Social media bans and digital curfews to be trialled on UK teenagers
bbc.com
bbc.com
Yes, some teens are creative with uploading videos, most are not. But teens can still be creative with a smart phone, just don’t post that stuff on social media.
There were pedophiles, porn, extreme gore, cults, scams and a primitive notion of brainrot. Music and games (not that I played games, but honestly my mum thought that this is why I liked computers and what I was doing) were generally thought to turn kids into killers.
Computer users even in the best conditions (and not children) were looked at negatively- as if they were no life losers. The techbro thing, and the normalisation of computer use is a very modern notion.
FWIW I had the same exact situation as the parent, and heard it all from my mum. The computer was considered undesirable at best and actively harmful at worst.
My point is: on a societal level, the numbers are pretty clear that teens consume too much media (and social media is even more addictive) and their skills and attention span deteriorate.
The “computers were considered dangerous” means that people generally thought they were dangerous, especially to children.
Do I believe the UK is doing this for the right reason or the right way? Absolutely not. But I also don't agree with the comparison of now and when I was a kid/teen.
Every generation has grumpy old people complaining about the youth. I see the dumb TikTok videos that grumpy old people complain about today, and they're about 2 steps above the absolute slop Gen X adults used to watch in the early 2000s: reality TV. Now grumpy old people watch political streamers saying we need to ban (new thing) because it's making kids stupid.
We just didn’t have those back in the day.
99% of today's social media usage is the opposite of productive, too bad the laws concentrate on policing internet use though.
But was access to that outlet really that free for you? I remember our main computer being in the middle of the living room where everyone in the family could potentially see what i was doing on the computer. I remember dial up being extremely expensive (or "broadband" have really low monthly caps) or the connection dropped the moment anyone would pickup the phone at home. Or use of computer/internet in schools being in public. I also remember all i had to learn to overcome these limits and the choices (cost/benefit analysis) i had to make to overcome those barriers. Those barriers not only provided the learning opportunities but also the necessary friction to reevaluate patterns and decisions.
Do you think the current state of access really replicates that? Are barriers really only "bad"?
They can use their computer however. That’s fine. It’s the engagement based social media and constant comms via messaging that’s the issue.
I find that she doesn’t actually use it all the time and goes and does other stuff like reading and recently drawing and painting.
Parents are up against some of the wealthiest companies on earth, and the fear of socially excluding their kids by limiting their usage. Systemic change is never going to come from parents on this one.
https://www.live5news.com/2025/02/28/former-high-school-hono...
Nineteen-year-old Aleysha Ortiz says she graduated from high school with honors and earned a college scholarship, but she can’t read or write.
A lot of my youngest's peers are pretty illiterate still at 13. They have trouble with more than a few minutes of concentration. They track reading age and the average is declining every year as they arrive at secondary school which is causing a big panic in UK education. I think some of this data is driving the legislation changes as well.
I'd have preferred the government to have targeted the social media and attention companies personally. Extremely high taxation would be a good start much as we do for cigarettes and alcohol. If the business is no longer viable at that point they can quite frankly fuck off.
The verification controls are possibly a bigger problem which has serious consequences for society going forwards. Things aren't too bad now but in the future, the information and data that is available makes the nazis and the stasi look like amateurs.
At some point, you have to ask how much of the rhetoric is driven by hysteria and moral panic and how much of it is driven by what the actual evidence shows.
From the Guardian[1]:
> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.
From Nature[2]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist[4], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[5] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same[6]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[7] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[8] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...
[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...
[7] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/
[8] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...
I can do the same if I want the other way. But it's not worth my time.
There are a lot of strong feelings around social media, and I'm no fan, but I'm not going to walk head first into a moral panic, or participate in witch hunt, without knowing the facts.
In the end, ad hominem arguments don't affect the validity of evidence. I was hoping to have an interesting discussion, but I see that if you aren't politically correct on this topic, evidence will be outright dismissed and the messenger shot for delivering it.
The point was simply things which are costly to society should be taxed. I am not comparing each thing to each other.
Society has a responsibility and an interest in parenting your kids as well. That's why it mandates some level of education and offer parts of it for free. It's why it has stores/bars check ID for buying alcohol or cigarettes. It's why banks don't give loans or credit cards to kids. It's why kids that commit a crime are not treated like adults.
So I never really understood that argument that society shouldn't also be worried and want to put some measures in place to protect kids from social media harm.
And I agree that regulation that can help parent do parenting would be a good start, so many services have such poor parental control, or it's behind an extra fee. Or in general, parents are not given support in both appropriate time off, financial, help, and education to be better parents.
That said, there are also so many bad parents, child without one, and so on, as well as external influences where parents can't reasonably be present for 24h/7, that I think there is also room for measures that don't rely on parents. And again, I reckon some of the ideas on what those could be conflict with other ideals, and I have no solution for that, but I think we won't find a solution by simply denying what the other cares about, which I often see happening. Either one side claims privacy don't matter as much as those that care about do, or they claim that children and their safety/health doesn't matter as much as those that care about it do. And I see both often pushing the problem away, like, parents should just not let kids to these things, or privacy conscious folks just shouldn't expect privacy on major platform and not use them.
There are multi-billionar dollar industries targeting the attention of your child. Many adults have problems resisting.
Are you using any technical measures to limit what they can see or do?
Edit: just asked her and she’s on book 7 this year. That’s a whole lot better for you than doom scrolling.
That clearly is required here, but the scale of the existing and potential harm is such that relying on parenting only is the equivalent of using paper instead of plastic straws when the worlds biggest companies and militaries are burning down the environment.
There’s a lot to do in the world. Social media isn’t very attractive if you go and do those things. I’d you don’t then it becomes a portal to a narrow view of the world and then there is trouble.
Half of me wants us to ban it for adults too.
The coordinated track that governments around the world are on (sponsored by corporations), is that governments and corps will be able to monitor and track individuals online - people will be deanonymised (via OS logins, no side loading, 'protect the children'). The ostensibly kind desires are just sugar.
Even if you accept that fact that people are online too much (by choice), teens are drinking/smoking less. When you push one thing another pops out. Forcing 'good' conformity on others, is actually psychological meddling. In my view meddling with another's desires (even if it's for their own good, in your opinion) is a form of psychological abuse. Inner re-engineering of others should not be normalised or accepted because it is done by government.
Having corporations in the role of 'bad cop', allows the illusion that the government is 'good cop', and that they can manage reality for the greater good.
However, the only entity that can manage reality, is the individual for themselves. Working with a constrained subset of reality, means you do not actually have the full picture.
Perversely, not having the full picture, means that people pretend that someone else has got this for us (government). Seeking an external authority, rather than working through reality personally, prevents the individual from building up the correct understanding: only you can manage yourself correctly. Having information hidden from you supports the idea that individuals are not capable of managing themselves, and encourages 'looking outside for help' aka nannying to manage one's difficulties. It puts people into a state of neoteny - prolonged adolescence - which benefits those who use psychopathic/narcissistic tricks. It's a choreographed, incremental ballet, that is intended to get 'the people' to a destination (technocratic governance) that no one would choose.
The state can, at least in theory, be structured to serve rather than exploit us.
On top of that, the idea that individuals have the time, energy, or inclination to completely manage their own "reality" rather than relying on external authorities is daft imo. At some point we need to trust and rely on eachother and there are various entities beyond nation states that are set up specifically for that too.
.. and governments are the same.
I believe we already live in a form of fascism where business and governments are aspects of the same entity.
> The state can, at least in theory, be structured to serve rather than exploit us.
I disagree. It can soak up believers energy though, forcing people against others who they have no personal issues with.
> On top of that, the idea that individuals have the time, energy, or inclination to completely manage their own "reality" rather than relying on external authorities is daft imo.
It might be daft in your opinion, but assuming the answers you want will be provided externally could be a working definition of insanity, imo.
And so do you not trust health advice from the WHO? Do you do your own controlled trials instead?
But we all know this is not happening because governments profit greatly and have much to gain from their symbiotic relationships with tech companies. So it's easier to hassle tax payers, or in this case children to gain political points.
We all talk about some great thing but we never define that thing. If we are going to move forwards with laws we need specifics. Is this place, HN, considered social media?
(As this is a law regulating both online speech and the safety of children, in the UK, bypassing will likely come with draconian penalties.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513098
Which is a platform being fined for not spying on children.
Most countries are looking at social media bans, and there is a deep groundswell of public opinion against tech today.
Yes, in the 90s, tech was the good guy, but today people are frightened and upset with tech companies.
This would be less of a problem, if governments globally were not tending towards authoritarianism.
Governments are more than happy to appear responsive to voter needs, while also finally getting some form of control over (primarily American) tech firms.
As it stands though - safety is a bad word, enshittification is an actual word, and profit seems to be the final word.
The Techlash is real, but it doesn’t seem to feature in calculations and discussions on HN.
The problem with that is that it just creates a blind spot, and a miscalculation in the energies underlying such drives.
The OSINT report from r/linux got more traction, even if it was riddled with issues, giving birth to the belief that this is all driven by Meta.
A reading of the same data sits comfortably with Meta simply taking advantage of the macro trends to push onerous burdens onto its competitors.
I am sorry for the meta comment, but the blind spot in logic is annoying to me since it results in a mis-estimation of the energies at play here. That in turn means the responses or ideas people have are not calibrated and scaled correctly.
People are going to respond to incentives and instigate for their needs to be met.
My guess is that if tech invested significantly in customer support and safety, being more responsive to user needs, perhaps the underlying anger can be alleviated.
——
Anecdotes:
There needs to also be actual signal sharing between safety teams in tech. Same for customer support - Far too many please for help go through slack and WhatsApp.
I know of posts on reddit where people are asking for help reporting and taking down NCII found on Instagram/Threads. ideas.
> Most countries are looking at social media bans, and there is a deep groundswell of public opinion against tech today.
Not sure what this has to do with laying the groundwork for an Internet Posting License, but sure.
I expect that if Big Tech wasn't shoving LLMs up every available nook and cranny, wasn't using a shocking amount of money, power, and land for said LLMs, and wasn't firing tons of people in order to spend more money on those LLMs, people would be far, far less angry.
> I know of posts on reddit where people are asking for help reporting and taking down NCII...
NCII? [0] Why would anyone want to take down or report that? Is this some new acronym for "kiddy porn"? Those seem to change every year or two.
That is the acronym for non consensual intimate imagery, the superset that contains revenge porn.
https://www.meta.com/en-gb/help/policies/1437976901029950/?s...
Is that what comes up for you when you search for NCII?
You must be doing something right if it is. More power to you, and may that be the case for everyone else someday.
Nope. That link appears nowhere in the first or second page of results on Kagi. There's one link on the first page that might be related? All the others are mostly the NCII (which appears first), along with a smattering of other businesses whose name is also that acronym.
The first Facebook-related link (which appears on the second page) is this one [0]. I don't think I'm blessed to get these results, I think we work in different industries. ;)
This is on Kagi ? Interesting! Would it be the same if you tried on the other search engines?
> I don't think I'm blessed to get these results, I think we work in different industries. ;)
Bah humbug. Join trust and safety. You can stare at the abyss staring back into you as you stare into it.
The very fact that we allow armies of state-actor paid posters to work diligently to undermine the views of our own citizens, and even more important our impressionable children, is beyond bizarre. Advertising works, manipulation works, and in an age where you can make up any story you want, create any visual appearance you want, create any history you want, this sort of manipulation is at an entire new level.
There is always more than one reason for any action, but I think a primary for this literal world wide push to add age verification, and eventually identity verification, is because states are finally waking up to the wide-scale manipulation happening on platforms today.
States take years and years to make policy change.
From the perspective of the state, they already know who you are when posting domestically. What they're gaining is an enhanced ability to ban externals from posting. To end or significantly reduce sock-puppetry.
Corps like Meta, X, etc would hate this on its own, for an enormous amount of accounts are fake accounts. Realistically, however, it would be a one time correction...
Anyhow.
Point is, when you see every democracy passing these laws, it isn't Meta.
None of this is nefarious, either. An example? Every decade or so every country in the world sends representatives to discuss ... effectively, "roads" and "road safety". One thing they do is, try to make the rules of the road as similar as possible everywhere.
An example is, in BC, Canada, a 'flashing green light' used to mean 'pedestrian crossing is active'. I kid you not. Meanwhile in Ontario, it meant 'turn left is OK'.
That's not how it works any more. BC now changed that flashing green light, and everywhere has almost completed the 15+ year long migration to an actual left arrow for 'turn left'.
Road lines were yellow in Canada most of the time, even in the middle of lanes. The logic was, you can see yellow easier than white, when there is some snow on the ground. Now, all lines tend to be white in Canada. Why? Because they're white everywhere.
The goal with road signs, is to have them as pictures, rather than words, and the same everywhere on the planet, so anyone of any language can understand them.
This is the sort of generic collaboration that happens in the background constantly. And its sensible, everyone wants tourism, everyone wants drivers to be safer, understand the rules of the road when traveling, and so on. Everyone benefits.
So from my perspective, to see all democracies passing laws, I simply see that probably there was a conference somewhere, and everyone discussed it, and thought "yeah, this is a problem".
Sure. And the outpouring of support for ratification of OOXML as an ISO standard wasn't motivated by Microsoft. Nor was the large influx of new "P" members who arrived just in time to vote to adopt OOXML. Absolutely.
The fact that those "P" members refused to meet their obligations to cast a vote in any later ballots (resulting in the failure of several key ballots, bringing ISO to a standstill) only strengthens the claim that their actions were genuine grassroots activity. No. Doubt.
Megacorps never use their massive gobs of money and influence to co-opt processes that require all participants to mostly operate in good faith. Nope.
> States take years and years to make policy change.
The USian post-9/11 hysteria would like to have a word with you. Authoritarians rarely miss an opportunity to manufacture (or inflame) a crisis in order to present their pre-prepared rules changes that just happen to further expand their power and influence.
> I think the state's true goal is more about foreign influence. ... From the perspective of the state, they already know who you are when posting domestically.
Not in the US, no. Not without a fair bit of legwork. Though, I don't know much about the situation on the ground in countries like Britain and Germany. Perhaps things are so now bad there that you need to attach your Posting Loicense/Papers to everything you post, IDK.
> What they're gaining is an enhanced ability to ban externals from posting.
Yeah, here it is. "Keep those fuzzy foreigners out of our discussions!".
For the sake of discussion, let's assume that banning and/or jailing "Those People" is a reasonable thing to want to do. [0] The problem with this is that once you deploy and normalize this sort of "social technology", it always, always creeps further. Today it's "dangerous foreigners" with their "subversive ideologies". Five, ten years from now, it's whoever is the equivalent of today's LGBT&etc underclass.
[0] It's absolutely not. The remedy for bad speech is more speech. The remedy for falsehood is truth. The remedy for invalid attempts to sow discontent is to show how those attempts are not grounded in fact.
Yes - Meta is most definitely taking advantage of the situation, but it’s surfing the waves, not generating them.
> [0] It's absolutely not. The remedy for bad speech is more speech. The remedy for falsehood is truth. The remedy for invalid attempts to sow discontent is to show how those attempts are not grounded in fact.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this defense (more speech) has been defeated.
We (humanity) have developed attacks that avoid these defenses. Our defenses were primarily against government control of data. The current attacks leverage the mechanized production of speech, and achieve influence via an abundance of content.
Between attention seeking algorithms, the death of classifieds and the revenue sources for independent journalism, the creation of party+media entities, and actual foreign influence operations - theres a surfeit of content traps to catch voters up. “Flood the zone”, so to speak.
It’s very similar to the sub prime mortgage/ NINJA loan scenario: On the one hand you have professional teams / media market makers which specialize in figuring out content that works. On the other side you have the average joe who is entering the marketplace with their wits and experience.
This iteration of the market place of ideas result in unfair fights between the average person, and whichever entity decides they have the money to spend.
Very loud incorrect buzzer
The minute humans gathered into groups larger than one could talk in-depth to in a week -let alone a year- we've had the "too much information" problem. So, we've had that problem for hundreds or thousands of years. It's nothing new.
Censorious authoritarians want to convince people that it's new and that the best solution is (obviously) to curtail free speech and association, but that's also nothing new.
that the Heritage Foundation (creators of Project 2025) wants these laws and has been pushing similar agendas in a number of countries makes me doubt this.
They have mass arrests of political opponents for speech. Exceeding authoritarian regimes 1000:1. Putin is jealous how many illegitimate arrests they are getting away with.
Now they intend to extend restricting speech of their political opponents even further.
Also in what way is the UK a police state? The amount of police is falling - we're strapped for cash...
Firstly the incumbent legislation is actually being rolled back at the moment by Mahmood. The FB posts are all inciting violence against others which should not be protected speech. As for the jury trials, have you ever been in a jury? I'd rather not thanks myself. My peers are mostly fucking idiots. And they're changing that as well.
I‘ve heard from multiple people already that there is a massive prosecution going in the UK against people that say „hateful“ things on the internet. Whereby „hateful“ is vaguely defined but usually in relation to religious feelings.
All fake news? Honest question
- ex-partner disputes involving harassment
- actual incitement to violence, like the hotel arson
And if you look at the actual convictions, first offense for most things is usually a suspended sentence. I'd be interested to see if you can find a case on bailii (no, not social media, actual court transcripts only) which matches:
- first offense custodial sentence
- one off post, not a pattern of harassment
- between strangers
- does not include even implied threats of violence
(Last one I can think of was the Robin Hood Airport one, which hinged on whether a joke threat to blow up an airport should have been taken seriously.)
Right now the biggest issue in the UK is the same as most places - lack of money. It's killing our services, poisoning our politics. Everything else feels abstract in comparison.
Bold claim that really needs some evidence. Is there research which shows that kids who grow up with social media are less likely to succeed as adults because of social media exposure?