Children’s Code and Social Media

Today the UK’s Children’s Code, governing how online services should treat children’s data, comes into force which affects online platforms used by children. Sacha Lazimi, CEO and co-founder of Yubo (@yubo_app), the leading platform for Gen Z to socialise online comments on the introduction of this code

Sacha Lazimi, CEO and co-founder of Yubo:

‘We welcome the introduction of the Children’s Code today in the UK. Safety and wellbeing online should be at the heart of every social media company but especially when this concerns individuals under the age of 18. We fully support an ad free model across social media sites and other platforms which children use which will ultimately provide a better and safer environment for children online. Age verification should also become the norm when creating social media profiles, however once an age is verified there must be practices in place to protect those under 18 which we have already started to see from some of the larger online platforms these past weeks.

As a company who caters only to Gen Z, we have always had young people’s best interests at the heart of everything we do and have, since the launch of Yubo, verified the age of users to ensure their safety and wellbeing on the platform. Through our identification tools we make sure to keep users under the age of 18 in a separate community from those over the age of 18 with ever evolving community guidelines to make sure our users stay and understand how to stay safe online. Unlike other social media companies we also operate on a ‘freemium’ business model where we do not rely on making money from the selling of user’s data or through in-app advertising. Instead we look to monetise through social commerce where our user’s can buy premium features on the platform.’