Under-16s will be banned from using social media, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced.
Starmer says social media is making children unhappy, making it easier for bullies to abuse children, and is “designed to be addictive”. A ban would give children more time, security, and more freedom to grow up - as well as more opportunities, he adds.
“That is all any parent wants. They want to know that Britain will be better for their children, that they will get a fair chance,” the PM says in a speech in Downing Street.
Starmer adds that the government is “not prepared to compromise” on the safety and happiness of children - and that includes in the regulation and enforcement of this ban. He says the government has listened to and learned from countries like Australia, where a similar ban has already been introduced.
I’m not entirely sure how that’s panning out in Aus (a quick search suggests it’s a flop, but the sources aren’t great). I think the general consensus is that it’s not as enforceable as they hoped.
We are moving towards an era of a more locked down web in the UK. The main flag here is “robust age verification” - i.e. we’re moving from “you must provide ID to view adult material on social media” to “you must provide ID to use social media”.
One can quickly see “your id must be retained and linked to your account to reduce crime” and “any officer of the law may view this ID to better support crime reduction” slipping in over the next 20 years or so.
Overall, this feels like another Trojan horse to move towards a China-style de-anonymised web. Bad move all around really.
I’m in Australia and it’s shit for everyone. The whole thing was basically conceived by SportsBet so they could advertise on social media with impunity.
My kids are on more social media platforms than I am. So are all their friends. It hasn’t slowed anything in that regard.
I can say, none of the shady bootleg porn sites have implemented blocking. So there’s always that.
I’ve survived so far without doing a face scan or ID check. Most of my social media accounts are over 16 years old anyway.
UK assuming everyone online is a child unless they are willing to have their passport leaked.
I am in favor of keeping kids off of social media, but I think the method of ID verification as default is entirely wrong.
Parents should ultimately be responsible for the activity of their child. If you can’t trust your child to use the internet/social media responsibly, they simply should not be given access to smart devices.
If a kid gets onto social media and does stupid things there, go after the parents for neglect. The same would happen if I wasn’t supervising my 8-year-old and they sneak off to vandalize someone else’s property.
At most, maybe conversations could happen with ISPs to standardize an optional whitelist system for home consumers with children to block access to key social media domains for unapproved devices, but that’s as far as I’d go. Empower parents with better supervisory tools to be more involved, no need to violate the rights of everyone else.
Parents should ultimately be responsible for the activity of their child. If you can’t trust your child to use the internet/social media responsibly, they simply should not be given access to smart devices.
When people say this, I always think about how we ID for alcohol. If it’s the parents responsibility, they should never let their kid be able to go to the store to buy alcohol in the first place. The store shouldn’t have to ID people. Except most people don’t make this argument. I suppose if you agree with that statement, then you’d be consistent.
If a kid gets onto social media and does stupid things there
The stupid thing is using it. It’s bad for kids development. It’s not dissimilar to drinking. You could blame the parents if the kids got into the alcohol in their own home, but the same would also go for kids using their parents social media accounts.
Empower parents with better supervisory tools to be more involved, no need to violate the rights of everyone else.
I know I have been playing devil’s advocate for online ID, but I think it will be implemented in a way that is a privacy nightmare and am not in favor of the way it’s being done. However, is anonymity a right? Before 1980, nobody really got anonymity unless you authored something under a pseudonym, which we can still do. When people were outspoken about civil rights violation, they were often just out there in the public as themselves. Sure they could wear masks, but you couldn’t hide like you can on the internet.
The internet has allowed both for more anonymity than ever and also more tracking of people than ever. I do think it’s coincidental that this is coming at the same time as the birth/growth of AI, but it does kind of serve a convenient second purpose of validating humans (or at least you know that a person is using an AI to post on their account). It’s unfortunate that it’s a benefit, but we live in an age where people using social media/the internet now have to constantly question their reality and if people are even real. I don’t see a good solution to that without violating our previous expectations of privacy.
If age/human verification going to be done, I think it should be done correctly. Age verification could be done through Zero Knowledge Proofs where it only verifies your age and nothing else. I think one day our ID’s will have rotating security keys built into them that will be used both for in person and online verification. You’d be able to decide what information is provided to the website, so that if they only wanted to know “Are you 21+” it would only provide a YES or NO, and that’s it. I’m sure there will be some online method for doing the same thing before then, but it’d need to be tied to some form of biometric verification like a fingerprint or else it could be used maliciously. The most likely scenario is we start off by using phones to tie the ID to the person, and have the phones require some form of biometric lock.
All that to say, we are realistically headed towards a future where the the anonymity we were used to will be no more. At least for any website that doesn’t want AI spam. While just uploading pictures of our ID’s to websites is a terrible idea, it’s what the idiots in charge will likely have us do as this new process starts. If they’d let the smart people take their time to do it right, the whole thing wouldn’t be nearly as bad.
You only get ID’d for alcohol if you look like a kid. I haven’t been carded in years. And when you do get carded, they look at your license, check the date, and hand it right back. No copies are saved to a database that could get leaked who-knows-where.
If a social media site is concerned that a user may be underage, I’m fine with them asking for some sort of verification. But a blanket request on everyone to ID themselves by default is just not the way.
You only get ID’d for alcohol if you look like a kid
Depends on the place
And when you do get carded, they look at your license, check the date, and hand it right back.
This is true for most places. There’s nothing stopping a creep from memorizing more than they should, but that’s of course an edge case.
While uncommon, there are places such as casinos that take everyones ID and use an ID scanner to add them to a local, or not local, database. Places that do that really are no different from websites that want to ID. Except with a website you’d provide it once, and at those facilities you have to have it scanned each time you go in.
But a blanket request on everyone to ID themselves by default is just not the way.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s a terrible idea and is going to spell disaster for many people. I am not arguing we should have websites collect IDs, my argument is about whether age verification on websites should exist in any form, even if it’s securely setup. Many people here think age verification is strictly a problem of parenting, and I think that’s an absurd argument.
When people say this, I always think about how we ID for alcohol. If it’s the parents responsibility, they should never let their kid be able to go to the store to buy alcohol in the first place. The store shouldn’t have to ID people. Except most people don’t make this argument. I suppose if you agree with that statement, then you’d be consistent.
One could argue that kids can go to shops that sell also alcohol, but I can get the logic.
Problem is that a parent cannot check on their kids 24/7, so maybe having a check other than the parent could be a good idea.
Stores should absolutely check for ID since there is no way for them to verify that the parents did their job.But scientific studies suggest alcohol physically toxic to kids! Social media is…
Well…
Also shown to be toxic. Like, measurably dangerous to your health.
(And I agree about the IDs. Honestly this should be done for alcohol too).
They learned from countries like Australia huh? Australian here, did they learn how much its not working 😂🙄! None of my kids have anything other than YouTube, but my 9yo knew how to get around it. He doesn’t because he just watches in a browser with ad blockers and we monitor it. My high schooler reports the many and varied ways kids just changed where they go online to continue their crap. Do I think under 16s should be on social media, no. But identity verification is not going to fix that.
This was never about protecting the children. That’s just an excuse to further promote mass surveillance and to exempt companies from responsibility for the additive design of their products and services. It’s easier and more rewarding to penalize the users.
Yep. I’ve since deleted it, but I had to verify my identity on my FB account, which i’d had since 2008. Math is a thing 🙄.
It should have the Zuck riding the horse. He’s the one pushing for this so the advertisers know if they are showing ads to people and not bots on his platforms.
He definitely isn’t. He already knows. This is 100% governments wanting to crack down on free speech. Look how many people the UK government already jails for social media posts.
Nah it is Netanyahu who is riding Keir directly and whipping him at the same time. What a pathetic excuse of a human. Next extension of this will be to jail anyone who says free Palestine in the internet. Such a convincing way to prove there is no genocide lol.
Pove you’re not a child so your data can be sold to advertisers so they can continue to sell you stuff.
The voters need to understand they aren’t doing this to “protect children”. They’re afraid to vote against it because they’ll look like they don’t want to protect children. We need to let them know we see through the ruse, and we won’t punish them at the polls for voting against this shit, but we will for passing it.
They might as well just introduce an umbrella ‘won’t somebody please think of the children act’. They’re moving very quickly from porn to social media, and the slope is starting to feel real slippery.
On the other hand everyone think that social media are dangerous for the children so something need to be done.
I am afraid that you cannot have children protection without some sort of control
There are innumerable far more dangerous things we teach them to protect themselves from. Which who knows could come in handy once they turn 16
True, but in my opinion social media are not seen as dangerous by a large part of the population, so nobody think that they should teach kids to protect themselves from them.
Personally, I’m of the view that a blanket ban is simply not going to work, and comes with all the same problems of the online safety act, mostly that the government, or the companies they employ to verify ages, simply cannot be trusted with that information. If control needs to be implemented, it should be in having mandatory parental control options, but ultimately I believe it to be the job of the parents to utilise them, not the government.
Personally, I’m of the view that a blanket ban is simply not going to work, and comes with all the same problems of the online safety act, mostly that the government, or the companies they employ to verify ages, simply cannot be trusted with that information.
Government already has your informations, problem are the companies. But in the end I think that the only viable option to have some sort of decent check is that the company try to verify the age with the government, which only answer yes|no.
If control needs to be implemented, it should be in having mandatory parental control options, but ultimately I believe it to be the job of the parents to utilise them, not the government.
Parental control failed time and again. In the end the problem are not the kids who follow what the parents say, but the others. And nowadays it seems that parents, first and foremost, are more than happy to let social media to keep their kid occupied.
As you say, the government already has that information, so while people might not be happy about that, it does seem a semi-reasonable way of confirming age. But the current plan is the reverse of that, with the government asking companies to conform age using a third party, which not only will definitely be using it for advertising purposes, but is more likely to get hacked, and all the information make it into even worse hands.
The problem with a ban in response to poor parenting is that it just disincentivises both the parents and children who have been doing it right until now, because if they’ll lose access all the same then what was the point of doing otherwise until now. And what would be the point of doing it right in future.
And what would be the point of doing it right in future.
I do the right thing because it is the right thing and not because I expect something in return. Then I may contest the law because it is stupid or I can follow it to the letter to show how stupid it is.
In the end people that do the right thing will continue, like parents who don’t give a damn will continue to don’t give a damn about it.
As do many people, but there are plenty others who will see this as being punished for doing the right thing, and will be less inclined to do so going forward. Whereas if this was addressed properly, it would continue to incentivise people who need that nudge to keep doing the right thing, whilst also pushing those less inclined to do the same.
I guess what I’m getting at is, this is just a terrible way to address a legitimate problem. Which seems to be the way this government operate.
As do many people, but there are plenty others who will see this as being punished for doing the right thing, and will be less inclined to do so going forward
Maybe, but I am more optimistic about that.
Well, if they just ban the over 16s as well, then we’ll have something.
More like to deanonymize anyone who uses social media.
This has nothing to do whatsoever with protecting children. That is not the goal. This is anti-privacy, plain and simple. Discussing the merits of this plan as a child protection measure is agreeing to their framing of the discussion, it’s agreeing to discuss it on their terms, and then you’ve already lost.
Here’s a real counterargument: suppose we pass this, and the fascists win the election (I know, completely and utterly unimaginable, but bear with me). Now, organizing protests via social media (as it went in Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, and so on) becomes impossible, because your actual identity is tied to your social media accounts. In the current climate the fascists will probably go after muslims first, so I hope you haven’t said scary things like insh’allah on facebook, because the government has your name now. Are you gay? Better hope you haven’t left a thirsty comment on the insta of someone of your gender, because the government will know.
Of course, we don’t need to imagine some hypothetical fascist government. I hope you don’t object to genocide and post about it online, because that can be declared support of terrorism at the drop of a hat, and that’s illegal.
and the fascists win the election
Mate….the fascists won the election. How can they push these laws and you still can’t see that?
The people who been calling everyone else fascists are the same people who have been begging every social media site, forum, and company for MORE CENSORSHIP for the last 5+ years. You wanted this because you thought it would only harm people you disagree with. You thought wrong.
People throw the word fascists around so loosely these days… it diminishes its meaning.
You wanted this because you thought it would only harm people you disagree with. You thought wrong.
Don’t talk to me like I’m some liberal.
How do you get an entire population of adults to voluntarily scan their faces and submit them to Palantir?
By banning them from the Internet
Aren’t they already scanned? Don’t know about the UK but in modern countries there are cameras everywhere
Typical. Punish the individual, but don’t ever address the underlying social causes.
Capitalism
People better start remembering the 5th of November real soon.
Why stop at 16
Get rid of all of it
We never needed it anyway
I agree, but on the ageism point. The thing that needs to be done is regulation so that manipulative design is reduced. Its the corporations that are the problem. Bans only target the victims the most.
Consequences for rich people? Not blaming their victims?!? Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway??
