media update’s Adam Wakefield dives into these new developments and why they're important.

WhatsApp age-limit to be raised

According to Jan Vermeulen, writing for MyBroadband.co.za, WhatsApp might be raising the minimum age of its users in South Africa to 18.

Michalsons managing attorney John Giles, speaking to Vermeulen, says WhatsApp could be instituting this change in about 18 months, before the end of the grace period for organisations to be fully compliant with the Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act.

Facebook, which owns WhatsaApp, has also recently changed the terms of service for the messaging platform so that it complies with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“The GDPR and POPI are similar when it comes to how the personal data of children must be protected, except that, under the GDPR, a child is effectively someone under 16 for the purposes of data protection,” Giles says.

Under POPI, a child is someone younger than 18 years. It also makes it unlawful to collect the personal data of minors without consent from a competent person.

In Giles’ view, if WhatsApp follows the same logic applied to the GDPR to POPI, or interprets POPI in the same way, the age limit will be raised to 18 in South Africa.

Unskippable Snapchat ads

Snapchat is reportedly going to start testing unskippable ads in its TV-like shows.

According to three sources, and Snap itself, Digiday senior editor Lucia Moses says selected Snapchat Shows will be used to test unskippable six-second ads, with the experiment expected to start around Tuesday, 15 May.

The test will run on Snapchat Shows produced by publishers. These shows are three to five minutes in length, highly produced and, importantly, as noted by Moses, is content that viewers are used to seeing ads in.

This decision comes in light of the backlash against Snapchat’s recent redesign, with Snap now reportedly looking into ways to roll it back.

Facebook will not pay publishers' fees for their content

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg has quashed the idea that the social media platform and media company will pay news organisations an annual fee for their content.

Peter Kafka, senior editor for media at Recode, reported on Tuesday, 1 May that Zuckerburg is unsure that proposal makes sense, and believes users come to Facebook to communicate with people, not to consume news.

Zuckerburg recently attended Off the Record, an annual gathering of journalists and media executives hosted by The Information, Quartz and Buzzfeed.

At the event, he repeatedly emphasised Facebook’s interest in helping people subscribe to their content. However, according to Kafka, Zuckerburg appeared to be unfamiliar with arguments made by the likes of News Corp, Buzzfeed and 21st Century Fox, who say that Facebook should pay the equivalent of a carriage fee to access their content.

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*Image courtesy of Freepik

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