Guess some mid level government officials was sick of the Yo mum jokes in COD… About as stupid as the UK porn ban.
This is all silly. Just make parents feel responsible for their children. Settle with social media companies to start a joint fund that pays for PSAs about safe social media use on kids tv shows and stuff. The tobacco and alcohol industries have to do it, so why not social media? Though we will end up with an unstoppable 15 second ad before every YouTube video about not sharing personal info in the comments or DMs.
Alan Moore sure knows his stuff about the British government.
Why are they straight up trying to imitate the V4Vendetta?
Seems kinda like a pecking order. Target the young ones. And by prohibiting kids, you can ID everyone.
That’s the thing. I’m not only perfectly fine with getting anyone under the age of 16 off the Internet, I’d also like to see everyone under the age of 21 off the Internet. But it has to be done in a way that utilizes the strength of modern technology and protects our privacy. It’s extremely doable to achieve this, and governments know this, but getting kids off the Internet is not what the government is trying to do.
Segregate the 16-21 to their own internet area so they arent radicalized by the old boomer ideas and they can form their own opinion.
The government can probably id kids anyway through their parents
Rather than regulate the cancer that is social media companies, they want to ban youths from being easily able to contact one another outside of regular texting and phone calls.
Probably not a coincidence that the UK just ruled that protesting the genocide in Palestine somehow constitutes “terrorism”. Seems all these laws against young people on social media all sparked after it became apparent that most all young people oppose Israel. Not a coincidence.
Well of course social media wins this one, they’re paying big money to influence policy over there too! It’s no coincidence, but they have A HUGE influence in many countries. I watched a video on this very thing. It’s long by detailed and good.
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet#t=869
Enforcing this ban will be a privacy nightmare for people.
Which is the idea, especially assuming it also targets the decentralized networks like the Fediverse. Like, will self-hosting Fediverse instances, and self-hosting anything at all even if it’s completely offline suddenly be criminalized there?
And what about open-source OSes like Linux and BSD? Will those also be targeted or will websites start blocking those OSes in UK borders now?
lol
Time to be criminals in the eyes of the law. Young people will just use a VPN anyway.
They’re 100% going to come for VPNs as well.
It’s literal insanity how many people can’t see a consumer VPN ban as the logical next step. I swear most of the population have the critical thought of an NPC.
It is true, but you don’t necessarily have to be a dick about it. The real question is, now, do we declare the internet dead? Are there alternatives? Are there ways to push back? It seems to be a worldwide move, so we’re all in the hole.
VPNs are next on the chopping block.
Corporations and the government will still be allowed to use them, but they’ll outlaw VPNs for average citizens.
One day someone who knows his arse from his elbow will be in a position to make decisions, but not today.
We’ve been waiting for someone like that for a long time. I can’t even remember the previous actually-competent politician.
Because candidates with any sort of real competence are weeded out early in their political careers by a press owned by the sort of people that would view actual leadership as a threat.
I get that many view this as government overreach, but I’m totally OK with it. If it hurts these platforms then so be it. A 10 year old has no business being on tiktok. I’ve got kids and I can police this stuff myself, to an extent, but I’ve seen many neglectful parents who just leave their kids to their own devices (figuratively and litterally). If this prevents children being prematurely exposed to these garbage platforms then I don’t personally see the issue, but I’m open to reasonable counter arguments.
Yes, exactly. Let’s also ban nature documentaries along with slides, bikes, Gregg’s sausage rolls and clowns. Anything that requires an iota of parenting should be verboten from the younglings.
Of course that’s what I meant.
It’s a logical conclusion though?
Yeah, except this isn’t really about the children. This causes a lot of adults to face restrictions and submit their IDs to surveillance companies like Persona/Palantir. Also, I’m fairly certain you are aware why tying your identity to your browsing activity is a bad idea.
Also, there are noninvasive ways to implement this, like:
- Google’s Parental Controls (if you use Android/Google)
- If you use Apple, then there are similar settings there too
- If you are on a degoogled device, then use DNS filters, and lock apps to prevent changes
I do not think everyone (including adults without children) needs to suffer because some parents find it hard to do parent.
Also, I think this should be more about cracking down on addictive algorithms by social media companies (and holding them accountable) than enforcing a blanket ID collection. None of these laws do anything about that. Even adults are addicted to these platforms, and at best, all this law does is push the addiction until after 16 (in a realistic scenario, children can, and will circumvent this).
This is an overt invasion of everyone’s privacy to protect children. It will do nothing to stop children from accessing this content. On the contrary, it will likely push them to even more unsavory areas of the internet to get around it.
20 years ago, the goal was to “protect us from terrorists,” and now the argument is “protect children from the world we created.” A year or two from now, they’ll realize that they didn’t go far enough with this, because children will use TOR and/or VPNs to get around it. Then they will come for those technologies. It is a transparent power grab by rightwing fanatics. It always has been and always will be.
The idiocy of fascism. First they convinced the scared racists, then the scared parents, who will be left to stand for up for our internet freedoms
A ten year old was already barred from using this social media. Generally you have to be over the age of 13 to engage with these social media platforms.
But the big take away here is that instead of these platforms making their product not-addictive and generally safer, they will use this as an opportunity to force legislation that allows them more access to everyone’s personal information (and invades everyone’s privacy) because the law says they have to to enforce age verification to "protect children’. And since that data is their main product that they sell outright or sell access to for ad aggregation, and because they have proven to be incredibly bad as anonymizing and safeguarding that information, this is literally worse for everyone, especially children who’s data is valuable because they don’t have bad credit or other marks on their identities yet and that means their identities (if stolen and used for illegal activities) can detrimentally effect them for the rest of their lifetime.
That’s what you’re advocating for when you agree with this kind of government overreach. The companies have this worked out. When your identity is stolen they give you some credit monitoring and go on operating as if nothing happened. Maybe (and that maybe is doing Atlas levels of heavy lifting here) they end up in a class action lawsuit and the people affected get $12.
I have seen literally no ID verification law that combats this or addresses it in any way. And that’s before we get to governments using this to surveil the general populace.
I lt feels like there’s two separate issues: whether children should be allowed on social media, and how age verification should be implemented.
It’s perfectly reasonable to be concerned about privacy, data collection, and mission creep. Those are legitimate concerns that any age-verification scheme should address. But it doesn’t follow that because some verification methods are bad, we should abandon the goal of keeping children off social media.
The fact that platforms already prohibit under-13s isn’t much of an argument when everyone knows those rules are routinely ignored. If a law is unenforced and ineffective, pointing to its existence doesn’t solve the problem.
You also seem to assume that age verification necessarily means handing social media companies copies of passports and driving licences. It doesn’t have to. There are privacy-preserving approaches where a third party verifies age and only returns a yes/no answer. Whether those systems are good enough is a fair debate, but it’s not accurate to suggest that the only option is mass identity collection by Facebook and similar companies.
I also don’t think it’s fair to characterise supporters of these measures as advocating government overreach or surveillance. Many parents simply look at the evidence around addictive design, bullying, self-harm content, and compulsive usage among children and conclude that some form of restriction is justified. They may be wrong about the solution, but they’re not necessarily indifferent to privacy or civil liberties.
Finally, if we accept that social media companies have failed to make their products safe for children, then regulation becomes the obvious next question. Saying that platforms should design better products doesn’t tell us what to do when they don’t.
There are no privacy preserving age verification methods beyond “just trust us we pinky promise we won’t track you or keep your data”. And I certainly don’t trust the government that tried to backdoor iCloud and is currently trying to mandate government spyware to be installed on all devices
This is nonsense. “Social networks” started off as homebrew unregulated unmoderated forums, and there’s arguably more ways than ever to spin up your own. This is what kids will do if we ban rather than regulate. It’s literally the same for every prohibition.
People are arguing that these measures are not only myopic and pointless, but they are dangerously stupid to support wrt government overreach and surveillance. And that affects everyone, especially the children they are so keen on “protecting” right now.
That doesn’t address the argument being made.
It’s entirely reasonable to worry about privacy, data collection, and government overreach. Any age-verification system creates new infrastructure for proving identity or age online, and people are right to scrutinise that. But it also doesn’t follow that every attempt at age restriction is therefore equivalent to mass surveillance or should be dismissed out of hand.
Likewise, pointing out that children will find ways around restrictions isn’t, by itself, an argument against having restrictions. Kids have always circumvented rules. The relevant question is whether a measure meaningfully reduces access or harm, not whether it is perfectly enforceable.
I also don’t think it’s accurate to frame support for these measures as inherently “dangerously stupid”. Many supporters are responding to concerns about addictive platform design, bullying, self-harm content, algorithmic recommendation systems, and the amount of time children spend on these services. You can disagree with their proposed solution without assuming bad motives or indifference to civil liberties.
Where I think the debate should focus is on effectiveness and proportionality. If age-verification systems are ineffective, easily bypassed, or require unacceptable levels of data collection, then that’s a strong argument against them.
But that’s different from arguing that any attempt to restrict children’s access is necessarily an attack on privacy or freedom.
And if we agree that major platforms have not done a particularly good job of protecting children, then “people will just use something else” doesn’t fully answer the policy question. It simply shifts the discussion to what, if anything, should be done instead.
The damage is done in the UK. The regulation needs to be written with privacy first, or it will undoubtedly be taken advantage of by bad actors. To think anything else is possible under capitalism is dangerously stupid.
Australia’s social media ban – is it working?
Obviously regulation has been and is always better than prohibition. Prohibition is a lazy “quick win” political move and always has been.
A 10 year old has no business being on tiktok
Government overreach.
Parents should issue an internet capable phone to a 10 y/o. And if, restrict it to hell and heavens.
