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UK: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces (www.bbc.co.uk)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 32 points 4 months ago (9 children)

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.

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    If parents dont care or approve of their kids using social media then the kids will keep doing it. Its still important that the top officials in government are warning adults that its not safe for children there, because some people dont know or won't trust anyone else.

    The problem was thinking it was okay for kids to be on social media, and this fixes that. People on here keep saying the problem being fixed is how to prevent every child from getting on social media, but thats not what's happening.

    This also allows us as a society to punish parents who break these laws or allow their children too. We have to be able to signal to each other in society when something is harmful, whether it affects autonomy or not.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    If kids want to be on social media badly enough, they will find a way regardless of approval and permission from their parents. They get banned from Meta and TikTok, they just band together and move to an app not on the list. I agree that people need to know if something is harmful. All the effort and money going into a ban, would've been better spent on media literacy and education on how algorithms work, and the addictive nature of some platforms. This is the reason why none of my kids are interested in most social media. Because they know how awful it is. YouTube is a bit more grey, IMO. I filter out shorts for my kids, but they've learned a lot of stuff over the years. Yet Roblox isn't banned? That should've been top of the list. Identity verification is a privacy and security nightmare. People should not be required to provide their identity to participate in discussions, or even worse, use their own device.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    If we actually cared about society in general, we would behave differently. This is a result of the fuck-you-get-mine mentality that thrives in America. There are plenty of people here that don't care about their neighbors, at all.

    You only see outrage come from people affected firsthand, because everyone else thinks they are too smart/rich/successful to possibly fall victim to the same systems as the stupid/poor/lazy people.

    You bring up a great point about focusing on youtube and letting roblox slide right by. Plenty of parents made that mistake, but the truth is that almost no online platform is safe for children to meet strangers in.

    I'm not sure what the best way to restrict access to adults only is though, but it does seem the current attempt is the best we've come up with so far. Its incredibly invasive, and I simply won't use products that require age verification, so I'm hoping this leads to a better solution. Perhaps another country will figure out an idea and we can copy it.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    Wao, you really believe this too, don't you? Kids are smart enough to circumvent most barriers you put around them. No amount of government bullshit is going to keep them from doing something they are laser focused on doing. Now, parenting does have a chance to keep them from harm (a CHANCE) if the parents put on the effort and are raising their kids with values.

    You have to be a special type of moron to believe tour own post, honestly.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Even the parents that have degrees and jobs in tech have trouble keeping ahead of all this stuff, because there is far more money and manpower put behind making these products as abusive as possible. Sure, I'd like everyone to be as knowledgeable as us on the subject, but that's not practical. Social signaling has a place for broader society even if it ends up hitting people it won't affect.

    Parents are only one side of the equation, with the other being the social media companies themselves. These laws make it so they have to stop offering their services to children, just like I would expect laws to prevent a corner store from selling tobacco or alcohol to minors.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I get that, and it would be a fair assessment if it wasn't because the real problem here is that parents are not parenting, plain and simple. This is yet another part of this that the social media and tech companies are using to their advantage. They get people hooked, that we agree on. Then they lobby for all this surveillance and forced identifications that uses... (Drumroll) companies owned by the same tech giants, in partnership with the other giants. Now they have made it illegal to not provide them with your data and identity, while removing many underage individuals from the equation. Win-win for them, as their liability drops, and now they can serve more ads directed at each individual, effectively increasing the price advertisers are willing to pay, increasing their revenue. There is absolutely no way to keep children out of any platform without full identification, its that simple. Then the same governments that are pushing this have access to all this data as well, which makes them basically all-knowing about every single person in the population.

    There is no universe in which any of this is a good thing. Look at the whole picture, and it's not the UL, it's every country in the world doing this, at different levels, with varying level of success and oppression.

    These are only some of the many reasons why I will never agree with something like this.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    The answer is convincing people that the major social media services available now are bad for everyone regardless of age. For some reason this type of understanding tends to start with the most vulnerable people affected, until we finally admit its bad for everyone. These laws only punish those who use social media and those who provide it as a service, which should reduce social media use in general to a degree, so I'm for it.

    Ideally for me, social media wouldn't exist in the way it does today. If we did have it at all, it would be extremely localized as a means to connect neighbors to one another. Something that would benefit society in some way.

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