The United Kingdom announced its intention to pass a social media ban for users under 16. Many details are not yet finalized, but the country plans to ban most major social media platforms, implement restrictions on chatbots and chat and livestreaming features, and impose an internet curfew on users under 18.
Announcing the policy, Prime Minister Keir Starmer (who has since announced his resignation) stated that “we’re stepping in to protect children” and “back parents.” Technology Secretary Liz Kendall boasted that this bill was “taking power away from the tech giants and putting it back in parents’ hands.”
But the government could not have this more wrong. It is their proposal—a broad ban on social media based on Australia’s social media ban—that would take power away from parents, with Big Brother mandating what kinds of platforms, features, and content are appropriate for each child and family.
The announcement shows that far from learning the lessons of Australia’s ban, which is, per The New York Times, “floundering,” the UK is doubling down by demanding even more complex restrictions. This effort, too, will fail and ultimately harm children. But it also poses an even greater threat to adults’ online privacy and their ability to speak freely.
Why the Australia Ban Failed
Let’s start by considering the results of a similar ban in Australia, in which many children have avoided the age-verification process entirely. Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of children still have access to certain social media accounts by styling their hair differently during facial recognition, using fake IDs, getting help from family and friends, or using virtual private networks (VPNs). The UK government implicitly acknowledges these failures when it promises to learn from the Australian ban, but it also wants to adopt an even more technically challenging age-verification regime.
The proposal includes additional restrictions for 16- and 17-year-olds once they are allowed on social media, including the blocking of “high-risk” functions such as livestreaming and chats with strangers, as well as digital curfews and forced breaks in scrolling or autoplay. So, the UK will require platforms to not only know if a user is under 16—a task with which Australia already struggles—but also to specifically know if a user is 15 and under, 16, 17, or 18 and over.
Not only will a ban be difficult to enforce, but it also can’t fix the problems its proponents identify. In fact, it will harm many kids. Children use social media, yes, for entertainment, but also for engaging with countless hobbies, communities, news, and educational materials. The ban would cut children off from those groups and interests, as we’ve seen in Australia.
Even so, many children will still likely be able to access social media content. But they will not be able to access significant parts of many platforms, nor will they enjoy any protections built into platforms’ services, such as parental controls, content recommendations, or content restrictions for minors. The ban will push children toward alternative social media platforms, often ones with fewer tools to protect kids, a phenomenon observed by at least 27 percent of Australian parents. If the goal is to make children both less safe and less connected, the ban would accomplish this handily.
The UK has also shown remarkably little consistency regarding when it thinks teenagers should be trusted to exercise their judgment, demonstrating some doublethink. At the same time the current government is moving to lower the voting age to 16—arguing the UK should be “engaging young people in our democracy” and “empowering them to participate in society and affecting real change”—it is claiming that 14- and 15-year-olds cannot be trusted with social media at all, and that even 16- and 17-year-olds must abide by online curfews and other internet restrictions to protect them.
A bit odd—innit? —to push for a lower voting age while simultaneously arguing that young people should be restricted in their ability to speak, debate, and access information online.
Big Brother Is Watching You
The impact of the prospective ban isn’t merely limited to kids. It would require everyone, including adults, to prove their age in order to access vast segments of the internet. By forcing everyone to provide identifying information, age-verification regimes pose a huge threat to anonymous speech online.
Whether it is an ID, a facial scan, financial documents, or some combination of age verification techniques, technology companies would effectively be forced to gather enough information to identify their users.
But consider the sensitive reasons individuals might use platforms anonymously. They might engage in anonymous speech regarding contentious political issues, join groups to discuss sensitive personal matters ranging from sexuality to religion, or speak truth to power as a journalist, whistleblower, or activist, using anonymity as a shield. They might even use their anonymity to flee abusive situations and find support.
Anonymity can embolden, enable, protect, and support such users because they know their identity is secret. In a world with widespread age verification, however, users can never be truly anonymous when they must provide a record of who they are. One data breach or hack will spill everything they’ve said, or the identity of anyone with whom they’ve interacted online, into the public domain. Faced with such a threat to their privacy, many users in sensitive or dangerous situations will choose not to speak. Their speech and access to information will have been chilled by the demands to prove their identity.
UK lawmakers have also announced their intention to go further in ending anonymity by restricting VPN usage. Virtual private networks route your web traffic through the VPN’s servers, making it appear as if you are based in another part of the world.
Such networks can provide users with security and privacy benefits, but they also help evade location-specific laws, including the one under consideration in the UK.
Indeed, we’ve seen users around the world (and even in the UK in response to their Online Safety Act) use VPNs to evade such laws. Many policymakers would again cite the need to keep children safe, but we should be clear that they are attacking a common tool used by individuals and businesses to protect their privacy and security online.
The UK has also shown a dangerous tendency toward policing online speech, ranging from comments made by comedian Graham Linehan to those of left-wing political commentators Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker. But once everyone is forced to show their papers and is banned from using VPNs, the government will be able to identify any anonymous speaker. It is only a matter of time before the government argues that it must unmask anonymous speakers to police dangerous speech.
Together with the UK’s similar attacks on encrypted communications, the country is quickly moving toward a reality where Big Brother is indeed watching.
Freedom Is Slavery
The UK presents its move to radically restrict children’s access to social media as empowering parents and protecting children. Yet it is a significant restriction on the speech rights of British teens. And following the same general approach as the Australian ban, these restrictions will, by definition, provide no control to families.
There are certainly plenty of harmful things on the internet, and indeed, plenty of people do harbor unhealthy online habits. But focusing solely on these downsides—exaggerating harms and minimizing benefits—is a recipe for bad policy. And the consequences are quite large, too, requiring that everyone must sacrifice their privacy in the service of such policies.
This simplistic painting of new technology as destroying young minds is, of course, incorrect. The scientific evidence does not support it. Kids find plenty of good things online, along with the bad. We can and should—and frequently do—prosecute bad actors for harming kids online. Parents can and should set good boundaries and rules for technology use that prepare teenagers for life in the 21st century. And each family will have different challenges, benefits, and solutions.
Rejecting this reality is not a virtue. Good intentions are not good policy. The UK is on the precipice of moving further toward Orwell’s dystopian world, while some lawmakers in the United States appear eager to join them. Yet while British lawmakers are likely to repeat all of Australia’s mistakes in waging their fight against new technologies, Americans don’t have to join them.