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

from the techlash-on-demand dept

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is not having a particularly good time of being the UK’s leader. Basically everyone thinks he’s doing a terrible job and it seems unlikely that he’ll be in the role much longer. Apparently desperate to turn the tide on being historically disliked, he’s decided to grab the most reliable life preserver in modern politics: the techlash. Over the last few weeks, everything he’s done can be summarized in a single sentence: “let’s blame the internet for everything bad.”

It started a week ago with an announcement that if internet social media companies didn’t wave a magic wand and make all sexting disappear… he would start putting tech execs in prison.

“Today I’m calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce device controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually ​explicit images,” Starmer said in a speech at London Tech Week. “This is not an impossible challenge.”

Under the new plans, firms like Apple and Google ​would have to build or activate technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to detect and block nude images for children. ⁠Adults would still be able to take, share or view nude content through an age verification process.

If companies did not act within three months, the government said ​it would bring forward legislation to force them to do so or risk facing fines or, as a last resort, the threat of criminal liability for bosses.

This is very much the magical “nerd harder” thinking by a technologically clueless bureaucrat who thinks that societal problems can be solved by making tech companies do the impossible: stopping humans from doing stupid things.

That magical wishcasting continued this week with Starmer announcing that the UK would be following Australia’s completely failed experiment in “banning” kids from social media, by putting in place an even stricter ban of teens from even more internet services.

The U.K. plans to follow the same model for a social media ban as Australia, which last year became the first country to bar under-16s from holding social media accounts. Platforms that fail to take reasonable steps to exclude children younger than 16 could be punished with multimillion-dollar fines.

The U.K. said its ban will apply to platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, but not YouTube Kids or messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal. Starmer stressed that enforcement action will target tech companies, not children.

The prime minister also said he will go further than Australia’s measures.

He said the government will act to prevent strangers from contacting children on gaming and livestreaming platforms. Authorities are also considering additional measures including overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for those under 18. More details are expected next month.

This is more nerd harder nonsense. Again, Australia’s ban has been a total joke, with the vast majority of kids figuring out how to get around the ban, and the ones most hurt by the ban being teens who have lost access to the communities that were most important to them. Again, every detailed study on the subject has found that the number of teenagers who have negative experiences on social media is tiny.

But the media and politicians absolutely love to blame the internet for any sort of societal problem, and it makes a wonderful scapegoat for their own policy failures.

Even Ian Russell — a prominent UK child safety activist who has spent years blaming social media for anything bad that happens to children — finds this whole thing particularly pointless. Russell, who became an activist after his daughter died by suicide (which he blames on her social media experience), has pointed out that these kinds of teen bans are the kinds of headline grabbing measures politicians love, but do nothing to actually help kids.

Starmer also promised me personally that he would implement effective measures to strengthen regulation and finally address the harm caused by social media. He has failed to keep either promise.

He also promised bereaved parents after the recent consultation on children’s social media use that he would follow the evidence and take the time to consider his response then act decisively. Instead, he has rushed out a ban.

Indeed, the evidence has long suggested that these kinds of bans actually can make things worse by isolating kids who are at most at risk and who need support. At a time when fear mongering and moral panics have cut off basically everywhere that kids can be kids with each other and without adults hovering over them at every moment, social media became that kind of digital third space. Social media didn’t become the default digital third space because it’s uniquely ‘addictive’ — it became the default because adults have spent decades overreacting and shutting down every other place kids could gather and communicate without supervision.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that pretty much all experts agree that age verification technology itself makes kids way less safe online.

But, even more to the point, the UK spent years supposedly crafting what they insisted was a very balanced policy in the Online Safety Act. We always found those claims to be ridiculous as the bill seemed bad from the very start, but if they spent all these years crafting this policy, which only just went into effect, it seems pretty ridiculous to then immediately jump to a way more extreme and less carefully thought out plan.

However, that’s what we should expect for every single nonsense bit of internet regulation that is being pushed for by a political class “for the children.” Because the bills misrepresent the real problems they do nothing to solve them. Rather than admit that their policies were misguided and a kneejerk reaction to a moral panic, politicians will always blame others: in this case the tech companies, and immediately come up with more draconian regulations that serve no purpose other than to get flailing politicians headlines for “doing something.”

Perhaps the perfect encapsulation of how stupid all this is was the question of how Bluesky would be handled (disclaimer: I am on the board of Bluesky). When the ban was first announced, the government had said it would apply to sites that meet the following description:

This would capture user-to-user platforms, whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material, alongside algorithms. The ban will therefore include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban.

Some right wing nonsense peddler sites absolutely lost their shit at the lack of Bluesky being mentioned, claiming that the extremely centrist Starmer was somehow creating an exemption for the supposedly “left-leaning” Bluesky. However, when asked about it, the UK government apparently said that Bluesky was covered and would be required to ban teens like those other platforms.

But does that even make sense? If the supposed problem with all these sites is that they allow for the sharing of content “alongside algorithms,” Bluesky doesn’t actually do that. There are recommendation algorithms, but they are totally in the control of users themselves. They don’t need to use them. Or they can use one of the over 100k feeds that others have created. Or they can easily create their own feeds. It’s wholly different than all the other platforms named, which focus on telling you what they think you’ll want to see (or what maximizes their own profits).

Either way, this shows how random this policy is. Bluesky either does or doesn’t meet the requirements (depending on how you read “alongside algorithms” which is already painfully vague), but as soon as there was a right wing freakout about it, the UK government said “oh, yeah, sure, them too.”

This is not thoughtful policy. This is not considered policy. This is not protecting children. This is a desperate politician with no clue how any of this works announcing nonsense to grab headlines.

Filed Under: keir starmer, protect the children, social media ban, teen safety, uk