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.
Any government that oversteps so much that it thinks its role is as the parent, must be abolished.
Let them eat guns and cigarettes.
It’s insane that they’ll say it’s designed to be addictive, and then just let the company keep doing that. Like maybe go after the entity producing the addictive substance directly then?
All social media is designed to be addictive, though. It’s their entire business model.
Lemmy and the whole Fediverse is social media. What do you think social media is?
Lemmy is addicting naturally, not being fed slop via an algorithm.
That’s the problem with this panic. Everybody is using a different definition of social media. You and the other guy don’t hate social media, you hate Meta, X, and TikTok. And the government hates that too but also defines the Fediverse and forums in general, plus video games and anywhere else you might talk to another human being as social media as well.
So if you’re on a social media site like Lemmy or Piefed and you’re complaining about how evil and addictive social media is, the government is going to read that and think “My god! This poor person is in trouble! They’re screaming for my help! I must pass a law to ban Lemmy and liberate Derpgon from they’re horrible addiction to the Fediverse! That’s what Derpgon wants!”
I’d sadly probably find a different addiction.
Its a webforum, not a social media.
Social media is places that revolve around shit in your real life no one cares about. Facebook, Instagram,Tiktok,Etc.
Reddit and the Fediverse are listed in the Wikipedia article about social media as social media:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
Social media is media where people can socialize.
First of all, Don’t blatantly lie about the very thing you are linking to. It is not listed as social media.
They simply say some people (mostly idiots) refer to it as social media.
So thats already points on you for intentionally and willfully misrepresenting information.
Also the entire article is bunk cause it calls Mozilla and Minecraft social media. Which is stupid. Because Mozilla is a fucking company that makes a browser, and Minecraft is a goddamn game.
Second of all, You can wrongly refer to something as social media all you want.
I can write Fuck You on a brick and throw it through your window, and just because I
Call it Macaronirefer to it as social media, doesnt magically make it social media.First of all, Don’t blatantly lie about the very thing you are linking to. It is not listed as social media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media#Decentralization_and_open_standards
“While the dominant social media platforms are not interoperable, open source protocols such as ActivityPub have been adopted by platforms such as Mastodon, GNU social, Diaspora, and Friendica. They operate as a loose federation of mostly volunteer-operated servers, called the Fediverse.”
The problem isn’t me wrongly referring to Lemmy and Reddit and other forums as social media. The problem is pretty much the entire world doing it. So until that gets fixed, it’s probably best not to call for the destruction of social media.
Just cause lots of people call something X, doesnt mean its X.
Otherwise Trump would be a literal god. And web forums would actually be social media.
and a large part of that is the up/down vote systems, and other gamifications of human interaction.
And they’ve spread out of social media into many other website types.
All it does is extremify human interaction and is a major component in why we’re at the point we are right now with right wing extremism and fascism on the rise.
Get rid of these systems, and let people just communicate with eachother without having to appeal to a hive mind to tell people who gave up thinking if somethings good or bad based on votes/reactions/etc
I think it’s insane because social media is addictive because being social and communicating with fellow human beings is addictive. That’s what you and me are doing here and why we find it so pleasurable. That is not a bad thing.
It’s a bizarre lesson to drill into our children’s brains that this is a negative thing. I assume they don’t really know what social media is and see it as distinct, more like the one way communication of comic books, rock n roll, and other media moral panics, and they assume children will too. But what will happen to the next generation is that they will see all forms of human interaction as horribly addictive, amoral, and unhealthy.
The algorithm is the problem
The engagement-based algorithmic feed is the problem. Kids being able to talk to strangers is also an issue, but that isn’t because of addiction, and I personally think public chats should just be opt-in with the expectation that the parents will actually do their job and teach their children not to talk to strangers.
Why stop at 16
Get rid of all of it
We never needed it anyway
I agree, but on the ageism point. The thing that needs to be done is regulation so that manipulative design is reduced. Its the corporations that are the problem. Bans only target the victims the most.
Consequences for rich people? Not blaming their victims?!? Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway??
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 is based, adults next.
Social media needs to go away, fully. Not just for kids.
It should be regulated like gambling
That would be lovely.
It should become social again. No faking and manipulation at the penalty of criminal punishment.
It was great when it was a small pod of your close friends sharing stuff together.
But now it’s just an algorithm that shows you what you want to see by people pushing products and flat out lying. It’s done. It needs to go away.
Said a person or AI on a social media…
this is a forum. Which, is totally different. You can’t be serious.
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.
I have a digital ID and use it all the time. What’s wrong with it?
Imagine you have a strong opinion against some known ongoing genocide. Would you feel safe expressing yourself online about it? Or imagine that your country takes enough turns to become a dystopian nightmare, which for slme reason is extremely common nowadays… would you feel safe speaking against your own government?
What does any of this has to do with digital ID? I’m using digit ID to access government services and sign documents, not to express my opinions online.
If you use it to access government services it’s a thing, but using it to block the underaged from accessing social media it’s a very different situation.
If you use credit cards to block underage from accessing social media it’s also a different situation. Do you have a credit card?
Yes, but i dont use it to open up an online forum. The problem isn’t the identification itself but when and why do i need to be identified. I thought this was clear.
This conversation is becoming silly. If you dont value your privacy online, thats your thing. I would drop internet usage to the minimum if i ever need to identify myself to use trivial shit like gaming or accessing social media.
And I don’t use my digital ID to open online forums.
You’ll have to use it to express your opinions online. That’s the problem, and the whole point of it. They government want to know exactly what every person says on the internet.
My country had digital ID for 20 years. You’re saying they introduced it only to force age verification decades later? Because they want to do age verification using the EU proposed method, not using our digital IDs.
Your country clearly doesn’t have the type of digital ID that we’re talking about, does it?
What digital ID are you talking about? I have the type which I can import into my browser and use it to identify myself when accessing web sites.
Why does it have to be originally introduced with oppression in mind? Why not realize it provides a nice framework for it and use it instead? US toyed around with the idea of ID verification for anything that connects to internet. It is probably not going so smoothly. This could as well be a smaller experiment. We are talking about a goverment that jails eighty year olds for saying free palestine, not hard to imagine them wanting to do the same in the internet. It is crazy how far rabid zionist lobies can push goverments into oppressing their citizens.
Many things can be used for online identification and oppression, for example credit cards or cellphones. Why singe out digital ID? Are you going to fight against credit cards and cellphones as well or just digital ID?
Why don’t you use your real name on Lemmy?
What for?
As your username. Why don’t you use it?
Because it would be boring?
Not because you want to be anonymous? What’s your name? Address? Phone number?
That’s what the government want to be able to tell. They want to be able to arrest you because you said something they didn’t like, no matter where you say it on the internet.
No, that’s not it. If I wanted to be anonymous I would not use seflhosted instance tied to my personal domain, would I?
We don’t believe you otherwise.
That’s ok, I don’t care if you believe me or not.
More like to deanonymize anyone who uses social media.
I think there’s a rational argument for saying anonymous social media is what Russia, China and other dictatorships use to undermine and affect public opinion, to be fair.
I’m not saying therefore anonymity shouldn’t be allowed. I’m just saying there’s a nuance here…
Homegrown capitalists and the states they control are far more profligate and effective at social media manipulation than either Russia or China. Don’t forget that it was Facebook and Cambridge Analytica that made Brexit happen, not Russia or China. Although I guess you did say dictatorships, so that includes the dictatorship of capital that rules the west.
Myeah, sure, maybe, maybe not. But whatever the source, anonymity does enable well-resourced actors to affect opinion change.
It will only be deanonymised for UK citizens though (and any other country that applies some sort of ID verification). Any Russian LLM bot can still spread lies in the internet claiming to be from the UK so no problem solved there.
Worst yet, today it is deanonymisation “because think of the children”, tomorrow it is putting people who say “Free palestine” in social media to prison.
anonymous social media is what Russia, China and other dictatorships use to undermine and affect public opinion
You talk from the past. Nowadays bots are less anonymous than real people.
Social media would become a ghost town.
No it wouldnt. It’d be a .001% reduction in users.
If you want social media to become a ghost town, ban bots/AI
Can they even do it? AI nowadays can reliably parse captchas, present themselves as adults, with little effort they’ll even present documents and “real” photos
Full digital ID. Then the only for AI to get in is to steal a real human’s identification.
Many civilized countries already have some system like this in place for critical stuff like banking, online healthcare, etc.
They could but it’s symbiotic. Social Media churns engagement using bots, which generates ad revenue.
Not to mention that large Social Media companies like Meta are almost certainly filtering out bot content to train LLMs on.
They obviously don’t want to do it. But my point is that I think they actually can’t.
I mean Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare definitely can’t filter real people from AI. Documents photos, real time videos, those are even easier for AI to fake than to the real people to make them.
That brings us to the good old sms to a physical sim card purchased in a real shop with human face and document check. And that also will be spoofed in like 6 months.
I mean if people can figure out bot accounts and make lists of them just by looking at them, I’m pretty sure the companies that see 25000 accounts all connect from the same IP address can figure it out.
if people can figure out bot accounts
That’s a big IF and most of the times they don’t.
25000 accounts all connect from the same IP address
That’s just not how it works.
Anything to avoid parents actually … parenting their children. Just like making weed illegal stopped everyone from smoking it! :D Same with alcohol.
Making weed illegal created a causa belli for an uncountable number of police stops and searches.
Oh yeah they wanted to mess with minorities and hippies
And guns! Making them illegal did nothing for people using guns to murder each other!
… oh wait.
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
It’s not about that though is it? There’s a world of difference in SM companies knowing what I like to look at (Tools and steam engines mostly) and them having access to my actual address, my actual date of birth, my actual current face…
Do you even know the extent of things they know and what that information allows them to derive about you? They know the patterns of life of billions of people. You’re just a pattern to match with everyone else just like you.
Exactly. It’s more than enough.
They don’t have a copy of my passport and a video of me holding it. They also don’t have a 3D scan of my face, which is what all these age verification companies want from you. They literally use AI while you are filming yourself to 3D scan your face for the Palantir database.
dont use social media then. the less that use it the better
You were in the background of a picture uploaded to the net. You are shadow profiled. This problem doesn’t go away because you’ve turned away from it to bury your head in the sand.
If I can still access your profile an hour from now and it’s not deleted, you’re full of shit.
It’s been 7 now.
so?
If only I could be this naive. First of all this isn’t going to do much to prevent kids from getting online unless the measures to prevent it become absolutely oppressive. And secondly the bare minimum check requires you to give even me information to the social media companies. And I guarantee they won’t be held accountable if kids find a way to bypass whatever measures get put in place. And of course adults are just as addicted to it as kids but I guess they don’t matter.
If the goal was to reduce the amount of people addicted to social media the solution would be to regulate how social media functions not regulate access to social media. What is being suggested is stupid. You can’t ban things on the internet.
They don’t care if kids do since that isn’t the purpose, just the excuse.
you cant ban things but somehow you can regulate? lol
You can’t ban car crashes. You can regulate car manufacturers to install seatbelts to minimize injury.
you ban under 16 from driving
So what’s your point? That cars don’t need a seatbelt because we’ve banned kids from driving? Actually what you’re doing is just proving my point. For starters that ban doesn’t stop 16 and under from driving, it’s just something that will be used to punish someone after it has happened. At best it’s a deterrent because law-abiding citizens (including children) are less likely to break the law but I’ve personally seen kids take a car for a joyride and crash into someones yard so the ban isn’t going to stop anyone who really wants to go and drive. And more importantly it doesn’t really address the core problem which are collisions and crashes. Despite the ban adult people still end up in crashes. What does help are all sorts of regulations that car manufacturers have to adhere to make sure that the damage is minimized. Instead of having your brains splattered all across the road you might end up with a concussion instead.
And the same applies to social media. Banning kids from social media isn’t going to do anything about the addiction or mental health problems social media causes to people. It won’t even stop kids from using social media because kids are smart and if they want they will find a way around the ban. Now I’ll compromise a bit and say that banning kids from social media isn’t the worst idea because kids are more impressionable and social media might have a much bigger effect on a young mind. But if the goal is to improve the mental health of kids you also have to target the social media companies and regulate them to make sure their impact on mental health is minimized. Not only would that help kids but that would also help adults.
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.
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”.
And then from there to
you must provide ID to use your deviceand eventuallyyou can only run (state-approved OS) on your device, assuming thin clients tied to rented servers, which would be then tied to your ID, don’t take over and kill off personal computing first.Oh, there’s pretty solid data about Australia. A large percent of kids are still using social media because the ones who no longer use it are the ones whose parents won’t let them use it, which is of course the same group as the ones whose parents always had that power. But we have heard from some vulnerable minority kids who now no longer get access to the support that they used to have. And that’s really f***** up.
those kids socialising other ways. social media isnt socializing anyway
Of course! Whyever didn’t the bullied queer kids or the kids in abusive households or the kids living in remote areas think of that? I bet they’d feel so silly if you told them they should just find support networks elsewhere 🤦♀️
there were support networks before the giant social media companies. and they didnt harvest your data!
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.
Just a heads up, the other one ( teyrnon from shitjustworks) who commented to you, promoted strongmans and such authoritarian measures, to fight authoritarianism.
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.
I bought a BlackBerry in 2007/2008, and to get on Facebook I needed to show my ID in an o2 shop. This is all that is required. This is suspicious in the very least.
o2?
Phone/network provider.
I tried to visit a porn site from Australian VPN server and was prompted with age verification bs.
If they wanted to do it properly they could take a leaf out of the pages from STOKITI or EDRI - but they don’t want to do it properly. They just want to seem like they are doing something, while gathering data and profiteering at the same time. I would imagine Starmer and the rest of them have wet dreams about this shit and wake up with sticky cotton pyjamas every morning.
Really interesting they push for that the day of the report of investigation regarding rape gang and how the gouvernement didn’t protect children en even enable harm toward them. Trully disgusting. Really hope they get prosecuted by the next gouvernement
RIP Minecraft live lol
" designed to be addictive ". So you think adults are somehow magically exempt from addiction?
Adults are allowed to choose to become addicts.
Are they though? Can you buy heroine in the UK freely? Aren’t Chinese and Russian media channels banned in the UK?
Being an addict isn’t illegal, possessing illegal drugs is. Plenty of legal ways to be an addict if you insist though.
Fair point. But using social media means spreading social media among other addicts.
I think you raise a fair point, can you participate in social media without affecting others in a negative way? My guess is scale is a big issue. If social media was just our neighbors together in a forum using technology to improve our communication, that would be a positive overall I’d think.
Tools aren’t really bad on their own, it depends how we choose to use them and what goals we try to achieve with them.
but we still regulate harmful addicting substances, no?
For children yes, and when it affects others safety like with drunk driving. If an adult wants to fuck off in the woods and become an addict, thats entirely acceptable. Apparently some adults think that when we protect vulnerable people that we are taking their freedoms away.
If you’re referring to me, you have the very wrong end of the stick.
The irony is in admitting this shit is harmful and addictive…but uh, only for those too young to monetize.
I think its well known its addictive for everyone, but profit and convenience are the most important things to Americans, so here we are.
There are definitely plenty of addictive substances which are banned in the UK
And plenty that are not. What’s your point? Ban alcohol, cigarettes and sport bets?
My point is exactly what I said. I don’t know how much clearer I could have been, TBH, if my post is read in the context of the three proceeding it
All drugs to be legalized when?
Taking drugs have negative effect on others
Like when I smoke weed and my wife wants me to do the dishes? Yeah, that’s not happening while I’m high.
