By any measure, opening a bank account in the United Kingdom is a serious business. You prove who you are, where you live, and pass security checks designed to stop fraud and protect the public. Yet on social media—platforms that shape elections, fuel abuse, and influence our children—anyone can appear with a fake name, no identity, and no accountability.
It’s an absurd imbalance, and rather than ban people from social media, it’s time we corrected it.
If we were to apply the same identity-verification rules used by UK banks to the creation of social media accounts it would be a long-overdue step toward basic digital responsibility—one that would reduce fraud, curb anonymous abuse, and help law enforcement respond to real threats.
Banks don’t demand ID to be nosy – they do it to keep the system safe. The same logic applies online. Social media has become a place where anonymous accounts can target individuals, spread disinformation, or commit fraud with near-zero risk.
A system could be established where users would verify their identity using a government-issued document, proof of address, and a simple biometric check—just as they would at a bank. Crucially, this doesn’t mean everyone must post under their real name. Pseudonyms and anonymity in public spaces would remain. But behind the scenes, platforms would be required to know who is using their services, and to share that information with law enforcement when legally required.
Some might argue that such a policy could harm people without standard documents. But there are alternative verification pathways—through trusted charities, local authorities, schools or emerging digital-identity schemes. The intent is not exclusion, but protection.
Victims of online harassment know the pain of being attacked by nameless profiles. This policy would give those victims something they rarely get today: a real route to justice.
Tech companies already verify users when money changes hands or when accounts reach influencer-level audience sizes. Formalising and expanding these checks is not an undue burden. The real burden is the one society currently carries: scam victims losing savings, teenagers facing relentless abuse, and citizens struggling to trust the information they see.
The proposal could roll out gradually, giving platforms ample time to build verification systems. In return, Britain would gain a more civil, trustworthy, and safe digital public square.
No one is banning free speech. No one is silencing dissent. What this policy would do is require the same level of identity assurance we already accept in banking, renting, or accessing public services. It raises the bar for those who use the online world as a shield for wrongdoing while preserving the freedom for ordinary people to speak without fear.
For too long, social media companies have profited from chaos while shrugging off responsibility. Bringing bank-level verification to online accounts is not radical. It’s common sense. And it’s time.
We could go one step further and make people who publish online – whether individuals, influencers, or organisations – legally responsible for what they post.
To do this we would need to extend existing publisher-liability principles into the digital realm. The groundwork for this idea already exists in UK law, particularly in the debates around press standards and libel outlined in several Culture, Media and Sport reports I was privileged to take part in, including those where my casting vote accused the Murdoch’s of being unfit to run a business, and of being wilfully blind to what was going on in their publications.
But first, let’s know who is behind the scams, the lies and misinformation that is damaging our public discourse and creating so much division and hurt within our communities.
* Adrian Sanders is the Honorary President of Devon & Cornwall Liberal Democrats, and was the MP for Torbay from 1997 to 2015.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
The Joy of Six 1528
Endometriosis and acetylation
Reform makes first gain from Conservatives in this by-election cycle
How Chancellor Reeves torpedoed the economy
Michael Meadowcroft: A Liberal of Intellectual Rigour and Uncommon Integrity
Geoff Reid
Tom Bailey
Leonora Scipio
Kira Collins
Daniel Walker
13 Comments
I think in principle these are excellent ideas which would go a long way to cleaning up social media. As you say, aside from issues of misinformation, it would also make social media safer: People are much less like to threaten others or abuse or harass women if they know they can easily be identified.
But there is a lot of detail that would need to be worked out:
– How can you enforce checks similar to bank account checks without making it too hard and expensive to launch new social media platforms, and therefore stifle competition?
– How do you deal with the mass of social media posts that are about the UK but come from outside the UK?
– How do you ensure that people maintain their privacy for normal casual posting? (In other words, guarantee that their actual identity can only be accessed by competent authorities and only if there is a legitimate reason? And avoid security breaches?
– Where do you draw the line between a social media post vs private conversation vs group chat etc.?
Sorry, but absolutely not.
To state the obvious, large social media platforms are international, and the UK could only attempt to implement this for UK users. Foreign users and bot farms will still be free to post whatever they like. Plus anyone who knows how to use a VPN or other method to disguise location can avoid it.
And there are legimate reasons in the public interest to post anonymously e.g. whistleblowers, and the effect *will* be exclusionary for some.
The big social media platforms have convinced the world that they neither could nor should “police” the content users post, and should not be responsible for it. This is a false premise – they are more than capable of taking stronger action against hate speach, bullying, misinformation and scams, but they choose not to.
A first step would be to recategorise social media companies as publishers where they serve content to users, which users have not asked for and/or have no control over. Thus this includes the use of algorithms to determine what user/consumers see, adverts, any “you might be interested in this” feeds, any ordering of posts beyond straight chronological order of receipt, and additionally, the lack of obvious controls that permits a user to block any unasked for content and block the social media company from publishing their posts to people beyond their friends and groups.
I think then the social media network operators would become receptive to improving their service…
While it’s important for law enforcement to have some way of tracing hate speech and bot-generated content back to its originators, giving social media platforms like Meta and Twitter (now called X) your full name and address is a really silly idea. Zuckerberg and Musk et al know enough about us already without being gifted our name, address and bank account details as well!
I post on social media under various pseudonyms (this one included) because – for some of us at least – it’s important to keep certain aspects of our lives separate and private. Yes, allow law enforcement to trace posts (given a court order) if necessary, but gifting that information to social media platforms will only enrich them further at everybody else’s expense.
I’m trans. Should i have to appear under my deadname which makes my skin crawl, considering all my documents are assigned to it?
WWW = Wild West Without a Sheriff!
When we cannot control the harmful content on British TV how can we expect to control the world wide Web?
If the platforms will not do more they must be stopped from access in the UK.
Draconian? Yes Edfective? Yes but with side effects. Yes
Making posts illegal without the name of the person posting would be a start. It would not stop free speech. It wouldensure posting was owned by the writer and might even be taken up in other countries.
@Stefano: You fairly easily could to it without people having to give details to Meta/X/etc. Just have some agency which is the organisation you confirm your identity with, That agency could be very highly regulated – to the level that a bank is, or perhaps even actually be a bank you have an account with and which therefore already knows your identity anyway. Then social media platforms could be required to check with a suitable agency that you are a verified actual person. But the crucial thing is – the agency would simply confirm that they do have details of who you are: They wouldn’t actually supply those details to the social media platform.
It’s roughly the same principle as when you try to login to a website and you get the option to authenticate with Google: Google does the authentication, and then confirms to the website that you are a valid user.
No, no, no.
Social media and a bank account are totally different things. Anonymity on the Internet can be abused, yes, but it also allows people from marginalised groups to have a voice and be themselves in safety. I’m mostly quite open about who I am online, but keep business and personal separate for many reasons, and in some cases I want to lurk anonymously for privacy. Hard as it might be for some people to understand, but there’s a reason no one lives their lives completely in the open, and “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” is wrong.
Authoritarian governments would love nothing more than to be able to have everyone identified and monitored online, as would criminal organisations and foreign powers that then get a goldmine of personal information. The so-called “online safety” laws in the UK have already seen breaches to access all that lovely personal information, wrapped in the illusion of protection and safety. Again, people are going after the symptoms, and not targeting the real problems.
I don’t trust online identity verification systems. They are often not secure and not compliant with data-protection standards (heard of the Discord data leak?). They also tend to rely on AI without bothering with any human intervention to correct any incorrect judgements. The industry is under-regulated, so introducing it would just move users from one “Wild West” to another. Also if the verification system is “government-backed”, how can one be sure it won’t “phone home” to government with details of what one has posted on any web forum? Be careful what you wish for. Imagine what a Reform-led government might do with the information collected.
As for treating social media companies as “publishers”, with the implication that they are directly liable for every single thing posted on them, this would have a chilling effect on all user-generated content, as it would be too dangerous to allow anything to be posted at all. “Social media” doesn’t just mean the big players, this proposal would affect community-driven efforts such as Wikipedia, small-scale community forums, startups that might in the future replace the current players. All gone. The big profit-making players (Facebook, X etc) would be able to survive as they could afford the armies of lawyers and content-checkers needed to operate as “publishers”, but no-one else would.
If you try to regulate the entire Internet as if it were Facebook or X, then soon Facebook and X will be the only things on the Internet.
@Alex – “ As for treating social media companies as “publishers”, with the implication that they are directly liable for every single thing posted on them”
You missed my point.
The original WhatsApp app was a messaging system: users set up their own groups and could only distribute posts to their groups, so WhatsApp Inc was a platforms or intermediary (aka carrier like the phone companies). Hence no need for algorithms or “carefully selected” adverts for products or other users.
The new WhatsApp app has probably crossed the boundary with its: “Find channels to follow” and recommendations of groups that might be of interest.
If we look at Facebook as it is today compared to what it was in 2016, you will see a far larger movement away from being a platform/intermediary towards pushing unrequested, and with no facility to disable, third-party content at its users.
Such a repositioning doesn’t impact existing exceptions for bulletin board and user content sites such as LDV.
@Roland: But the services still enable users to upload content to their platforms with no editorial control over what appears. And users can hide things they don’t want to see (even if it can be annoying to have to see them in the first place). So the use of algorithms to serve content does not automatically turn a “platform” into a “publisher”, and the principle that platforms should not be liable for 3rd-party content provided they comply with requests to take down unlawful content should still apply. I think the algorithms themselves should be much more heavily regulated, and not only for content aimed at minors. If it becomes clear that an algorithm is systematically selecting offensive content for some group of users, then the service should be mandated to modify it. But forcing pre-emptive control over everything uploaded (which is what would be required of any “publisher”) would not be appropriate and (echoing @John C above) would be tackling the symptoms rather than the cause.
@Alex – Perhaps a simple blanket recategorisation of the Social Media operators as publishers would lead to the issues you raise. However, even in the original debates there were voices suggesting a more nuanced stance, which where I am coming from, but poorly expressing.
To me we take the user-to-user communication as it is, thus in this context the social media operators are simple intermediaries, however when they determine what other content a user gets to see, they become publishers so all of that content is subject to the laws of publication.
So taking a very simple example, WhatsApp aren’t responsible for the content of dubious communications between serving police officers, however, if they recommend their chat group to me, they are, as a publisher, responsible for the content from that group they show me and that it is appropriate given the information they will have collected from me. An effect of this would be for the social media companies to pay more attention to and potential review the material posted by those wanting their posts to be published, just a newspaper will review submissions it receives before publishing.
With Facebook things are slightly different as part of the terms of service users grant Facebook the right to use all user uploaded content however they see fit.
@Roland: “when [platforms] determine what other content a user gets to see, they become publishers.” No they don’t. If they did, then content screening to remove objectionable (not necessarily illegal) content would also make them publishers. But many platforms do this (whether this is by an algorithm or a human), both the big services and small-scale blog platforms such as this one. The reason for not making them publishers is to protect them from lawsuits such as Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy.
So while I agree that social media platforms are not exactly “mere conduits” they are also not really publishers either.