Fintech professional’s tech predictions: 4 – Social media regulation

This is the fourth prediction from a fintech contact of mine making tech predictions for the next five years.

The previous blog posts in this series predicted that tech firms will soon need government certificates if producing news content, to fight against fake news, and the cyber security risks associated with smart energy meters and the risks associated with sharing data.

Read part 1 here.

Read part 2 here.

Read part 3 here.

In this entry he talks about social media platforms facing an inevitable tightening of regulations they have to adhere to. Social media platforms are increasingly hitting the news for all the wrong reasons, hmm Facebook, so this makes sense.

“Governments will introduce regulation and monitoring for social media systems which may include limitations on functionality as well as stronger oversight, much in the same way banking regulation evolved following poor behaviour in that industry. This may lead to de-globalisation of the large operators if regulations differ in each country where they permit use today. Tougher criminal penalties will be introduced for website companies and management teams will be prosecuted personally. Authorities may seed test data into specific systems and trace its usage to build legal cases and generate evidence against website operators.”

This series of blog posts came about following a conversation with one of my contacts. He had lots of predictions for tech over the next few years and I thought I should share them and get some comments from the wider public.

A few of the predictions might be a statements of the obvious to those more closely involved, so he sent them in context of trends emerging over the next 1 to 5 years.