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.
… Announced on a social media site owned by a man who encouraged Pogroms and generates CSAM for profit.
Oh the hypocrisy… The fascists live on it, and no one bats an eye.
…and that is why we need the ban! /s
“Oh no, this is terrible” cry the social media sites, while working out just how much your passport details and home address are worth to advertisers.
…and certain government agencies using corporate fronts.
And that fucking Eye of Sauron.
And then they get “hacked” and don’t know anything about it.
Age verification and identification is not the same thing.
It will be.
Zero knowledge proof is a thing, but we all know that’s not what they’re going for.
If we’d stayed in the EU it would have been a legal requirement to employ ZKP.
Social media is absolutely addictive and making people unhappy.
But how do you enforce this without removing anonymity?
Once again, they’re going the corporate/government friendly route of surveillance. Ban VPNs, age vefification, soon we’ll be required to use biometric checks to access the internet.
These chucklefucks will do anything other than attempt to solve the problem. Which is more education and help for parents while holding parents and the corporations accountable. But that would cost money rather than having lobbyists and donors fund them even more so 🤷♂️
It all comes back to capitalism.
Maybe ban algorithmically-delivered content? So, for example, consider YouTube. The only way to get content would be to search for videos or to subscribe to individual channels. You can still have a user-curated experience, but that curation must be actively done by the user. This would at least prevent feed algorithms selecting for engagement and rage.
I would rather target the worst practices of social media companies in general, rather than try and keep kids from them. It’s not like adults aren’t harmed by this stuff either.
As I said, hold the corporations accountable. It was never about children in the first place.
This is my biggest issue with it.
Social media has become a blight on society on all levels. Not just children.
But, there’s a lack of education or push for children, and adults too, to be smarter online. They’re just instituting laws and legislation and pushing the onus on corporations to comply.
Sounds good at face value but doesn’t factor in smaller companies who are unable to afford the changes needed to comply (resulting in the pulling out of a region) or they institute dodgey 3rd party verification systems that will just on-sell your data.
Then, there’s the world of dodgey VPNs that kids and people have rushed to. Also, as other people have said, children have found work arounds for age verification.
So, what’s the point? What did we actually achieve? I sometimes defer to the old addage of never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Sometimes I feel it’s more like naievity or good intenaions being controlled by malicious forces.
I don’t know.
What I feel though is that it just doesn’t feel like it’s truly about the children. If it is, there should be a whole lot more factored into this.
Instead it feels like a half baked plan being sold to us as being for the children.
It’s a moral panic being co-opted by those in power. (Ironically, many of those in power being predators themselves, especially here in the US where they’re a major political party 🙃)
Some I can think of off the top of my head:
- The Patriot Act
- COINTELPRO
- The Satanic Panic and resultant legislation
- The War on Drugs
Legitimate concern gets amplified to a moral panic and then legislation is quickly put forth but is never tested or thoroughly understood. And given that most legislation today is written by lobbyists…well 🤷♂️
I’m sure stupidity is a part of it, but that might be a bit too convenient. It’s usually some genuine intention that then gets swept up and captured by malicious infrastructure. They know what they’re doing. They’re narcissists, unempathetic, and the most willing to exploit. Capitalism in a nutshell.
That’s why I’m saying hold the parents and the corporations accountable. Peel back data collection and restrict algorithmic content altogether. Enforce/provide parental education for online technologies and children. Basically, pay attention to your kids, be interested in them and their lives. The infrastructure exists on these social media platforms to restrict and monitor access, as well as it exists at the router level and at the device level as well. It’s the parents who purchase the device and provide internet access. Would we be ok with in home governmental inspections on all of us so that kids can’t have access to a gun or alcohol? No, it’s up to the parent to protect their child from danger. Why is this any different? Why should we all give up our privacy?
how do you enforce this without removing anonymity?
That’s the point - you don’t.
Another factor is making executives of those companies personally responsible for all the havoc they have created while only thinking of their profits. Do that, make the penalties tough enough, and the problem ia fixed.
I just wonder who the hell is asking for this from the population? Out of all the things that are being brought up as issues on either side (like immigrants, trans rights, energy, housing crisis, the wars etc) I’ve never seen this being brought up as the thing anyone has wanted.
How have we reached this level of “democracy” where even protesting is banned…
Capitalism always trends toward fascism, this is nothing new.
Nothing new, and yet we still do need to talk about it.
Absolutely! I did not want to lessen the conclusion, instead I urge to look at the historic and economic context so it becomes clear this is no accident.
OAPs who don’t understand how the internet or young people work and Age Verification companies.
Emphasis on age verification companies and other beneficiaries…
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.
It is possible to create anonymous age verification. I doubt the UK will pursue, but it is possible. Check out what Denmark did.
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.
A kid circumventing internet controls should not lead to charges against the parent. What a shit take.
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’s insane that they’ll say it’s designed to be addictive, and then just let the company keep doing that. Like maybe go after the entity producing the addictive substance directly then?
All social media is designed to be addictive, though. It’s their entire business model.
Lemmy and the whole Fediverse is social media. What do you think social media is?
Its a webforum, not a social media.
Social media is places that revolve around shit in your real life no one cares about. Facebook, Instagram,Tiktok,Etc.
Reddit and the Fediverse are listed in the Wikipedia article about social media as social media:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
Social media is media where people can socialize.
First of all, Don’t blatantly lie about the very thing you are linking to. It is not listed as social media.
They simply say some people (mostly idiots) refer to it as social media.
So thats already points on you for intentionally and willfully misrepresenting information.
Also the entire article is bunk cause it calls Mozilla and Minecraft social media. Which is stupid. Because Mozilla is a fucking company that makes a browser, and Minecraft is a goddamn game.
Second of all, You can wrongly refer to something as social media all you want.
I can write Fuck You on a brick and throw it through your window, and just because I
Call it Macaronirefer to it as social media, doesnt magically make it social media.First of all, Don’t blatantly lie about the very thing you are linking to. It is not listed as social media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media#Decentralization_and_open_standards
“While the dominant social media platforms are not interoperable, open source protocols such as ActivityPub have been adopted by platforms such as Mastodon, GNU social, Diaspora, and Friendica. They operate as a loose federation of mostly volunteer-operated servers, called the Fediverse.”
The problem isn’t me wrongly referring to Lemmy and Reddit and other forums as social media. The problem is pretty much the entire world doing it. So until that gets fixed, it’s probably best not to call for the destruction of social media.
and a large part of that is the up/down vote systems, and other gamifications of human interaction.
And they’ve spread out of social media into many other website types.
All it does is extremify human interaction and is a major component in why we’re at the point we are right now with right wing extremism and fascism on the rise.
Get rid of these systems, and let people just communicate with eachother without having to appeal to a hive mind to tell people who gave up thinking if somethings good or bad based on votes/reactions/etc
I think it’s insane because social media is addictive because being social and communicating with fellow human beings is addictive. That’s what you and me are doing here and why we find it so pleasurable. That is not a bad thing.
It’s a bizarre lesson to drill into our children’s brains that this is a negative thing. I assume they don’t really know what social media is and see it as distinct, more like the one way communication of comic books, rock n roll, and other media moral panics, and they assume children will too. But what will happen to the next generation is that they will see all forms of human interaction as horribly addictive, amoral, and unhealthy.
The algorithm is the problem
The engagement-based algorithmic feed is the problem. Kids being able to talk to strangers is also an issue, but that isn’t because of addiction, and I personally think public chats should just be opt-in with the expectation that the parents will actually do their job and teach their children not to talk to strangers.
Pove you’re not a child so your data can be sold to advertisers so they can continue to sell you stuff.
It’s not just advertisers by a long shot, they aren’t even the main customers in most respects now. Governments want all of that information and buy it, as do other commercial interests, including security consultants and contractors like Palantir.
Governments can use go betweens to buy the information too, China for instance, is likely getting every single piece of information sold by data brokers. The entire thing is a joke, on us, because it’s not about the kids, it’s about locking down the internet and crafting social scores based on everything we have said or done online and off run through half baked ai threat detection.
Starmer is a fascist cunt that will hand the government to openly fascist cunts, but yay, go team! /s
It’s great cos then those sites asking for ID will just lose tons of traffic and advertisers will be wasting their money
More like to deanonymize anyone who uses social media.
I think there’s a rational argument for saying anonymous social media is what Russia, China and other dictatorships use to undermine and affect public opinion, to be fair.
I’m not saying therefore anonymity shouldn’t be allowed. I’m just saying there’s a nuance here…
Homegrown capitalists and the states they control are far more profligate and effective at social media manipulation than either Russia or China. Don’t forget that it was Facebook and Cambridge Analytica that made Brexit happen, not Russia or China. Although I guess you did say dictatorships, so that includes the dictatorship of capital that rules the west.
Myeah, sure, maybe, maybe not. But whatever the source, anonymity does enable well-resourced actors to affect opinion change.
anonymous social media is what Russia, China and other dictatorships use to undermine and affect public opinion
You talk from the past. Nowadays bots are less anonymous than real people.
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.
Well, if they just ban the over 16s as well, then we’ll have something.
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
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.
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.
Any government that oversteps so much that it thinks its role is as the parent, must be abolished.
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??
