A child-free internet, at what cost?

When I wrote about the Online Safety Act last summer, I warned that forcing people to hand over their passports to access online content would lead to worse things sooner than later. I argued that the vague definitions of ‘harmful’ content and the reliance on third-party age verification companies would fundamentally break the internet as we know it in the UK.

I’d love to say the situation was different, but the slippery slope was a cliff.

Today Keir Starmer announced at a Downing Street press conference what the government is calling an “Australia Plus” ban on social media for under-16s ¹. Becoming law by early next year, this legislation is sweeping, authoritarian, and flawed. It will block anyone under 16 from accessing platforms like YouTube, Instagram, X, TikTok, and Reddit ².

What is Australia Plus?

Australia’s badly thought-out social media ban wasn’t bad enough, Starmer thought, and decided to add in dozens of equally unenforcable provisions. These ‘world-leading’ restrictions are going to weaken internet freedom in the UK and undermine our already-feeble standing in the world’s freedom index. Name a tech company willing to launch or operate in such a hostile environment as the one being created now?

Under the new proposals, the government wants to impose restrictions on gaming apps and messaging platforms, completely removing the ability to chat with strangers. They are also looking into enforcing overnight digital curfews and banning infinite scrolling for anyone under 18.

In Australia, 61-67% of children report still using social media despite the ban ³.

A Life Without Social Media

Here is where the nuance enters - I actually believe we would be better off without social media. I think relationships, friendships, and social dynamics would be improved in a world where we aren’t expected to always be online and reachable. I prefer the concept of the Internet being a physical space, like a computer nook or a library, where you have to visit to get online - or a landline, meaning you can only be reached when you’re at home, and going out means you get to have some time away from it all.

Of course, the internet has massively improved life for a vast majority of things - but social media is undeniably toxic and poisonous to teenage brains.

Despite this, I do not believe that banning under-16s is the right move. Recognising the problem does not mean we should outsource parenting to Keir Starmer.

Parents vs the Government

The epidemic of ‘iPad kids’ is evident everywhere in society. Try going to an airport or a train station, the chances are most children in buggies that you see will be grasping iPads wrapped in clunky Bob the Builder cases, watching Cocomelon or some equivalent brainrot.

Clearly, these devices are detrimental to the cognitive growth of the children ⁴, and a much healthier balance of boredom and screen-free entertainment would be hugely beneficial to the children of the world. So should the government ban giving devices to children? I don’t think so.

Parents should be allowed to parent their children to an extent. I don’t believe in homeschooling, I’m not an avid libertarian - but I do believe that all parents and all children should not be punished for the irresponsibility of a smaller subset.

Social media for children can be sometimes beneficial - and not only that, ‘social media’ is, once again, a broad and vague definition. This includes YouTube - which means that children taking their GCSEs won’t be able to access educational content, children who are interested in history can’t expand their knowledge on Reddit or TikTok, where despite the stereotypes, there are actually large amounts of educational content ⁵.

However, I don’t want children raised by algorithms designed to strip them of their attention spans and individuality. I want them offline, playing in the parks, and going to the library after school. But passing a law that outlaws it entirely doesn’t magically rebuild the physical world - it takes away both their worlds, encourages anti-social behaviour, and creates an environment of lawlessness amongst those who attempt to circumvent the ban.

How do we know they’re children?

There is also a fundamental and unavoidable reality that the government and campaigners continue to conveniently avoid:

You cannot ban 15-year olds from the internet without forcing every 16, 20, and 60 year old to prove they aren’t 15.

To enforce the social media ban, tech companies who wish to continue operating will have zero choice but to implement total mandatory age verification for every single British internet user.

Remember Persona, Yoti, and Onfido, the age verification companies who were contracted to implement the Online Safety Act? The companies with the sparse privacy policies who reserve the right to aggregate all your data? They are about to get the biggest payday of their lives.

Every adult in the UK will now be required to upload a government-issued ID, or submit to biometric facial scanning, just to watch a YouTube tutorial or to read a thread on Reddit.

This lame-duck government is forcing a nationwide digital ID system - but one outsourced to private companies. It’s Tony Blair in the pocket of Palantir. Anonymity on the internet is coming to an end.

Evading the ban

The bitter irony of this all is that it won’t even work. I still frequently use VPNs to avoid age verification on websites - I’m not underage, but I am not happy giving up my identity to every site who asks for it!

And, what happens when the mainstream moderated platforms become too much of a hassle to access? As cybersecurity experts and children’s advocates have repeatedly warned, frustrated kids often won’t give up - they will keep looking for the sites which let them in, sites where moderation is non-existent and the content is dangerous.

Device-level Photo Scanning

The social media ban is not the only ban going into effect soon - there is a second ban, hidden in the shadow of the first one, which is coming into place much sooner. It is a ‘nudity-detection’ feature that the government want phone companies to implement at device-level ⁶. Yes, so VPNs won’t get around this one! It will essentially require every adult to prove they’re an adult in order to use their devices without photo restrictions. Their ultimatum for tech companies to implement this voluntarily is September. In fact, Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips resigned in May because Starmer wasn’t pushing this hard enough - so perhaps her resignation forced his hand into rushing the legislation through ⁷.

Are they trying to get Apple and Google to lobby for Reform UK? Any sense of the UK being tech-friendly is evaporating by the second.

The only way it seems to evade this for now is to re-flash your phone and choose a different country at the beginning, and then change all your settings to live in the UK, and that might not even work soon.

Can we stop this?

I’m still holding out hope that either one of these scenarios will happen:

• Tech companies like Apple and Google will threaten to pull out of the UK entirely, and the government will quietly shelve these plans.

• Starmer goes before September, and the new leader quietly shelves the plans.

Otherwise, I fear the state of the internet and the British tech industry is slowly whirling down a sinkhole into oblivion.

Write to your MP. Support digital rights organizations like the Open Rights Group. I think we should absolutely fight to get kids off social media - through regulation, better public spaces, and cultural shifts. But do not let them pass this ban off as a ‘child safety’ measure when it is, in reality, the largest expansion of mass surveillance this country has ever seen ⁸.