rationale. www.ft.com/content/cfa7...

It looks like last chance saloon in the UK for tech companies (and the government and regulator) to demonstrate to restless parliamentarians and parents groups why a social media ban isn't necessary. www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safet...

Interesting thread on theories of change for (AI) tech accountability. My personal bugbear with the 'change it from the inside' aspiration is that it wholly under-accounts for the degree to which Big Tech internal governance structures are both abnormally underpowered and hierarchical

The House of Lords has been questioning the UK government on UK-EU regulatory alignment on online platform regulation (i.e. the Digital Services Act). Nothing ground-breaking in the response, save a signalling that the long-delayed EU : UK Digital Dialogue will happen in the near future.

The UK government has announced that Caroline Wilson, a career diplomat, will be the next UK Ambassador to the EU. She's previously held UK diplomatic postings in Moscow and Beijing - essential hardening for the negotiations on veterinary standards and visa-free travel for musicians 🙃

More than most subjects of lawmaking, online safety is an area where procedural legitimacy in the rulemaking process is essential because of what's at stake for rights, etc. In the long-run, the optics of this move could be as damaging for the online regulatory project as the substance of it.

As a benchmark of how newspaper values have fallen, this is slightly less in cash terms than was offered for it in 2004. Should be a bit over £1bn.

"On the internet, no one knows you're a <checks notes> regulator". www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safet...

A new Ofcom investigation, this time into the provider of two online 'image board' services. The fact of not naming the service, and the nature of duties the provider is alleged to be non-compliant in respect of, implies another low reach, high risk service. www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safet...

'X had outlined several grounds in its application for a stay, claiming that the continuation of [CnaM's] investigation would cause the platform serious and irreparable harm.' I have a long list of more pressing sources of 'serious and irreparable harm' facing X www.irishtimes.com/business/202...

The EU Commission's expert panel looking into whether to implement a social media ban for kids had its first meeting today. Recommendations to be finalised in summer. I wonder if they're allowed recommend to 'keep working with your existing tools'. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/...

New Zealand is moving towards a comprehensive online safety regulatory framework, with a new parliamentary report setting out recommendations for government. Amongst them: ➡️DSA-style gradated content responsibility ➡️A new independent regulator, styled on the UK's Ofcom and IE's CnaM

The UK government comms zeitgeist that insists on framing every activity as 'world-leading' or 'world-beating' has now infiltrated the traditionally dry domain of public consultations. Is nothing sacred?

Six months ago, Labour conjured-up the slogan 'delivery, delivery, delivery' to describe its organising principle for government. The idea that it's too 'complicated' to simply implement and enforce a law that <checks notes> is already in force doesn't bode well for 'delivery' writ large.

We're witnessing an increasing intersection of the data protection and content regulation domains, and it's going to keep policy and compliance pros on their toes in 2026. I spoke to @techpolicypress.bsky.social about the latest example of this interplay. www.techpolicy.press/privacy-regu...

The lesson this morning in British politics is the same one that's been delivered in every electoral moment since the mid-2010s: Britons will keep voting for change until they see it.

⏰ Call for #tenders altert for public #discourse, #democracy, and #politicalscience researchers: There is a new EU pilot project on "Advancing Social Cohesion in the Face of Polarized Public Discourse" The project seeks to "produce concrete, actionable outcomes to better understand and address […]