- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
Under-16s will be banned from using social media, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced.
Starmer says social media is making children unhappy, making it easier for bullies to abuse children, and is “designed to be addictive”. A ban would give children more time, security, and more freedom to grow up - as well as more opportunities, he adds.
“That is all any parent wants. They want to know that Britain will be better for their children, that they will get a fair chance,” the PM says in a speech in Downing Street.
Starmer adds that the government is “not prepared to compromise” on the safety and happiness of children - and that includes in the regulation and enforcement of this ban. He says the government has listened to and learned from countries like Australia, where a similar ban has already been introduced.
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I’m not entirely sure how that’s panning out in Aus (a quick search suggests it’s a flop, but the sources aren’t great). I think the general consensus is that it’s not as enforceable as they hoped.
We are moving towards an era of a more locked down web in the UK. The main flag here is “robust age verification” - i.e. we’re moving from “you must provide ID to view adult material on social media” to “you must provide ID to use social media”.
One can quickly see “your id must be retained and linked to your account to reduce crime” and “any officer of the law may view this ID to better support crime reduction” slipping in over the next 20 years or so.
Overall, this feels like another Trojan horse to move towards a China-style de-anonymised web. Bad move all around really.
You’re right, and it’s failure will be the excuse to deprive us all of more of our privacy and autonomy.
To fucking no sane person’s surprise.
you mean we have privacy now? you know these social media companies already gave info on you even if you dont sign up.
its good if social media companies cant get kids into doomscrolling
You have the means, ways and most importantly, it is still legal to obtain privacy, though, right?
For now. We’ve already seen behaviors become culturally suspect simply because they became uncommon. Not too far from vilification from there, then fear mongering, then criminalizing. I worry the value of us not having privacy is too profitable to withstand the effort to remove it.
yeah just dont use it
We have more than we will and for some of us, who made the sacrifices and took steps, more than others.
I’m in Australia and it’s shit for everyone. The whole thing was basically conceived by SportsBet so they could advertise on social media with impunity.
My kids are on more social media platforms than I am. So are all their friends. It hasn’t slowed anything in that regard.
I can say, none of the shady bootleg porn sites have implemented blocking. So there’s always that.
I’ve survived so far without doing a face scan or ID check. Most of my social media accounts are over 16 years old anyway.
Next 20 years? Next year pal. Not just the police either. Just because they don’t tell you about it doesn’t mean it won’t happen sooner. You could organize to try and stop it, just a thought.
Already a member of the EFF, and I teach privacy to my students and coworkers already.
It’s more a rearguard than a fight at this point - most Brits are too distracted to care.
You guys and us both in the US. I know it. We can win, if we organize. We are set against each other, but that is only because we don’t have a populist leader.
“If it continues long enough, even a reign of terror may become a fondly remembered period. People believe they want justice and wise government but, in fact, what they really want is an assurance that tomorrow will be very much like today.” - Terry Pratchett
It’s a good quote, and it tells you a lot about the idea of organising to forcefully change things. Change comes through education, patience, kindness, and self-sacrifice; it comes from teaching people that tomorrow can really be better. It’s never quick, it’s rarely (if ever) a great leader who brings it about, and it’s never such leaders who pay the price.
UK assuming everyone online is a child unless they are willing to have their passport leaked.
I am in favor of keeping kids off of social media, but I think the method of ID verification as default is entirely wrong.
Parents should ultimately be responsible for the activity of their child. If you can’t trust your child to use the internet/social media responsibly, they simply should not be given access to smart devices.
If a kid gets onto social media and does stupid things there, go after the parents for neglect. The same would happen if I wasn’t supervising my 8-year-old and they sneak off to vandalize someone else’s property.
At most, maybe conversations could happen with ISPs to standardize an optional whitelist system for home consumers with children to block access to key social media domains for unapproved devices, but that’s as far as I’d go. Empower parents with better supervisory tools to be more involved, no need to violate the rights of everyone else.
A kid circumventing internet controls should not lead to charges against the parent. What a shit take.
Just dont have a kid so they dont have to work for the worst of us to pay rent to the worst of us. Also, no prison time!
Parents should ultimately be responsible for the activity of their child. If you can’t trust your child to use the internet/social media responsibly, they simply should not be given access to smart devices.
When people say this, I always think about how we ID for alcohol. If it’s the parents responsibility, they should never let their kid be able to go to the store to buy alcohol in the first place. The store shouldn’t have to ID people. Except most people don’t make this argument. I suppose if you agree with that statement, then you’d be consistent.
If a kid gets onto social media and does stupid things there
The stupid thing is using it. It’s bad for kids development. It’s not dissimilar to drinking. You could blame the parents if the kids got into the alcohol in their own home, but the same would also go for kids using their parents social media accounts.
Empower parents with better supervisory tools to be more involved, no need to violate the rights of everyone else.
I know I have been playing devil’s advocate for online ID, but I think it will be implemented in a way that is a privacy nightmare and am not in favor of the way it’s being done. However, is anonymity a right? Before 1980, nobody really got anonymity unless you authored something under a pseudonym, which we can still do. When people were outspoken about civil rights violation, they were often just out there in the public as themselves. Sure they could wear masks, but you couldn’t hide like you can on the internet.
The internet has allowed both for more anonymity than ever and also more tracking of people than ever. I do think it’s coincidental that this is coming at the same time as the birth/growth of AI, but it does kind of serve a convenient second purpose of validating humans (or at least you know that a person is using an AI to post on their account). It’s unfortunate that it’s a benefit, but we live in an age where people using social media/the internet now have to constantly question their reality and if people are even real. I don’t see a good solution to that without violating our previous expectations of privacy.
If age/human verification going to be done, I think it should be done correctly. Age verification could be done through Zero Knowledge Proofs where it only verifies your age and nothing else. I think one day our ID’s will have rotating security keys built into them that will be used both for in person and online verification. You’d be able to decide what information is provided to the website, so that if they only wanted to know “Are you 21+” it would only provide a YES or NO, and that’s it. I’m sure there will be some online method for doing the same thing before then, but it’d need to be tied to some form of biometric verification like a fingerprint or else it could be used maliciously. The most likely scenario is we start off by using phones to tie the ID to the person, and have the phones require some form of biometric lock.
All that to say, we are realistically headed towards a future where the the anonymity we were used to will be no more. At least for any website that doesn’t want AI spam. While just uploading pictures of our ID’s to websites is a terrible idea, it’s what the idiots in charge will likely have us do as this new process starts. If they’d let the smart people take their time to do it right, the whole thing wouldn’t be nearly as bad.
You only get ID’d for alcohol if you look like a kid. I haven’t been carded in years. And when you do get carded, they look at your license, check the date, and hand it right back. No copies are saved to a database that could get leaked who-knows-where.
If a social media site is concerned that a user may be underage, I’m fine with them asking for some sort of verification. But a blanket request on everyone to ID themselves by default is just not the way.
You only get ID’d for alcohol if you look like a kid
Depends on the place
And when you do get carded, they look at your license, check the date, and hand it right back.
This is true for most places. There’s nothing stopping a creep from memorizing more than they should, but that’s of course an edge case.
While uncommon, there are places such as casinos that take everyones ID and use an ID scanner to add them to a local, or not local, database. Places that do that really are no different from websites that want to ID. Except with a website you’d provide it once, and at those facilities you have to have it scanned each time you go in.
But a blanket request on everyone to ID themselves by default is just not the way.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s a terrible idea and is going to spell disaster for many people. I am not arguing we should have websites collect IDs, my argument is about whether age verification on websites should exist in any form, even if it’s securely setup. Many people here think age verification is strictly a problem of parenting, and I think that’s an absurd argument.
But scientific studies suggest alcohol physically toxic to kids! Social media is…
Well…
Also shown to be toxic. Like, measurably dangerous to your health.
(And I agree about the IDs. Honestly this should be done for alcohol too).
They learned from countries like Australia huh? Australian here, did they learn how much its not working 😂🙄! None of my kids have anything other than YouTube, but my 9yo knew how to get around it. He doesn’t because he just watches in a browser with ad blockers and we monitor it. My high schooler reports the many and varied ways kids just changed where they go online to continue their crap. Do I think under 16s should be on social media, no. But identity verification is not going to fix that.
This was never about protecting the children. That’s just an excuse to further promote mass surveillance and to exempt companies from responsibility for the additive design of their products and services. It’s easier and more rewarding to penalize the users.
Yep. I’ve since deleted it, but I had to verify my identity on my FB account, which i’d had since 2008. Math is a thing 🙄.
If parents dont care or approve of their kids using social media then the kids will keep doing it. Its still important that the top officials in government are warning adults that its not safe for children there, because some people dont know or won’t trust anyone else.
The problem was thinking it was okay for kids to be on social media, and this fixes that. People on here keep saying the problem being fixed is how to prevent every child from getting on social media, but thats not what’s happening.
This also allows us as a society to punish parents who break these laws or allow their children too. We have to be able to signal to each other in society when something is harmful, whether it affects autonomy or not.
If kids want to be on social media badly enough, they will find a way regardless of approval and permission from their parents. They get banned from Meta and TikTok, they just band together and move to an app not on the list. I agree that people need to know if something is harmful. All the effort and money going into a ban, would’ve been better spent on media literacy and education on how algorithms work, and the addictive nature of some platforms. This is the reason why none of my kids are interested in most social media. Because they know how awful it is. YouTube is a bit more grey, IMO. I filter out shorts for my kids, but they’ve learned a lot of stuff over the years. Yet Roblox isn’t banned? That should’ve been top of the list. Identity verification is a privacy and security nightmare. People should not be required to provide their identity to participate in discussions, or even worse, use their own device.
If we actually cared about society in general, we would behave differently. This is a result of the fuck-you-get-mine mentality that thrives in America. There are plenty of people here that don’t care about their neighbors, at all.
You only see outrage come from people affected firsthand, because everyone else thinks they are too smart/rich/successful to possibly fall victim to the same systems as the stupid/poor/lazy people.
You bring up a great point about focusing on youtube and letting roblox slide right by. Plenty of parents made that mistake, but the truth is that almost no online platform is safe for children to meet strangers in.
I’m not sure what the best way to restrict access to adults only is though, but it does seem the current attempt is the best we’ve come up with so far. Its incredibly invasive, and I simply won’t use products that require age verification, so I’m hoping this leads to a better solution. Perhaps another country will figure out an idea and we can copy it.
Pove you’re not a child so your data can be sold to advertisers so they can continue to sell you stuff.
It’s not just advertisers by a long shot, they aren’t even the main customers in most respects now. Governments want all of that information and buy it, as do other commercial interests, including security consultants and contractors like Palantir.
Governments can use go betweens to buy the information too, China for instance, is likely getting every single piece of information sold by data brokers. The entire thing is a joke, on us, because it’s not about the kids, it’s about locking down the internet and crafting social scores based on everything we have said or done online and off run through half baked ai threat detection.
Starmer is a fascist cunt that will hand the government to openly fascist cunts, but yay, go team! /s
It should have the Zuck riding the horse. He’s the one pushing for this so the advertisers know if they are showing ads to people and not bots on his platforms.
He definitely isn’t. He already knows. This is 100% governments wanting to crack down on free speech. Look how many people the UK government already jails for social media posts.
Nah it is Netanyahu who is riding Keir directly and whipping him at the same time. What a pathetic excuse of a human. Next extension of this will be to jail anyone who says free Palestine in the internet. Such a convincing way to prove there is no genocide lol.
The voters need to understand they aren’t doing this to “protect children”. They’re afraid to vote against it because they’ll look like they don’t want to protect children. We need to let them know we see through the ruse, and we won’t punish them at the polls for voting against this shit, but we will for passing it.
They might as well just introduce an umbrella ‘won’t somebody please think of the children act’. They’re moving very quickly from porn to social media, and the slope is starting to feel real slippery.
Well, if they just ban the over 16s as well, then we’ll have something.
More like to deanonymize anyone who uses social media.
How do you get an entire population of adults to voluntarily scan their faces and submit them to Palantir?
By banning them from the Internet
Aren’t they already scanned? Don’t know about the UK but in modern countries there are cameras everywhere
This has nothing to do whatsoever with protecting children. That is not the goal. This is anti-privacy, plain and simple. Discussing the merits of this plan as a child protection measure is agreeing to their framing of the discussion, it’s agreeing to discuss it on their terms, and then you’ve already lost.
Here’s a real counterargument: suppose we pass this, and the fascists win the election (I know, completely and utterly unimaginable, but bear with me). Now, organizing protests via social media (as it went in Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, and so on) becomes impossible, because your actual identity is tied to your social media accounts. In the current climate the fascists will probably go after muslims first, so I hope you haven’t said scary things like insh’allah on facebook, because the government has your name now. Are you gay? Better hope you haven’t left a thirsty comment on the insta of someone of your gender, because the government will know.
Of course, we don’t need to imagine some hypothetical fascist government. I hope you don’t object to genocide and post about it online, because that can be declared support of terrorism at the drop of a hat, and that’s illegal.
and the fascists win the election
Mate….the fascists won the election. How can they push these laws and you still can’t see that?
The people who been calling everyone else fascists are the same people who have been begging every social media site, forum, and company for MORE CENSORSHIP for the last 5+ years. You wanted this because you thought it would only harm people you disagree with. You thought wrong.
People throw the word fascists around so loosely these days… it diminishes its meaning.
You wanted this because you thought it would only harm people you disagree with. You thought wrong.
Don’t talk to me like I’m some liberal.
Typical. Punish the individual, but don’t ever address the underlying social causes.
Capitalism
People better start remembering the 5th of November real soon.
if the goal was to actually protect kids, it wouldn’t be a problem.
however, this isn’t supposed to protect kids, it’s supposed to protect corpofascists.
It’s actually funny how some years ago The Great Chinese Firewall was a thing that we looked at as some horror. Yet very soon in the Western countries the Internet will be by passport only. China won’t probably implement this as they likely already know everything they want about their users.
