“The government’s own figures show that the cost of unsafe social media is over £30bn per year. Watering down online safety bills would mean the UK continues to have to pay billions to clear up the mess caused by the US companies, and that’s not a good deal for us to strike.”

“But it also just doesn’t make any kind of economic sense. Right now we are all footing a huge bill for unsafe social media sites, for example in money lost to fraud, or in taxpayers’ money to deal with the fallout of the damage to mental health.

The UK's Online Safety Act designates fraud as a priority offence. Yet in its wisdom, @ofcom.bsky.social has decided not to include any user verification measures in its Illegal Content Codes of Practice - a huge missed opportunity to protect UK users from scams (and many other crimes).

Offering users verification, and making it easier for them to identify and avoid non-verified accounts, would help disrupt scammers' industrial scale "pig-butchering" operations, as we set out here: www.cleanuptheinternet.org.uk/post/new-rep...

2) What we are arguing here is that given Ofcom has identified fake and anonymous accounts as a "key" risk factor for multiple illegal harms, it should be recommending measures to mitigate the risks within the Illegal content codes, for platforms where it's a relevant risk (which would not be "all")

1) Our proposal is that relevant user-to-user sites be required to offer all users *optional* verification, combined with transparency as to who is and isn't verified and options for users to filter contact non-verified accounts. I.e. platforms are required to give users choices, not to force them

No, that's not what we're suggesting!