The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy | Hacker News Reader

The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy

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132 pointshn_acker148 comments

Article mostly cites self-reported studies ie the kids think that the kids are doing alright, which is a different statement from the kids are actually doing alright.

Most teachers seeing generational changes are raising five alarm fires around how badly the kids are doing. Actually testing kids is showing a startling reverse Flynn effect [1]. I’m curious what the author has in terms of actual evidence here?

[1] https://pure.eur.nl/en/publications/the-negative-flynn-effec...

Alright covers a broad spectrum of properties.

Most teachers have been asking for more resources for decades, warning of the consequences of not doing so. It seems a little on the nose to ignore their warnings and when the consequences manifest opt to blame something else entirely.

It doesn't seem like there's been a precipitous drop in resources compared to the decades of requests and warnings that have led up to this point. So what's different now, if not resourcing?

I'm not sure which precipitous less than a decade drop you are referring to, but I would be inclined to think, in the last decade, a period of social isolation and absence of education might have been a factor.

Resources have never been higher. Theres an expectation now that the schools will do everything and pay for everything but its never enough.

Pay is comically non competitive - a fraction of what it would need to be to reconstitute the sixties.

Pay for teachers has ALWAYS been terrible. Governments are shit like that.

But you know what teachers got? Respect. Teachers were part of the elite that ran the village.

Yes, but you can get away with it when you keep 51% of the ultra-high quality brain power of society in bondage. If you want to replicate American greatness under conditions of free competition, you must ~triple the wage. People do not think through what America had in its public schools in the postwar period and expect good results when wages have fallen behind even nursing. Ask your preferred AI to compare nurse:high school teacher:dentist:physician between the 50s and today, keeping in mind that high school teacher pay was grossly suppressed by the bondage of women. The teaching staff of American greatness and economic dynamism was ultra-highly educated women who were paid basically nothing. Teachers are paid in a much lower proportion to e.g. physicians - another hightly trained service, than they were in the 50s. The difference is that women can be physicians. Educator wages and thus competition for them is infinitely too low in contemporary America. If you want to bash teachers, I'm fine with that, the fact is we get what we pay for.

There hasn't been a preciptious drop in outcomes either. There have been statistically significant drops in average test scores, but the large number of students who take those tests means that even small differences can be statistically significant. Generally, the average test score just fluctuates within a few percentage points over the long term. The differences between individual students are much larger. If you pick two random students in a year and compare their scores, they'll likely be much farther apart than the average scores of different years.

As a corollary, the variation that people personally experience at small scales (e.g. high-school teachers comparing the various students they encountered throughout their career) is dominated by changes in class composition. Some years, there are just randomly more bad students than in others. When the students seem to be getting worse over time, the teacher might attribute this to societal decline; when the students seem to be getting better, they credit their skill at teaching instead.

Thus things are constantly getting worse and the sky is falling, yet somehow it never makes contact with the ground, and when you compare with ancient records, it's more or less where it has always been.

This is not about resources anymore.

What’s especially interesting is that a lot of teachers take a paycut [1] to go teach in private school partly because the kids are better adjusted, rich kids have more comprehensive childcare and don’t need to rely on screens/social media for the gaps in parenting.

For a taste of all these details, go on r/Teachers

[1]: https://www.ccu.edu/blogs/cags/2011/12/teaching-in-private-s...

I encountered something just the other day that mentioned r/Teachers. I can't remember what it was exactly, but there was definitely a huge caveat about it not being a representative sample.

There is correlation between socioeconomic status and academic performance, but it is not the be-all-and-end-all. Schools serving lower socioeconomic populations should have vastly higher resources to address the additional challenges. One of those resources, is the number of teachers.

A teacher taking a paycut for a different job is not because they want less money, it is because the ratio of what they are paid to the work that is asked of them is better in the lower paid job. That is exactly a resource issue. If you pay a teacher 20% more and ask them to do a job that takes two teachers, then it is unsurprising that they will go for a job that more reasonably asks of them proportional to what they are paid.

The problem is, a classroom full of TikTok zombies doesn’t fit into the 20% more work vs. 80% more work dichotomy. It’s simply spending 40 hours a week talking to an (almost literal) wall.

It’s money sure, and some teachers who don’t care can keep going. But most who do, would be happy to switch to a place where they can make a difference.

This is all a separate conversation to school resources is my point.

I can't remember which state it was but they spent 2/3+ of the entire states education budget on one underperming school district. In the end they ended up with new buildings but the scores went down because school spending isn't actually correlated with student success.

The postwar American glory period depended on the fact that half the brain power of society couldn’t get a job except in teaching. Now the sort of women who taught me in high school are federal judges and captains of industry. Teacher salaries would need to be two or three times as high to get the quality of the period of American greatness.

Of course it had nothing to do with America's having been on the winning coalition in two world wars or its being the only developed country whose homeland was not devastated by the second of the two wars because those reasons wouldn't feed into the narrative that America is prosperous because it benefited from oppression (of women in this case).

Somehow the much greater oppression of women in the Islamic world doesn't make the Islamic world prosperous.

> ... couldn't get a job except in teaching.

Or nursing, or a fair number of other career tracks. Perhaps as important, there were plenty of smaller and family-owned firms. In many of those, talented women could get quite a ways ahead - though perhaps with less public acknowledgement than is currently fashionable.

> Now the sort of women who taught me in high school are federal judges and captains of industry.

Your HS teachers were in the 0.001%? No 2X, 3X, or even 25X to teacher salaries could replace a meaningful fraction of today's teachers with such people - because, by definition, the supply does not exist.

Smart money says it’s more to do with kids being more uncontrollable, prone to violent outbursts, and completely disinterested in anything that isn’t smashing their dopamine buttons every three seconds.

The teachers didn’t start being bad at teaching. The parents got bad at parenting in an environment where everything is working against them.

Buildings don't relate to student scores, they relate to how many students you can teach. If the new buildings house the same number, as before but were actually required then they spent money on basic human dignity. If the buildings were not required, the money was wasted. That is the opposite of spending it on resources.

Teachers, more of them, with more training is one of the main things that is needed. Increase the amount of one on one time. Adjust the curriculum to what each student needs. Measure the improvement in individual students, not the improvement in the mean of the lot of them.

Only teach things after the principles that they depend upon have been learned.

There is growing acknowledgement that this is related to laptop usage in classroom. Countries are recognizing this and rolling back policies, citing PISA rankings.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly0vk77vdko https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jun/15/educa...

Quoted in your article:

“Later this year a ban on mobiles in schools – even for educational use – comes into force.”

It’s obvious to most that taking away the laptop while leaving the TikTok will not have the intended effect.

Nationalized social media bans and restricted device usage while in a classroom are different things. Why would TikTok ever belong in the classroom?

Of course if even educational use of laptops is restricted then personal mobile devices would also be. They are already banned in my country.

The original article doesn’t care to explore the difference, it doesn’t even acknowledge there is a problem.

If the article was “instead of a national ban, we should look at school-wide ban”, I would be sympathetic.

FWIW, American states are doing exactly this[1], people still complain

[1]: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/09/23/governor-newsom-signs-legi...

The article doesn't really discuss education outcomes at all, that is something you brought up. It sounds like we agree that there is an issue here. I'm suggesting that there are other reasons that explain the performance drop.

My reading of the article is that it criticizes the implementation of this policy and the methodology behind it, which I agree with.

Living in a country that moved quickly from a "social media ban" to an "adult content ban" in the space of 3 months, I feel that these policies are overreach due to how they must be implemented. As in, they require all users to provide verification, not just the targeted cohort.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy92qpv424o

> the kids think [...] Most teachers

Random anecdotal claims from population A contradict random anecdotal claims from population B.

> I’m curious what the author has in terms of actual evidence here?

Well, it can't be any worse than you have, in that the paper you link to doesn't show anything about what causes that negative Flynn effect. It does speculate, and social media is not on even on the authors' list of guesses.

Did you have anything relevant?

Barring any real causal studies, I’ll lean on the experience of teachers and school boards [1].

Note if the article called for instituting a school board ban instead of a country-wide ban, I’d support it. But the article is fundamentally questioning the existence of the problem which was a silly over-reaction.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/us/social-media-schools.h...

A lot of issues require holding two ideas in your head at once. Age verification chips away at privacy and internet freedom. It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, even if it’s imperfect and won’t stop everyone. The interesting question is where the right trade off sits. People often end up arguing only one side.

Massively downplaying it to say "chips away" this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. Of course people only argue one side, the stakes are losing internet privacy and freedom in the entire world if the west also succumbs to these authoritarian policies. It isn't the government's job to prevent your child from getting access to a phone/ipad, that's your job as a parent.

I think you’re proving my point a little. You’re treating the costs as obvious and enormous, while treating any potential benefits as essentially zero.

We have to accept that there are policies with obvious and enormous downsides and essentially zero upsides, because they exist and get tried from time to time. Eastof (and the article) are providing an argument that this is one of those times. A pretty reasonable one too, I forget the implementation details of the UK scheme but in Australia and most of Europe the authoritarian bent of the people implementing these age restriction bans is concerning - it looks like they're setting up a general purposes minority targeting systems. I'm not sure how they're going to justify that and I don't recall seeing anyone make a reasonable argument to justify it yet beyond "We can and we're going to. Trust us and think of the children".

Your argument seems to be that the issue is more nuanced than anyone else is saying, which is cool and all but then it sits with you to identify what the nuances you want to talk about are. Pointing out that someone else has identified different tradeoffs than you have is something of a given since that is the case with almost any pairing of people.

Revolutions have been fought over the freedom to act without constant surveillance. The obviousness and enormity of a need for privacy is well established.

The government’s job is to make sure we behave (and vote) properly.

Otherwise, as Bertolt Brecht said, the government might simply dissolve the people and elect a different one.

>China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after.

This may come as a shock but neither China or Russia had their first encounter with losses of individual freedom in the 1990s. This is what the OP is talking about, this is the kind of shibboleth of online libertarianism that has little to do with real world policy outcomes. You'll find many similar laws concerning child safety in Norway that you find in China, different political systems and cultures can value the same things, even implement similar laws, without converging on the same political system.

In most countries on earth protecting children is a collective job, not a parents private business. A functioning and safe social fabric is a condition for successful families.

Just worth mentioning one data point. In the US 50% of young men (aged 18-49) now participate in online betting or gambling, likely as a consequence of the saturation of ads on social media and gaming platforms. Good luck with your parental responsibility when an entire country operates like this.

I mean, you're cutting off the qualifier with your selected quote. They are clearly talking about online freedom:

> this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after.

Russia's first online censorship was for truly abhorrent things. It moved on to become a ban on things the government didn't like. The book "The Red Web" does an excellent job detailing how this downward slide took place. It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom, and the first step was putting in place a basic censorship apparatus.

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrei-soldatov/the...

>It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom

yes because Russia is a dictatorship. These recent age limits on social media have had broad public support and are widely supported by parents. Not having your kid grow up on a combination of porn, gambling and body dysphoria and their data exfiltrated by a US mega-corporation isn't the dawn of internet censorship. What about the privacy of children and the ability to grow up outside of the morass of commercial surveillance platforms?

Having your kids grow up free from that crap doesn't make you China, it makes you ca 1990s Denmark. Japan and China both have strict gun control laws, but Japan's a democracy. People are free to live by different values than Americans, just screaming red scares isn't going to convince anyone.

> Having your kids grow up free from that crap doesn't make you China

Who said that it does? I think you're kind of missing the point here, and it seems rather intentional to be honest.

> their data exfiltrated by a US mega-corporation isn't the dawn of internet censorship

Instead, all adults must submit their PII to those same "US mega-corporations" to verify that they are adults. You realize that the social media companies absolutely love this, right? They support this.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/uk-to-require...

> People are free to live by different values than Americans

Has nothing to do with being American. I don't even get how you got to that?

> Japan and China both have strict gun control laws, but Japan's a democracy

Ok? They also both enjoy sunsets and long walks on the beach.

Americans don't care because the elite will send their kids to private school and raise children in special elitist bubbles.

The proles are allowed to amuse themselves to death.

China and Russia did not have "freedom" prior to the internet.

What internet privacy? Look at the sites this is being enforced on and tell me with a straight face you have privacy accessing those. Even for sites like X i'd argue truly anonymous users are horrible to have. Users should be accountable for what they say online in common public spaces. You want free speech and anonymity go to those spaces not facebook and X.

It’s possible to verify age without disclosing identity. The German national ID (smartcard) allows this, but I’m not aware of any online service making use of the feature. I suppose it’s used offline by cigarette vending machines though.

A point I don’t often see made is: the argument that “the parents need to parent” is unintentionally classist.

Wealthier people who can afford to have one parent stay home or have babysitters or nannies who will actually supervise the kid can do a much better job monitoring and redirecting than when both parents work long hours and have no money.

So poorer kids are going to spend more time scrolling brain rot, which may lead to worse academic performance and concentration problems. They’re also more likely to get sucked into any number of garbage social media propagated cults, wacko ideologies, and dumb fads.

There are plenty of tech controls that exist for children's personal technological devices that do not require the state to intervene.

They cost money or take many hours of time. Many families have neither.

For the record I’m not a fan of the way this stuff is being pushed. At the same time, I feel like a lot of people are totally out of touch on a lot of the reasons why some people support this.

> They cost money or take many hours of time. Many families have neither.

The time can be amortized. Parental controls don't have to be set up in one sitting. Take the phone away for 2-3 weeks (during summer break if there is one), spend 20 minutes (almost) every day adding parental controls, and give the phone back after everything has been set up. Allowlist websites and password-block app downloads. Child needs the phone on weekdays? Instead add parental controls once or twice a week, across 4-6 weeks.

The parents are already shelling out for a smartphone (because dumb phones are getting harder to buy, because peer pressure, because advertising, because some schools assign smartphone-based tasks, but nevertheless). The money aspect of elitism is a sunk cost. The next obstacle is the technical literacy aspect of elitism. What the parents need is the knowledge to use parental controls and the understanding that parental usage of parental controls should be almost not optional. I know most parents won't seek all of that knowledge on their own because lack of knowledge begets lack of enthusiasm, so this is where the government should be stepping in. (Also, the government should mandate that all stock Android/iOS devices have parental control features without necessarily mandating that the manufacturers or sellers turn those controls on before sale.) Have schools send emails and snail mails with big bold scary letters in English and Spanish: This Will Affect Your Child's Grades. Please Put Parental Controls On Your Child's Devices. Come To Our PTA Meetings About Parental Controls And Watch The Recordings If You Can't Attend.

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/sometimes-you-have-to-hurt-...

I'll take that over everyone being forced to accept the same, standardized, government-mandated "cults, wacko ideologies, and dumb fads", thanks!

Government makes everyone poorer through their terrible policies -> parents need to work more to stay above water -> nanny state must grow to take care of kids -> terrible government policies entrench. Nope, don't want it

It also ignores social pressure entirely. If everyone in your class is on some social network and your parents parent and you aren't then you are socially outcast from a major part of your peer socialisation.

If only 50% of parents enforce the rules suddenly half your class isn't there and it doesn't become such a big deal to be missing out and it's less appealing for the kids who are allowed still.

I'd prefer it to be voluntarily organised like https://www.waituntil8th.org/ but even a bad solution is going to have a major improvement on society even if social media is less private due to the ID issue. It's not like you don't share everything with these companies anyhow. I'm pretty confident that if you are a regular user of any large social network today they could identify you 100% of the time already even without your ID.

I don't think facebook needs some kind of age verification scheme at all. They are already fully aware of how old their users are. The kids post photos and messages every birthday. They use these platforms talk with their school friends. The platforms know who the children are. They already target them with ads and algorithmic manipulations accordingly. They don't need our biometric data to know that we're adults, they just want it anyway and this is their excuse.

WRT to how it was done in Australia.

"Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December last year. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age."

So the bulk is done as you say but they still need* an age verification system for when they over-stepped.

* need here is because of the way the laws were written AFAIK.

Platforms can't know what the false positive and false negative rates are simply from cases where a user is thought to be a minor and proves otherwise. Even if the law were written better, for example to say that 95% accuracy is acceptable, platforms would still have to verify id from at least a random sampling of thought-to-be-adult users, which doesn't help you if you're one of the ones randomly selected.

We need some kind of verification system that gives no extra information about users to the platforms, but I don't know if there's a true ZK way; it might require government involvement. I think that's fine. Govts could certainly run an age-verification system, give a signed yes or no token back to the user, with some permanently applied jitter per person so that platforms can't use cookies from returning users to figure out their birthday. As long as the government program has strict oversight to ensure it's not saving information about who's visiting what sites, it seems fine, or at least vastly better than entrusting photos of IDs to private 3rd parties.

counterexample, the government could quickly institute a law stating that individuals knowingly allowing children to access tik tok must pay a fine. instead, government has teamed up with big business ... ostensibly to save the kids, however these actions conveniently benefit government and business alike (because ad tech can now seperate AI from human activity, and police/three letter orgs are granted automated citizen tracking). big fan of collectively considering contrasting ideas man but yeah i dont see how its ever going to be in the common mans best interests for the public and private sectors to team up.

Wouldn't a lot of the harm to adults and children be reduced if those companies went back to non-algorithmic feeds? No stupid discoveries based on searches, web history, fingerprints, or friends's interest. Just plain popularity and time sequence like they used to do before they went all aggro about finding ways to get you to consume the most inane, insipid and or crass and degueulasse shit they can to get more eyeballs and time on their services. Ban that --even in the best of cases, why continue to subject adults to that deluge?

If you can't go into a strip club unless you're 18, why can't the government say you can't go to a strip club website unless you're 18?

The government does government things.

This doesn't seem like something crazy.

We have a solution for that: parental controls. The new feature is that parental controls are enabled by default and cannot be disabled without the phone manufacturer's consent. The upcoming feature is that this also applies to non-adult sites like Facebook and YouTube. It's nothing less than the end of the free, open, and anonymous internet.

TL;DR don't make everyone prove they're an adult (and thus who they are). Put the kids into the daycare if that's what you want the law to be.

Don't let the kids wander Las Vegas / the adult section of town (the Internet) unsupervised?

Or even better:

Have any website that's intended for children make a Legal Claim that they are rated Child Safe / Friendly so they fall under Advertising Law coverage and/or soliciting a minor.

Then have user agents (browsers) used by children configured to limit them to those places. Or even pay for a special VPN that limits access to those places.

The last option is the only correct one. A simple HTTP header would do the trick.

> It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children,

While increasing harm to many others. Nobody ever wants to mention that part. It is not a clear "child safety" win. Personally I think it's probably a significant net loss.

Isn’t it normally the case when politicians in any part of the world say they need to do something for the children, it’s just theatre to cover up them doing nothing or to hide legislation with a different purpose?

No, that’s a tech meme. If you’ve ever been near a PTA, you’ll understand that there is terrific civic potential in appealing to parents’ fears.

The true think of the children has always been national security.

except in food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, or general well-being.

The cuts to education were the last thing that disengaged kids from the world, of course they are going to self soothe

Governments always "Think of the kids" until they have to invest in them.

Then suddenly it becomes performative posturing with maybe a little extra spending here and there.

I'm not a fan of social media. I'm also not a fan of authoritarian governments.

From my POV those two things are more similar than they are different.

> except in food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, or general well-being

Parents activate over their own kids. They’re seeking to protect them and will call their electeds and knock on doors and potentially back a primary challenger if you ignore them.

The UK government's turn towards authoritarianism on these sorts of things is extremely worrisome! Invest in a VPN to keep yourself safe.

Where do you suggest for VPN egress?

What a joke. Throwing around auth casually like this normalizes it.

The UK is an actual movie trope for pushing more and more authoritarian with their massive amount of surveillance and petty regulations and restrictions. I don't think it is a joke at all, they have been continuously moving that way the last few decades. Just because some places are or were at one time worse that doesn't absolve the UK from guilt.

This seems like a popular law you don’t agree with though most of your country does for valid reasons. Nothing about that seems authoritarian especially with actual auth stuff on this side of the pond.

Just because politicians and rich assholes can get legislation pushed and passed that doesn't mean the people actually want it. Claiming people want what they currently deal withs just because they have "democracy" is a cop-out that has repeatedly been shown to be false across nearly every democracy in existence.

It has 90% public support and rightfully so.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/world/europe/uk-social-me...

And you don't think there is any problem with that poll, especially when it is in support of the government when ran by the government and had an inherently biased selection of participants from the start? Im sure if I polled people that looked up accounting services if wealthy people should be taxed less I could get 90% approval, but that doesn't mean the overall population supports it.

You're getting swept up in a narrative that doesn't reflect reality. Public surveillance cameras and "petty regulation" are not authoritarian. The UK has a crime problem and these are needed to maintain some sense of public order, the government is democratically elected and the people are not opposed to these nor is there any wide spread abuse of this.

They are pretty authoritarian to me. Nobody should accept constant surveillance upon them in their normal everyday lives. And petty regulations are a huge burden upon the working class who can't afford the time or money that the wealthy elite can to work through them. It is essentially a pro-wealth policy for that fact. Also crime rates way way lower now than in the past, so complaints about crime ring hollow to me, especially when you add in the fact that many crimes only exist because of the petty regulations that get foisted upon the poor. The UK's murder rate is the lowest it has been in over 50 years, and it isn't because of surveillance cameras.

And maybe if they spent more effort on improving everyone's lives instead of trying to find people to punish at any cost people would be less drawn to criminal enterprise in the first place.

The requirement to show ID is not to perform age verification to ban children from services.

The requirement to show ID is so that every user (especially adults) online can be real-world identified and located. This allows the state to privately and quietly retaliate for any sort of posts or publications or link-sharing that they don't like.

It's a ban on anonymous publishing, anonymous speech. It's so that they can simply and easily retaliate against publishers that don't have a legal department and media team (i.e. you).

This is a fundamental attack on freedom of expression by adults, by prohibiting anonymous use of the internet. It has precisely zero to do with children.

my government is implementing a ZKP protocol to solve this problem. So is brazil. (bifold open wallet.)

My 15-year old niece who recently visited her cousins in Australia assured me that the recently enacted Aussie law did not affect her ability to access socials while in Australia, nor has it affected her U16 cousins, who still have their accounts. Apparently the age checking there only applies to newly created accounts.

Is there a plan to start fining the social media companies themselves? Or raise their liability thresholds?

This is sort of like the illegal-immigration debate. If you’re serious about fixing it, go after employers. Same for underage social media users. If you want to actually solve it, you have to penalize the platforms.

This is the plan in the UK, yes: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=4500988470135094

they will apparently be fined around AUD$50M if they fail to do due diligence (not sure how the legislation phrases. I am not sure if any social media company has at this stage. Unfortunately we have a dictator as a so-called e-safety commissioner backed up by an equally useless PM who seem to think all parents are unable to monitor themselves or their kids online behaviour

Seems like a drop in the bucket for these corporations. If anything, it'll just entrench the existing social media sites further and be another operating cost for them.

>> Aussie law did not affect her ability to access socials while in Australia

I think that's expected.

>> Apparently the age checking there only applies to newly created accounts

Social media companies had to try and identify existing accounts owned by < 16 year olds and start removing them at the start of this year. I'd guess that process is slow and they don't do it unless they're certain. But if they stop new accounts effectively then within a few years the ban would be pretty effective.

Maybe not immediately but over time it can be given some teeth.

Over time those who are underage and have existing accounts will grow up.

It depended on how long the account had been active - one or two of my cousin's kids were pretty sad they lost access to some of their accounts but had new ones the same day with an older sibling or friend's face scan to bypass the age check.

Reportedly more than 3/4 of under-16s who were using social media before the ban still are.

Like most I've been listening to this same old argument for nearly 30 years. Old enough now to know it doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to even be 50% effective to mark a substantial improvement, a significant chunk of young people won't even need a technical restriction beyond being told the behaviour is against the law because it's bad for them.

But keep goading with "it's technically impossible" and watch what's left of the Internet turn into a government licensing fest, because it is entirely technically possible. Imagine how much cleaner and shiny the nation's pipes would be if we simply throttled any ciphertext flow that couldn't be matched to an Ofcom license holder. They'd never do that. No country in the world has done that, right?

At what cost though? Everyone will now need to submit real ID to access social media. Smaller social media sites will probably just shutdown since it’s unlikely they can afford the whole verification process.

The same was true of food safety. Aunt Tracey might not be able to sell cupcakes from her home any more (made in the oven next to where the cat likes to sleep because of the heat), but we centralised things enough that when BSE and Salmonella outbreaks happen, which nowadays is extremely rare, we know how and why almost immediately. If the cost of ridding ourselves of animal torture, terrorism and child pornography is a few hundred fewer Mastodon instances I could most certainly live with that

what a wild comparison, millions (billions?) of humans have died from food-borne disease, and yet we do in fact still let people very casually sell food to the public (even unpasteurized milk in the US)

I can't speak for elsewhere, but in the UK she can still sell her cupcakes, she just needs about 3 different kinds of license and one council inspection to do it. I imagine that is fairly normal across the EU

This is a social media ban. It's not going to fix any of the issues you're talking about, and there are far greater risks and costs. I say this as someone who despises social media, too.

That is a weird analogy because so much of modern food borne illnesses we deal with today are because of the fact that we centralized food production so any contamination effects hundreds or more people at a time which necessitated strict safety regulations. If you ate Aunt Tracey's stuff and got sick, maybe a handful of people at most get sick, if you eat Aunt Tracey's Original Recipe Cupcake™, thousands of people could get sick.

> it doesn't have to even be 50% effective to mark a substantial improvement

It is not even 10% effective, and rightly so. It’s so absurdly easy to work around that the whole thing is silly. If the kids can’t be on Instagram they’ll find an equally welcoming place like Roblox to hang out.

You aren’t going to stop kids from being kids, and you probably shouldn’t try.

Note how we’re trusting all these US companies with their safety because any of these companies in the EU would immediately be regulated out of existence?

You're just repeating the "it's technically imperfect" argument again.

Psychologists call this black or white thinking - in this case, either something works perfectly or it's useless.

Next to impossible to get a person who believes this that they're engaging in a cognitive distortion though. I tried the same thing you're doing, once. I gave up. They will die on this hill and then wonder why they lost long after everyone else had moved on.

It's possible to make effective arguments in line with their values. They simply don't want to be helped.

> Psychologists call this black or white thinking

The same can be told for your thinking. You (and several other posters) lumped several arguments into the same Nirvana fallacy [1]:

1. It's not 100% effective

2. It's only 50% effective

3. It is not even 10% effective

These are very different from each other. The first one may actually mean what you described (either something works perfectly or it's useless) but the others must be discussed separately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

ok, then what's the minimum efficacy such that you'll consider it viable?

Again, it's not a black or white issue. There is no universal constant threshold where it suddenly becomes viable. If you ask my personal opinion, I would say:

- If it's not even 10% effective, don't waste any resources. Replace it with another method.

- If it's 10% - 50% effective, improve it.

- If it's >50% effective, it's probably fine, leave it.

My point it that there can be many other shades of grey here. It's not fair to lump all opponents of the current implementation into the same basket.

Ok, then maybe what I'm saying applies to Aeolun and not you.

It looks like you decided to self-insert into a critique that doesn't involve you and then decide that means the critique is wrong.

No, it applies to Aeolun. That was my original point. You asked me my personal opinion and changed the goal post when I replied.

Also yes, that's how online forums work. I'm surprised that you haven't figured it out yourself even though you self-inserted into a critique of the social media ban that doesn't involve you.

Adding commentary is way different than coming after someone.

You're acting like I accused you of black or white thinking. If you caught a stray, it's because of interpellation.

No, I'm repeating the "The net effect is negative for more people than it's positive for." argument again.

You are saying that "Anything we do is better than nothing." Which I might agree with in certain situations, but this here is the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

The ‘technically impossible’ arguments always frustrate me. I used to buy into them to - but over time I’ve come to realise that the people making these arguments are not speaking the same language as lawmakers - or most of the rest of society.

It’s ‘technically impossible’ to stop convenience stores selling alcohol or pornography to minors, or to make people to adhere to contracts. Non-engineers don’t care what’s technically possible, they care what’s legally possible, or societally possible.

It’s the same thing when techies try to decipher what _exactly_ a law does and look for loopholes, when to the rest of society the standard is ‘whatever a reasonable person thinks it does’.

You need to make the argument about why the proposed thing is bad for society for it to be taken seriously.

I don't care if it's trivial to implement and impossible to bypass: it's an effort to eliminate anonymous Internet browsing/commenting because everyone over 16 has to submit ID as well. Its the end of free speech on the part of the Internet the UK controls.

A cynic might wonder if this is the real aim.

Context: the government has objectively become increasingly authoritarian, with the partial elimination of jury trials, the criminalisation of peaceful protest, the use of anti-terror sentencing laws for activities that are clearly not terrorist, and other actions which set up ideal conditions for an oppressive dictatorship.

It's hard to take the idea that this is about concern for teens seriously when the PM bypassed civil service vetting norms to make a known friend of Epstein ambassador to the US.

I'll believe this is actually about protecting children when they do anything to address the myriad of other issues young people today are facing. So far that doesn't seem to be happening.

Funnily, I'm also not seeing any talk about holding the social media companies themselves accountable for any of the damage they've done to society.

If anything it’s makes the discussion from parents to the kids so much easier. Why can’t I use it? Because it’s illegal. When will this happen in the US? We need it yesterday.

Kids (or more specially teens) will just find a site that doesn't require the verification. There will be some and you better hope it's not one run by intelligence agency in unfriendly country.

It would be way better to just reduce the harms in general by e.g. regulating algorithms. Those are things that you can do when people are using platform that you still have some control over.

I have to wonder how much of this is projected guilt. Parents can feel guilty about the amount of time they themselves spend on social media. Choosing for someone else to reduce their usage combined with choosing for someone else being required to make that happen seems like a way to feels as if they are acting against what they don't like, but at the same time doesn't require them to make any particular concession to their own behaviour.

This is a "can't lose" for Starmer. If it inevitably doesn't work exactly the way he wants, then he'll just blame the tech companies for not trying hard enough. Best bet here is to require that the government provide exacting requirements for what they want done and to hew to those requirements exactly.

Some form of malicious compliance is necessary here.

They are running a bi-election for a replacement to dump his arse, he's already out the door

The tone gave it away before he finally disclosed but - shocker - the author is on the board of a social media company.

Social media has been a pretty clear net-negative for society. The opinions of a guy in away connected with the industry are irrelevant.

As usual when tech people are asked to do something to control the harms of their products the excuse is "you don't understand, it's not possible". The author thinks preventing children sharing nude images on platforms is some impossible task - yet Apple has already implemented pretty good controls for this.

I'm not saying the regulations are perfect but continuing to ignore the problems caused by social media is irresponsible.

There was an interview with a kid in the UK that went viral yesterday. The interviewer pointed out the kid had spent 9 hours on a screen the previous weekend and asked what they would do now. The answer - stare at the wall. Funny. Maybe said in jest. But I think it still sums up the reason we need to do something about this. If kids literally don't know what to do with themselves without a screen the future isn't looking good. Another kid said it was taking away his planned career...as an influencer.

Social media isn't the problem cellphones are. The Yookay isn't gonna ban those because they are useful surveillance devices.

> 9 hours on a screen

> do something about this

Yeah ban cellphones. And I don't mean just for children. If you want to be a shut in nerd that spends "9 hours on a screen" then you'd best sit down in front of a computer.

Social Media is actually one problem, and that's not just cellphones. I don't disagree with the premise that this could be all a smokescreen by the UK spying on citizens but Social Media is a huge issue. If you are keen, read up on the intersection of Epistemology, Sociology and Social Media research.

Yeah, and what they could actually do about it would be banning the whole social media thing. Ever tried to enforce rules you don’t follow yourself on teens? They see through that shit in three seconds.

> the author is on the board of a social media company.

Yeah. Bluesky.

Pretty clear you have no clue and shouldn't be listened to.

It is not about "protecting the kids". This statement is attached to every process that the government wants to roll out that is normally unacceptable to the population.

It is about monitoring and identifying all members of the public - "prove that you are over 16" creates a profile about you that they can track and use.

Fear not, Roblox will not be subject to the policy for the older games within Roblox and as such young children allegedly may be able to get the latest news from their possibly maybe perhaps adult groomers. The newer games within Roblox are purportedly going through a 16+ check. [1]

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9824zvpz9po

Jup, I can’t publish anything useful to Roblox any more unless 100+ 16 year olds first enjoy it. Of course none of this retroactively applies to the games already frequented by 10M U12’s every week, because why would they actually follow the spirit of their own rules if it harms them financially.

To the people that agree social media is somewhat bad for children (I wish it didn't exist for adults). What do you propose the government do, if not banning it via internet restrictions?

I don't see anyone offering alternate solutions in these conversations and I think the ban is a necessary evil

I do however think the ban should be more nuanced

They could force the social media companies to federate so you can use the content with different algorithms.

They could regulate the harmful algorithms.

They could make for-profit operating systems implement actually robust and easy parental controls. Anything to give parents more control.

But how would they serve the first two to kids?

Yeah agree with the last one, but I have wondered if parental controls will breakdown relationships between parent and kids. I see articles now and again about parents controlling kids causing issues?

There are two key problems with social media. The first is a people problem. Predators, bullying, etc. This is a difficult problem. The furthest I got in ideating on this was some kind of graph-growth limitation: some proof of physical co-presence or chain-of-trust (i.e. approved by a trusted adult) required for friending.

The second is a product problem. Advertising, the 'algorithm', etc. For that, I do have a suggestion: force all social media sites to have ad-free versions which apply to the accounts of under eighteens, and attempt to reduce 'virality': no like buttons, ways to discourage reposts of original content, etc. so the timelines become less engagement driven.

device-side restrictions; improve the UX for parental restrictions and make them on-by-default for children.

When you buy a device, if you can't present ID (or the device is for a child), the vendor gives it to you in "child mode." Child mode has a whitelist/blacklist of all apps and websites that it can use. The list is set by the vendor, but modified by the federal government, state/provincial government, municipal government, school district, and parent/guardian (in that order, each overriding the previous.)

Perhaps in addition, devices in "child mode" always attach "do not show me adult content" to the HTTP headers they send to websites.

It would be great if we could test the harms of social media societally. Hypothetically if a democratic country with a free press was able to effectively ban Facebook, X, etc for a few years there's no doubt in my mind that the division we see in so many countries would clear up relatively quickly.

Kids, like all humans, are subject to an uncomfortable reality that is dismissed far too often in discussions about leadership and regulations:

49% of all people are less intelligent than the average person.

What if 10% of all people are indistinguishably of average intelligence?

> Again, every detailed study on the subject has found that the number of teenagers who have negative experiences on social media is tiny.

The study they linked is just self reported data from an internet survey. I'm sure that 13 year olds who don't get enough sleep because they're endlessly scrolling through ads, influencers, and disinformation don't see any problem with it the same way that a survey of alcoholics will show that beer is great, alcohol improves their lives, and that of course they can quit any time they want.

I'm not even suggesting that this ban will be effective or helpful, or that such bans are a good thing, but we know that these platforms are used to prey on their users, that "negative experiences" can be found easily, and that there's actual evidence of actual harms caused or facilitated by social media (including corpses). It should take a lot more than the opinions of just over a thousand children to discredit all of that and cause us to assume there's no problems with these platforms, how they're being used, or the effects they have on children.

It's interesting to see UK-based influencers all citing these weak studies (internet surveys) about how social media is not so bad for children, or bemoaning the huge loss for children whose access to educational videos will be cut.

While the financial motive is clear, they must all believe it to an extent, because social media made their careers and changed their lives.

The reality is that the vast majority of kids aren't interested in learning video editing or movie directing, they are mindlessly consuming AI-generated videos and similar content served to them. 30-second videos on random facts sprinkled here and there aren't education.

Not that I think this ban will help, but downplaying the harm to children is a bit too much coming from people with ties to these platforms, like the author of this article.

>> The reality is that the vast majority of kids aren't interested in learning video editing or movie directing

Also the idea that they can't do these things without social media or YouTube is absurd. The people actually interested in learning something new will go down even deeper rabbit holes, try things themselves, and come out better than they would have following some YouTube tutorials.

It's not that people can't learn something from youtube, but that's not where most of people (not just the children) are spending most of the time. Just because someone watches a few videos about something useful to them that doesn't mean they aren't also being exposed to things that are harmful to them.

There are a lot of benefits to social media, and it could be a positive thing with fewer downsides, but there are basically no regulations to stop platforms from exploiting and harming children. The industry also refuses to regulate itself and prevent harms (many of which they created/cause in the first place). Parents clearly need to do a better job protecting their kids, but I have to admit that it's difficult when their children are being targeted and manipulated by companies with trillions of dollars while parents have to spend most of their time working just to keep their kids housed and fed.

The point is. I’ve heard all of this before. Does anyone else remember being 15 and having every adult nearby tell you that staring at a screen for 6 hours a day is going to destroy my eyes and my life? I can tell you it’s worked out pretty well for me.

Of course I agree the pointless AI generated shit is a massive waste of time, but it doesn’t really matter what it actually is as long as it allows them to connect over a shared thing. I think it’s far more important we ensure there’s spaces for kids to meet that are not purely digital.

I had a kind of social media when I was a teenager. It mostly involved dialing into a BBS or two, and its easy to think that it was harmless because it was a positive thing for me, but even I have to admit that there were dangers and even though those online places were similar they were also very different. Social media platforms are designed to be harmful in ways that a BBS just wasn't. There were no algorithms trained on data collected from multiple sources and focused on driving endless engagement. There were no people being paid to pretend to be regular users in order to secretly push products on me. There were games, including some that some parents would probably find objectionable, but they didn't constantly nag at me to buy things with real money (or virtual currency that could only be reasonably obtained with real money), and corporations didn't populate those games with brand ambassadors and ads.

It's too easy to look back and think "I survived online", but what adults today experienced online as kids is very different from what exists online for kids today. It's not just parents who are saying so. The social media platform's own research shows that it's harmful.

Yes, absolutely. But those people exist now, and you need to know how to deal with them because they're going to be a fact of your life going forward. The LLM's are going to tell you nonsense and pretend its the pure truth. The people you meet online are going to be mostly benign but interspersed with a few genuinely bad apples. You don't want all of that dumped on you at eighteen when you are apparently suddenly not a child any more.

I think it's much useful to teach kids early rather than late.

> I'm sure that 13 year olds who don't get enough sleep because they're endlessly scrolling through ads, influencers, and disinformation

I didn't get sleep as a teenager because I read books. Should we ban those too?

If books were collecting every scrap of data they could on you, and every new page you turned to was algorithmically changed using data collected from your reading history and from additional information purchased from data brokers, and the words and pictures were being used to manipulate you and encourage you to engage in harmful actions ranging from sending the publisher nudes to killing yourself then yes, we should probably have some kind of regulations on when and how children use those books. Facebook's own internal research shows that their platform is harmful to children. We don't need to depend on opinions of child victims.

It would be equally disingenuous to not ask children what they think, we already marginalize childrens views and ideas and they often suffer under restrictive laws because they can't effectively fight any legislation or legal rulings.

Social media was dying amongst that demographic.

Now that they are being told it's banned that demographic will be all over social media again.

as always… any ban of this type is lazy virtue signalling.

it’s proving unsuccessful in australia and it’ll be unsuccessful in the uk. it’s way too easy to circumvent with vpns and social media is not going to prevent it because it’s not in their interest.

governments should put their thinking cap on and regulate the addicting ux patterns that social media uses…

Crazy to think that all of that happens in the country of George Orwell that was probably too in advance for his time with 1984 and the Animal Farm.

It was supposed to be a kind of satire of his own time, but it was in the end a perfect prediction of what is coming to us now.

Scary to see how far will go the Pigs that are in command in UK, France, Canada, ...

No one is falling for this fear mongering anymore. The people are finally raising up en mass to this toxic mess…

It's going to cost the population a fortune to VPN to a free country.

Mumsnet CEO is apparently on their advisory board, which more or less explains it. They just want something cheap they can tell someone else to implement to win the votes off concerned parents. It doesn't matter if it works, it just matters if they can carve out votes in 2029 for it. UK has a relatively long standing tradition of fucking itself over in order to win a single election (e.g. the Brexit ref).

Its particularly frustrating cos they ain't even done the OAuth properly like the Aussies have taken a pass at. Could even put an NGO as a shim in-between to protect privacy. But noOoOo, we'll ignore all the tech advice, do something shit and then follow it up by trying to "ban" VPNs when it clearly doesn't work, because we're thick.

No, it’s surveillance masquerading as “think of the children”. You can’t verify age without verifying identity.

I don't think the government that sponsors child rape gangs actually cares about child protection.

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