Most of my objections are enforcement - yes, other people have my ID, but they are generally large institutions that are held to account when they have data leaks. Data leaks in social media, especially smaller companies, are rife and I don't want them to contain everything someone needs for identity fraud. Video age recognition is not reliable and extremely discriminatory - I have a friend whose face never registers as a face, and it's especially unreliable between different teenagers. Teenagers are also less likely to even have any easily scannable ID, especially less well off teenagers.
On that last point, this feels a lot like yet another 'let's find a use case for mandatory ID cards' and nobody likes mandatory ID cards (tbh I am actually softer on this than most people I know, I only don't like the idea because of the incompetence with which it is likely to be executed).
Also, real names is actually pretty bad - there are a lot of reasons not to use your real name (not just trans reasons - eg you usually go by a nickname and noone will know who you are by your passport name, you are a teacher and don't want the kids you are responsible for to find you, you are in witness protection, you have a stalker, you don't want your employer or coworkers to know about your weird hobbies), people with 'weird' names are generally singled out for enforcement, it's hard to build up a personal brand if your name is too normal.
Here's a challenge for anyone who thinks ID cards are a bad idea. Find a single EU citizen (everyone knows a few) who can tell you a single story about any time in their life where having a government-issued ID card led to any outcome that was remotely less favourable to them than if there had not been government-issued ID cards.
That's it. One EU citizen, one incident, any time in their entire life.
It's interesting that across Europe, not a single political party, from the beyond-Corbynites on the far left to the beyond-Restore people on the far right, and including the extremely anti-surveillance Pirate parties, has the abolition of ID cards in its programme/manifesto.
I tried to explain to my Spanish neighbour (70 years old, resisted Franco, lifetime social democrat) that the UK has no ID cards. He was literally unable to understand how a society could function without them. When I told him that people imagine that there will be secret police on every corner demanding your papers he just laughed.
(As a nice by-product, identity theft of the type that plagues the UK and US is almost unheard of in EU countries...)
I used to be very anti ID cards, but have since come round to supporting. Partly, as you say, other European countries; also, the positive gains from it seem significant (including ID theft, as you say). But also because we give our ID so readily now elsewhere. The debanking of the trucker protest in Canada was a big switching point for me: if the Government can do that, whether or not you have an ID card is irrelevant.
(my initial objections were 'the weird kids need social media to find each other' but an Australia style ban on posting style social media that leaves Discord servers alone is fine for that.)
I asked Google what pro-ana material was but instead of telling me it told me help was available, so I'm guessing it's something pretty bad! (Searching 'pro-ana meaning' allowed me to discover it's pro-anorexia material. Yeah, that sounds like something we could do without.)
Given that, despite your involvement with the horror show that was the last government, you generally seem fairly sensible, this article is a rather depressing illustration of why the last government was as it was.
While I think that the hysteria about social media is overblown, I can see a case for restricting it somewhat for children. (I also think a phone ban in schools could be a sensible thing to do.). While this proposal is presented by the press, and by you, as a ban on social media for children it's actually a requirement for all adults to prove their ID to use a fair chunk of the Internet. If you think that's a good idea then you lack a lot of imagination and/or recent historical knowledge.
Worse for this proposal is that it appears to be the latest in a long line of idiotic ideas rushed out by a failed prime minister in search of a "legacy". That alone should disqualify it from support from anyone who's lived through net zero, the generational smoking ban, etc etc.
It would limit the ability of people working in eg multinational companies to express any political opinion (even moderate one), especially about foreign policy or things affecting their own industry.
Eg if you are a senior City worker, it's quite risky and potentially forbidden by your employer to express opinions in public about eg financial industry regulation or the latest banking scandal.
When I first had a Twitter account, I posted under my real name, also about the hot debate topics relate to the industry I worked in. Nothing extremist or illegal. Very soon I have been made to know that my employer was monitoring what I said on Twitter. That of course put a stopper on how freely I was able to express myself.
Sorry, but I am not very convinced about some of these arguments:
- "Culture and legislation are mutually reinforcing."
That this is about sending a signal to parents that it's illegal to use social media is entirely your assumption - and a weird one, considering you open with data about the support for this legislation. If anything, at least in the word of the PM, the nudge is towards the industry - but then I don't understand how a ban that falls on users rather than regulating the companies themselves is useful in that sense. If anything, it leaves them off the hook to create more damaging content. If there is such a wide support, why not choosing to regulate the tech companies?
- "We already use ID and other invasive tech tools" - well, first of all, the fact that you choose to use it does not mean everyone does or is willing to do so. And an argument that does not distinguish between a choice and a government-mandated measure is very risky - and treats the (widely documented) risks and harms quite superficially
As an aside we leave so many breadcrumbs on social media through our searches and set up of our browser and typing quirks that the big sites like Meta and Google know our real identity, any burner accounts we additionally have as well as our age. They have a good idea of our present mood too.
A change I would be very keen on is for advertisers and ad bureaus to have to prove their identity and if there is a problem later the social media site on hook to pay the compensation. Evidence from when Google tightened up is that it eliminates nearly all fraud overnight. Structure in place to implement swiftly.
Your point 4, that presenting a curated feed makes the platform a publisher, is cogent. Has this idea been used in litigation before? It sounds promising as an argument.
Like you, I have libertarian tendencies but believe that overall social media has been harmful to society. However, I oppose (with some reservations), the social media ban for under-16s, mostly because I don't want the UK to become a VPN nation, as Russia or Belarus, and because I worry that it might be too broad (I believe it would apply to every platform that allows for posting content in public and/or direct messaging between users, which would affect almost every forum on the Internet, as well as Substack). An alternative for regulation of social media for minors could be mandating better tools to help parents regulate use, although these do little to solve collective action problems.
Of the extra suggestions for regulating social media, number one is great (infinite scroll is poison), and some versions of numbers three and four should probably be passed. After all, the negative effects of social media do not stop when people reach their 16th birthday.
As an aside, the internet curfew for those between 16 and 18 years old is just dumb; current government policy is that a 17-year-old can vote but not watch YouTube videos at 9 pm, which no one believes that it makes any sense.
"To put my cards on the table, I believe smartphones in general, and social media in particular, have been a deeply harmful societal innovation, at the ‘hey, let’s put lead in petrol’ scale of innovation. Their affects appear to include contributing to declining mental health, collapsing attention spans, bullying and general unhappiness, as well as contributing to broader crises such as falls in literacy, loneliness, fertility collapse and political polarisation."
So what do you want to do with the physical bullying of school? The observed problems of mental health in schools (attempts at self-harm decline during school holidays), how bored most kids are in school, regardless?
If there's a collapse in attention spans, why are movies longer than they were in the 1940s?
You've not addressed the main point: that there is no robust evidence that social media is bad for children. It's all just a hunch that's become common sense among panicky parents
"40% of 12-15 year olds in Australia who had had social media accounts were no longer using it. "
40% of 12-15 year olds told pollsters that.
"Previous shifts - drink-driving, smoking - saw culture gradually change after legislation was passed."
Both of these have hard science behind them, social media doesn't.
"Parents are responsible for their children, not the state. They are, but we already age-gate many products, from alcohol and tobacco to films and video games. "
This is about the state acting in loco parentis. That children can go out, have some freedom, without them being able to buy alcohol. The age limit for children drinking alcohol at home is 5. A child can see a 12A at any time, if their parents think it will be acceptable, but only 12 by their own choice. Parents can (and this is most effective) control their children's devices.
"There is no way to have ‘harmless’ social media for children in its current form."
There is no way to have "harmless" towns for children to visit. Cars are dangerous, there are men that want to pick up girls. Should we ban children going to town? What about schools? Children often face physical assault. Do you think children should have to face that? Social media is just the new bogeyman, like rock music, video nasties. And school isn't because it's normal, and no-one looks at its problems.
"Social media causes harms to adults, too. Yes, it does - and we can come to that. But children are more vulnerable, the civil liberty concerns are much smaller when it comes to children, and there is a much higher public consensus for action regarding children - so we should do this now"
That the public wants it is no good reason for doing it. There was a time the German public were in favour of persecuting Jews.
"No doubt they will - but fewer will, and those that do will see it less often. "
No. Once kids have figured out to install Opera or Firefox and press the "VPN" button, they get everything. And this is why its all bad. It creates the illusion of safety for parents. The government is watching your kids, nothing for you to worry about.
This is before we get into something that most people don't understand, that the likes of Facebook already try and keep things in order. If kids can't use Facebook, do you think they won't do social media, or do you think they'll find places like 4Chan which are full of extreme content? Right now, that's completely open.
"The ban is on social media, not the internet."
But there is no clear distinction. I use Reddit to learn things, but there is also a social aspect of people discussing things. There are groups related to low-budget filmmaking on Facebook. And they don't want to move, because Facebook supplies a great, easy to use platform. YouTube has people making videos about the Versailles treaty, and you can leave comments, get into debates.
What are your thoughts on the 'TikTok gap' (the time freed up by children not being on social media) and how that could be filled? My instinct is that the ban is good policy, but the consequences of significantly more free time for children have been under-explored, and we don't really know what will happen.
Banning social media for kids has pros and cons; I'm on the fence. But banning *YouTube* seems bad. It's more like TV than it is like Instagram, Facebook, X, etc. Schools, and edtech platforms used by schools, often require YouTube for homework and in-class learning. Kids at bad schools or who've missed school rely on it to supplement learning. And lots of kids use it to learn hobbies and extracurricular subjects, like niche languages, arts and crafts, or musical instruments. I guess it's OK if they're just going to ban reading/writing comments on YouTube, i.e. the actual social-media-y aspect of it, and allow watching videos; but everything I've seen (including BBC and gov.uk) just says "YouTube" and/or suggests teens up to 15 will be limited to watching YouTube Kids.
I'm also not convinced by the 8:30pm curfew for 16-17yos (people who might have full-time jobs, or be away at uni, or live with a partner and kids, and who may soon be able to vote).
And I don't like the ID thing: it greatly increases the risk of data breaches / identity theft, and also increases the (actual or perceived) risk of posting politically dissenting material.
None of these ten are the strongest argument against the ban, though the culture one is close.
The main objection is that the ban is encouraging bad parenting: politicians should not be pandering to parents disclaiming personal accountability for how they raise their children.
Parents have the choice and the responsibility on how they raise their kids to interact with technology. Board any flight, and you will see 90%+ of parents handing children tablets before the plane even takes off. Why do they then turn to the state to ask for bans?
Well, I understand your logic. As a parent who was not very tech savvy and had a hard time getting my husband to join, I did a lot less than I should have to limit smart phone and computer use. Our daughter's sleep was disrupted, she was influenced by pro trans sites and she was very adamant when we limited her use. She was smart enough to have another phone as well as knowledgeable about using the neighbor's wifi. Other than the phone she was straight A's model student. There were fewer controls and monitors back when our child was young and I didn't do my due diligence as I didn't realize the harms. Kids are on their devices for 8-10 hours a day-I think 7 is an average fir high school age. That's a lot more influence than parents expect.
Most of my objections are enforcement - yes, other people have my ID, but they are generally large institutions that are held to account when they have data leaks. Data leaks in social media, especially smaller companies, are rife and I don't want them to contain everything someone needs for identity fraud. Video age recognition is not reliable and extremely discriminatory - I have a friend whose face never registers as a face, and it's especially unreliable between different teenagers. Teenagers are also less likely to even have any easily scannable ID, especially less well off teenagers.
On that last point, this feels a lot like yet another 'let's find a use case for mandatory ID cards' and nobody likes mandatory ID cards (tbh I am actually softer on this than most people I know, I only don't like the idea because of the incompetence with which it is likely to be executed).
Also, real names is actually pretty bad - there are a lot of reasons not to use your real name (not just trans reasons - eg you usually go by a nickname and noone will know who you are by your passport name, you are a teacher and don't want the kids you are responsible for to find you, you are in witness protection, you have a stalker, you don't want your employer or coworkers to know about your weird hobbies), people with 'weird' names are generally singled out for enforcement, it's hard to build up a personal brand if your name is too normal.
Here's a challenge for anyone who thinks ID cards are a bad idea. Find a single EU citizen (everyone knows a few) who can tell you a single story about any time in their life where having a government-issued ID card led to any outcome that was remotely less favourable to them than if there had not been government-issued ID cards.
That's it. One EU citizen, one incident, any time in their entire life.
It's interesting that across Europe, not a single political party, from the beyond-Corbynites on the far left to the beyond-Restore people on the far right, and including the extremely anti-surveillance Pirate parties, has the abolition of ID cards in its programme/manifesto.
I tried to explain to my Spanish neighbour (70 years old, resisted Franco, lifetime social democrat) that the UK has no ID cards. He was literally unable to understand how a society could function without them. When I told him that people imagine that there will be secret police on every corner demanding your papers he just laughed.
(As a nice by-product, identity theft of the type that plagues the UK and US is almost unheard of in EU countries...)
Unfortunately we grew up hearing about identity stars from a previous German regime and have developed a strong emotional reaction.
I used to be very anti ID cards, but have since come round to supporting. Partly, as you say, other European countries; also, the positive gains from it seem significant (including ID theft, as you say). But also because we give our ID so readily now elsewhere. The debanking of the trucker protest in Canada was a big switching point for me: if the Government can do that, whether or not you have an ID card is irrelevant.
(my initial objections were 'the weird kids need social media to find each other' but an Australia style ban on posting style social media that leaves Discord servers alone is fine for that.)
I asked Google what pro-ana material was but instead of telling me it told me help was available, so I'm guessing it's something pretty bad! (Searching 'pro-ana meaning' allowed me to discover it's pro-anorexia material. Yeah, that sounds like something we could do without.)
Given that, despite your involvement with the horror show that was the last government, you generally seem fairly sensible, this article is a rather depressing illustration of why the last government was as it was.
While I think that the hysteria about social media is overblown, I can see a case for restricting it somewhat for children. (I also think a phone ban in schools could be a sensible thing to do.). While this proposal is presented by the press, and by you, as a ban on social media for children it's actually a requirement for all adults to prove their ID to use a fair chunk of the Internet. If you think that's a good idea then you lack a lot of imagination and/or recent historical knowledge.
Worse for this proposal is that it appears to be the latest in a long line of idiotic ideas rushed out by a failed prime minister in search of a "legacy". That alone should disqualify it from support from anyone who's lived through net zero, the generational smoking ban, etc etc.
Additional point - if we did what was "tremendously popular" with the public then we'd still be in lock down...
"Require users to use real names."
It would limit the ability of people working in eg multinational companies to express any political opinion (even moderate one), especially about foreign policy or things affecting their own industry.
Eg if you are a senior City worker, it's quite risky and potentially forbidden by your employer to express opinions in public about eg financial industry regulation or the latest banking scandal.
When I first had a Twitter account, I posted under my real name, also about the hot debate topics relate to the industry I worked in. Nothing extremist or illegal. Very soon I have been made to know that my employer was monitoring what I said on Twitter. That of course put a stopper on how freely I was able to express myself.
Sorry, but I am not very convinced about some of these arguments:
- "Culture and legislation are mutually reinforcing."
That this is about sending a signal to parents that it's illegal to use social media is entirely your assumption - and a weird one, considering you open with data about the support for this legislation. If anything, at least in the word of the PM, the nudge is towards the industry - but then I don't understand how a ban that falls on users rather than regulating the companies themselves is useful in that sense. If anything, it leaves them off the hook to create more damaging content. If there is such a wide support, why not choosing to regulate the tech companies?
- "We already use ID and other invasive tech tools" - well, first of all, the fact that you choose to use it does not mean everyone does or is willing to do so. And an argument that does not distinguish between a choice and a government-mandated measure is very risky - and treats the (widely documented) risks and harms quite superficially
Jack *Dorsey*, not Dawsey. 🙏
Fixed!
As an aside we leave so many breadcrumbs on social media through our searches and set up of our browser and typing quirks that the big sites like Meta and Google know our real identity, any burner accounts we additionally have as well as our age. They have a good idea of our present mood too.
A change I would be very keen on is for advertisers and ad bureaus to have to prove their identity and if there is a problem later the social media site on hook to pay the compensation. Evidence from when Google tightened up is that it eliminates nearly all fraud overnight. Structure in place to implement swiftly.
Your point 4, that presenting a curated feed makes the platform a publisher, is cogent. Has this idea been used in litigation before? It sounds promising as an argument.
Like you, I have libertarian tendencies but believe that overall social media has been harmful to society. However, I oppose (with some reservations), the social media ban for under-16s, mostly because I don't want the UK to become a VPN nation, as Russia or Belarus, and because I worry that it might be too broad (I believe it would apply to every platform that allows for posting content in public and/or direct messaging between users, which would affect almost every forum on the Internet, as well as Substack). An alternative for regulation of social media for minors could be mandating better tools to help parents regulate use, although these do little to solve collective action problems.
Of the extra suggestions for regulating social media, number one is great (infinite scroll is poison), and some versions of numbers three and four should probably be passed. After all, the negative effects of social media do not stop when people reach their 16th birthday.
As an aside, the internet curfew for those between 16 and 18 years old is just dumb; current government policy is that a 17-year-old can vote but not watch YouTube videos at 9 pm, which no one believes that it makes any sense.
"To put my cards on the table, I believe smartphones in general, and social media in particular, have been a deeply harmful societal innovation, at the ‘hey, let’s put lead in petrol’ scale of innovation. Their affects appear to include contributing to declining mental health, collapsing attention spans, bullying and general unhappiness, as well as contributing to broader crises such as falls in literacy, loneliness, fertility collapse and political polarisation."
So what do you want to do with the physical bullying of school? The observed problems of mental health in schools (attempts at self-harm decline during school holidays), how bored most kids are in school, regardless?
If there's a collapse in attention spans, why are movies longer than they were in the 1940s?
You've not addressed the main point: that there is no robust evidence that social media is bad for children. It's all just a hunch that's become common sense among panicky parents
"40% of 12-15 year olds in Australia who had had social media accounts were no longer using it. "
40% of 12-15 year olds told pollsters that.
"Previous shifts - drink-driving, smoking - saw culture gradually change after legislation was passed."
Both of these have hard science behind them, social media doesn't.
"Parents are responsible for their children, not the state. They are, but we already age-gate many products, from alcohol and tobacco to films and video games. "
This is about the state acting in loco parentis. That children can go out, have some freedom, without them being able to buy alcohol. The age limit for children drinking alcohol at home is 5. A child can see a 12A at any time, if their parents think it will be acceptable, but only 12 by their own choice. Parents can (and this is most effective) control their children's devices.
"There is no way to have ‘harmless’ social media for children in its current form."
There is no way to have "harmless" towns for children to visit. Cars are dangerous, there are men that want to pick up girls. Should we ban children going to town? What about schools? Children often face physical assault. Do you think children should have to face that? Social media is just the new bogeyman, like rock music, video nasties. And school isn't because it's normal, and no-one looks at its problems.
"Social media causes harms to adults, too. Yes, it does - and we can come to that. But children are more vulnerable, the civil liberty concerns are much smaller when it comes to children, and there is a much higher public consensus for action regarding children - so we should do this now"
That the public wants it is no good reason for doing it. There was a time the German public were in favour of persecuting Jews.
"No doubt they will - but fewer will, and those that do will see it less often. "
No. Once kids have figured out to install Opera or Firefox and press the "VPN" button, they get everything. And this is why its all bad. It creates the illusion of safety for parents. The government is watching your kids, nothing for you to worry about.
This is before we get into something that most people don't understand, that the likes of Facebook already try and keep things in order. If kids can't use Facebook, do you think they won't do social media, or do you think they'll find places like 4Chan which are full of extreme content? Right now, that's completely open.
"The ban is on social media, not the internet."
But there is no clear distinction. I use Reddit to learn things, but there is also a social aspect of people discussing things. There are groups related to low-budget filmmaking on Facebook. And they don't want to move, because Facebook supplies a great, easy to use platform. YouTube has people making videos about the Versailles treaty, and you can leave comments, get into debates.
What are your thoughts on the 'TikTok gap' (the time freed up by children not being on social media) and how that could be filled? My instinct is that the ban is good policy, but the consequences of significantly more free time for children have been under-explored, and we don't really know what will happen.
Banning social media for kids has pros and cons; I'm on the fence. But banning *YouTube* seems bad. It's more like TV than it is like Instagram, Facebook, X, etc. Schools, and edtech platforms used by schools, often require YouTube for homework and in-class learning. Kids at bad schools or who've missed school rely on it to supplement learning. And lots of kids use it to learn hobbies and extracurricular subjects, like niche languages, arts and crafts, or musical instruments. I guess it's OK if they're just going to ban reading/writing comments on YouTube, i.e. the actual social-media-y aspect of it, and allow watching videos; but everything I've seen (including BBC and gov.uk) just says "YouTube" and/or suggests teens up to 15 will be limited to watching YouTube Kids.
I'm also not convinced by the 8:30pm curfew for 16-17yos (people who might have full-time jobs, or be away at uni, or live with a partner and kids, and who may soon be able to vote).
And I don't like the ID thing: it greatly increases the risk of data breaches / identity theft, and also increases the (actual or perceived) risk of posting politically dissenting material.
None of these ten are the strongest argument against the ban, though the culture one is close.
The main objection is that the ban is encouraging bad parenting: politicians should not be pandering to parents disclaiming personal accountability for how they raise their children.
Parents have the choice and the responsibility on how they raise their kids to interact with technology. Board any flight, and you will see 90%+ of parents handing children tablets before the plane even takes off. Why do they then turn to the state to ask for bans?
Well, I understand your logic. As a parent who was not very tech savvy and had a hard time getting my husband to join, I did a lot less than I should have to limit smart phone and computer use. Our daughter's sleep was disrupted, she was influenced by pro trans sites and she was very adamant when we limited her use. She was smart enough to have another phone as well as knowledgeable about using the neighbor's wifi. Other than the phone she was straight A's model student. There were fewer controls and monitors back when our child was young and I didn't do my due diligence as I didn't realize the harms. Kids are on their devices for 8-10 hours a day-I think 7 is an average fir high school age. That's a lot more influence than parents expect.